by David M. Reutter
The superintendent of Pennsylvania’s George W. Hill Correctional Facility, which is run by GEO Group, resigned in November after a media investigation uncovered a buried whistleblower complaint alleging racist and abusive behavior.
John A. Reilly, Jr., was recruited in 2001 as deputy superintendent George W. Hill. “When I came here, it was made clear to me that you’ve got to get up to speed to replace George, if something happens,” Reilly said of Hill, who had health problems. Hill retired in 2008, and Reilly replaced him.
“By then, the jail had attracted notoriety after a series of grim developments, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported this year. “Twelve inmates died at the facility between 2002 and 2008, and lawsuits filed by their families against the prison company resulted in more than half a million dollars in wrongful-death settlements. Two years ago, GEO paid a $7 million settlement to the family of Janene Wallace, a mentally ill 35-year-old woman who had been incarcerated on a probation violation, and then hanged herself after 52 days in solitary confinement.”
One might wonder why an assistant prosecutor like Reilly would be tapped to run a private jail. Critics say it ...
by David M. Reutter
Campaign contributions from private medical provider Wellpath to Virginia’s Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman may be legal under Virginia law but are raising ethical questions. Wellpath is already under federal investigation for a contract renewal in Norfolk County.
Wellpath was known as Correct Care Solutions until October of 2018. Correct Care obtained the contract to provide medical and mental health care to detainees at the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center in 2005. It then began to make thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to former Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson.
Chapman was elected sheriff in 2012, and Correct Care made its first contribution to Chapman’s reelection campaign in 2014. Since then, Chapman has accepted at least $14,750 from the prison-profiteering health-care company. Wellpath has 245 contracts to provide health care to detainees across the nation.
It stays active in the political process. Over a 12-year period, Wellpath and Correct Care contributed around $41,000 to Virginia sheriffs. “This is so widespread and so common, it’s the status quo,” said Max Rose, executive director of Sheriffs for Trusting Communities.
Such contributions are “ethically questionable” said Chapman’s opponent for sheriff, Justin Hannah. “When the Sheriff is accepting political donations in ...
by Matt Clarke
In 2018, Corizon Health was the largest for-profit provider of prisoner health care in the country. It contracted with 534 correctional facilities in 27 states holding about 15 percent of the nation’s prisoners. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Corizon was sued for malpractice 660 times within five years. It was also subject to millions of dollars in fines and penalties by the governmental entities it contracted with — usually for inadequate staffing. Yet the understaffing and substandard health care continues unabated and prisoner deaths continue to mount while Corizon treats fines, penalties, settlements and jury awards as merely a cost of doing business —not as a catalyst for change to providing adequate health care.
Corizon provides prisoner health care for the Kansas Department of Corrections (DOC). Unlike most entities contracting with Corizon, Kansas provided for oversight of Corizon’s performance by a third party. The University of Kansas Medical Center (UKMC) reviews a sample of health-care records at DOC prisons each year. Perhaps that is why Kansas has assessed Corizon penalties of $1 million for underperformance and $6.4 million for short staffing between July 2015 and December 2018.
When asked for records about its provision of ...
by Ed Lyon
The GEO Group is one of the largest private prison companies in the United States. Its primary reason for existence is to generate profit by warehousing people for the states and federal government. One of GEO’s many prisons is the 1,575-bed Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. Recently renamed the Northwest Processing Center (NPC) in an effort to make the facility appear less onerous, detainees at NPC perform various jobs in the kitchen, laundry and other areas. The detention center holds federal immigrant detainees, who are paid $1.00 per day for their labor – the amount Congress has decreed reimbursable. This practice is similar to that used by Washington State at its Special Commitment Center (SCC) for civilly committed sex offenders on McNeil Island.
Regarding pay for prisoners performing work in Washington prisons, state law exempts prisoners from being paid at all, much less imposing any threshold requirements like $1.00 a day or minimum wage. Wage rates are left to prison administrators’ discretion. The state’s civil commitment system lies outside of that law and is presumably on a par of sorts with the NPC. The NPC has been paying detainee workers a $1.00 per day wage since ...
by David M. Reutter
Nashville’s LGBT Chamber of Commerce (Chamber) has removed for-profit prison company CoreCivic from its membership rolls. The October 8, 2019 decision to return the company’s membership fee came after a vocal outcry from the local LGBT community.
“The voices at our meeting last night were very clear. Their membership was too much for many in our LGBT community,” the Chamber said in a statement. “We heard those concerns and last night our board voted to remove CoreCivic as a member and return their $300 membership fee.”
Speakers at the meeting pointed to the private prison company’s dismal record of poor conditions and abuse inside its facilities, as well as its involvement in detaining immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
PLN has reported on those conditions for years, and has covered numerous reports, audits, incidents and lawsuits involving CoreCivic facilities, often tied to the company’s business model of cutting costs in order to generate profit.
In the current political environment, CoreCivic sees opportunity to grow its business model. The Trump administration’s stance on undocumented immigrants is viewed by the company as a great opportunity. In June 2018, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told investors that ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 30, 2019, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Representatives Mark Pocan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sent letters to five private equity firms – BlueMountain Capital Management, H.I.G. Capital, American Securities, Apax Partners and Platinum Equity.
The firms own companies that provide support services to prisons, including health care, food services and prisoner telephone services. The letters accused the companies of charging exorbitant prices for substandard goods and services while reaping windfall profits, noting that they received over $40 billion in taxpayer funds each year plus money from prisoners and their families. [See: PLN, Aug. 2019, p.22].
The letters from members of Congress expressed “concerns about the rapid spread and effect of private equity investment in many sectors of the economy – including the correctional facility support services industry.” They noted that private equity firms had a history of purchasing companies, stripping them of assets while loading them with debt, and extracting exorbitant fees before selling them for a profit. Other concerns included the role of the private equity firms in consolidation of prison services companies and a steep decline in the quality of services provided. They noted that “three companies – GTL, ...
by Ed Lyon
California governor Gavin Newsom entered office in early 2019 vowing to end the use of private prisons – including those in which federal immigration authorities detain asylum seekers – because for-profit prisons “lead to over-incarceration” and “do not reflect our values.” For many years, California sent prisoners to privately-run facilities in other states.
The state legislature responded with Assembly Bill 32, which passed, was signed by Newsom and went into effect in January 2020, banning California from entering into any new contracts with private prison companies and beginning a countdown to end all such contracts in the state by 2028.
Florida-based private prison operator GEO Group, Inc., the nation’s largest for-profit prison firm with $2.33 billion in 2018 gross revenue, signed new contracts in December 2019 – just before the law took effect – with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for two facilities the company operates in California.
GEO also signed a new contract the same month with the U.S. Marshals Service for its 512-bed El Centro Service Processing Center until 2028, in addition to a contract already in place to run the 725-bed Western Region Detention Facility in San Diego for the Marshals until 2027. ...
by Matt Clarke
Many prisoners transported by Prisoner Transportation Services of America, LLC (PTS) report being denied restroom breaks, food, liquids and essential prescription medications such as insulin, occasionally with fatal results. Others say they were physically or sexually abused by PTS staff. At least five prisoners have died while being transported by PTS since 2012.
The Nashville-based company contracts with law enforcement agencies throughout the country to transport prisoners between jurisdictions in trips that can take up to two weeks coast-to-coast as PTS vans zigzag between jails, sometimes backtracking in an attempt to maximize profit each trip.
One death occurred after a PTS transportation officer – the company’s version of a guard – assaulted a prisoner and ordered other prisoners to beat him, too. Two more prisoners died due to bleeding ulcers while transport guards ignored their pleas for medical attention. Two guards were charged with sexual assault and pleaded guilty, one of them to lesser charges.
Being subjected to a PTS extradition transport is the proverbial trip from hell, according to prisoners who have taken such journeys. It starts with a guard placing your legs in shackles, then your wrists are locked in handcuffs with a “black box” ...
by Scott Grammer
On September 18, 2018, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) filed suit in Arizona against Corizon Health, Inc. and Corizon LLC. The purpose of the litigation was “to correct Corizon’s nationwide unlawful employment policies and practices that discriminate on the basis of disability and to provide appropriate relief for Charging Parties Elizabeth McCrehin, Ann Pogue, Nicole Moore, Linda Magnelli, Barbara McCormick, and other similarly situated qualified aggrieved individuals who were adversely affected by Corizon’s unlawful actions,” according to the complaint.
The suit alleged that “[a]s a matter of policy or practice, Corizon would not approve modified job duties, allow more than twelve weeks of leave permitted by the FMLA [Family Medical Leave Act], allow extended leave past an unpaid 30-day medical leave, or allow employees to return to work without being fully healed.... Corizon has failed to provide reasonable accommodations to its employees with disabilities when the employee requests an accommodation or when Corizon is on notice that the employee needs an accommodation.”
Further, the company was accused of “harass[ing] qualified employees with disabilities because of their disabilities.... Corizon has engaged in harassment of some of its qualified employees with disabilities because of their need for reasonable ...
One company has become the biggest provider of jail health care. Sheriffs are worried: “If you’re the only dance in town, you can pretty much call your own shots.”
Story by Marsha McLeod, The Atlantic
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – In the span of 24 days in May 2017, two men died in Forsyth County’s jail. Both were fathers. Both were black. The first man, Deshawn Lamont Coley, had written request after request begging for his asthma inhaler – accurately predicting that his sporadic access to it was putting his life at risk. The second, Stephen Antwan Patterson, was found without a pulse about a week after he was booked with a blood-pressure reading that would likely have led any free person to the emergency room. The deaths came at an uncomfortable time for Forsyth County: Patterson died just four weeks before the Board of Commissioners sat down to decide whether to renew a contract with the private health-care company that had cared for the two men, then called Correct Care Solutions and now Wellpath, or sign with someone else.
What might have been a routine board meeting turned tense. “Correct Care Solutions makes the sheriff’s office look bad, makes ...
