by Matt Clarke
Although the website of the Congressional Black Caucus states that banning private prisons is part of its agenda during the current congressional session, the legally separate but affiliated Congressional Black Caucus Institute (CBCI) has accepted donations from CoreCivic, formerly Corrections Corporation of America, and the Institute’s 21st Century Council lists lobbyists for private prison firms as “platinum members.”
For-profit prison companies “are among the most committed entities in opposition to transforming our criminal justice system,” said Scott Roberts, senior director of Criminal Justice Campaigns at the racial justice organization Color of Change, which previously pressured then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Congressional Black Caucus’s political action committee to stop taking donations from private prison operators.
“They are the most invested in maintaining the status quo that’s got us to being a country that is leading in the history of the world in incarcerating its own people,” Roberts stated in an August 2019 article, adding, “It’s incredibly disappointing to know that any of the entities affiliated with the Congressional Black Caucus continue to take money from CoreCivic or any other private prison company, so there’s just no excuse for it. It’s unacceptable.”
In a lobbying disclosure report, CoreCivic ...
by David M. Reutter
The Arkansas Ethics Commission (AEC) issued letters of caution to four companies that provide corrections-related services, for failing to report contributions to the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association.
The companies, Tech Friends, Inc., City Tele Coin Co., Justice Solutions and Correct Solutions, LLC, agreed with the AEC’s August 16, 2019 finding that they violated Arkansas law by failing to register as lobbyists and neglecting to report lobbying expenses. The AEC began looking into the matter after it received a complaint from Charles Niell, chief executive officer of Tiger Correctional Services, who received a letter of caution for similar violations in 2018.
The AEC found that Tech Friends, which provides financial and communication services to jails, co-sponsored a breakfast during the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association’s winter conference in January 2019. It also co-sponsored the association’s Ronnie Baldwin Memorial Trout Tournament in 2017 and 2018.
City Tele Coin bought fried chicken for over 30 sheriffs during the January 2019 conference, and co-sponsored a lunch. It also co-sponsored the 2018 trout tournament and paid for meals at Riverfront Steakhouse.
Justice Solutions, a jail software company, co-sponsored the 2018 trout tournament and lunch and breakfast at the January conference. It also co-sponsored an ...
by Caroline Isaacs, Program Director, AFSC
In 1998, I was a budding anti-prison activist, volunteering for the American Friends Service Committee in Arizona (AFSC-AZ). I was fortunate enough to attend the very first Critical Resistance gathering in Oakland and learn that I was actually part of a movement – a vibrant, fierce and committed group of people who, like me, saw the Prison Industrial Complex as one of the most dangerous threats to our communities. It was an energizing experience that solidified my commitment to this work.
Imagine my dismay, then, at receiving an email from Critical Resistance nearly 20 years later characterizing my work to combat private prisons as un-strategic and even as undermining the larger effort to end mass incarceration.
The critique, primarily leveled at prison divestment campaigns, was articulated by Ruthie Gilmore in her 2015 piece, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” and was more recently espoused by John Pfaff in his book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.
The argument goes something like this: Because for-profit prison companies only hold about 8.5 percent of the nation’s state and federal prisoners, this proves that the profit motive ...
by Kevin Bliss
Former warden Jody Bradley depended on gang leaders at a privately-run Mississippi prison to maintain control of the facility.
That was one finding of a December 2018 internal audit by Management & Training Corporation (MTC) at the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility (WCCF), which the company operates for the Mississippi Department of Corrections. Calling Bradley’s management ineffective, the audit accused him of ceding power and control to prisoners, leading to coercion and corruption of staff members.
Located near the Louisiana border in Woodville, WCCF houses 900 offenders, most of whom are classified maximum security, including former residents of a high-risk housing unit at the State Penitentiary in Parchman that closed in 2010. Some 80 percent of prisoners at the MTC-run facility are gang-affiliated.
A 2016 study of 39 prisons across the country by sociologist David Pyrooz with the University of Colorado at Boulder found that gang-related homicides nationwide averaged just two per year for every 100,000 prisoners. But WCCF averaged two per year with just under 1,000 prisoners – a homicide rate twice as high as Detroit’s.
Since February 2017, WCCF – which prisoners called “the Killing Field” in a 2014 article published by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger – ...
by Douglas Ankney
On March 29, 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana denied in part a motion filed by private prison company The GEO Group, seeking to dismiss a class-action suit filed on behalf of prisoners in the Mental Health Unit (MHU) at the New Castle Correctional Facility (NCCF).
GEO is paid more than $100 million to operate NCCF. In the MHU, over 100 mentally ill prisoners are locked in their cells 20 hours a day and forced to labor by cleaning, completing reports or assisting other prisoners. When not in their cells they are restrained with handcuffs and shackles.
Plaintiff class representatives Damarcus Figgs and David Corbin raised a number of claims, including: 1) Peonage in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA); 2) Forced labor in violation of the TVPA; 3) Harboring for labor in violation of the TVPA; 4) Cruel and unusual punishment; 5) Denial of equal protection; 6) Violations of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act; 7) False imprisonment; 8) Confinement; 9) Unjust enrichment; and 10) Negligence.
The district court dismissed all claims except numbers 2, 3 and 9.
In ruling on GEO ...
by Matt Clarke
On June 27, 2019, private prison operator The GEO Group, based in Boca Raton, Florida, announced that it would stop operating the Northeast New Mexico Detention Facility in Clayton.
The company cited inadequate compensation in its contract that made it impossible to recruit and retain staff in the rural area where the facility is located, which borders Texas. GEO said it steadily lost employees to higher-paying state prison jobs in New Mexico and across the border. However, it agreed to a 90-day extension of its contract, which expired in August 2019, to allow for a transition to state control of the facility.
GEO Group worked with the town of Clayton to design the 180,000-square-foot, 625-bed prison, which opened in 2008. The town owns the facility and GEO has operated it since then. The company also manages two other prisons in New Mexico: the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility in Santa Rosa and the Lea County Correctional Center in Hobbs.
Including the Northeast New Mexico Detention Facility, five of the 11 prisons in New Mexico are privately operated, with CoreCivic and Management & Training Corporation each running one. Unique among the states, over half of New Mexico’s prison population ...
by David M. Reutter
A legislative audit, released in December 2018, concluded that it costs Georgia about 10 percent more to house comparable prisoners in private prisons than in state-run facilities. The audit, completed as part of a study on criminal justice reforms, found that it costs $44.56 per diem for prisoners housed in state prisons compared to $49.07 per diem at private prisons.
The Georgia Department of Corrections (GDOC) has an average population of about 50,000 prisoners and an annual budget of around $1.2 billion. The state pays GEO Group and CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) nearly $140 million a year to house about 15 percent of its prison population – some 7,800 prisoners – at four privately-operated prisons: the Coffee County Correctional Facility, Jenkins Correctional Facility, Wheeler Correctional Facility and Riverbend Correctional Facility.
The audit found that across all categories of prisoners, the GDOC spends an average of $65.58 per diem when medical and maximum-security units are included. The auditors screened for prisoners’ gender, facility size and risk classification in private and state prisons when making a comparative analysis of housing costs.
Georgia House Appropriations Committee Chairman Terry England said he wanted to examine the ...
by David M. Reutter and Kevin Bliss
An activist investor organization has forced Boca Raton, Florida-based GEO Group, which operates or manages almost 75,000 for-profit detention facility beds across the U.S., to adopt a shareholder resolution requiring the company to issue a report on implementation of its human rights policy.
Under pressure from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), GEO Group adopted its first human rights policy in 2013 after reports surfaced in the news media – including in PLN – of deaths and poor conditions in the company’s facilities due to understaffing and cost-cutting. ICCR began buying small amounts of stock in GEO with the intent of guiding it toward a more responsible position regarding human rights for prisoners and detainees.
Originally founded to force businesses to divest from South Africa during apartheid, ICCR is a coalition of asset managers, unions, pensions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and faith organizations with over $400 billion in managed assets that invests in corporations to influence their practices and increase accountability.
Citing ICCR’s “ongoing engagements with GEO around human rights concerns for seven years,” Father Bryan Pham, S.J., of Jesuits West – one of the ICCR coalition members – said the group ...
by Matt Clarke
Undocumented immigrants in the United States often face wage theft when their employers underpay or refuse to pay them for their labor. A federal class-action lawsuit filed by the Attorney General for the State of Washington has highlighted how such workers continue to face wage theft even when in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). [See: PLN, Dec. 2018, p.20; June 2018, p.38].
The suit sought the state minimum wage for ICE detainees held at the 1,575-bed Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, who were being paid $1.00 a day to labor for the facility’s operator, The GEO Group. On May 13, 2019, a federal district court granted partial summary judgment to the state and dismissed several affirmative defenses raised by GEO.
In 2017, Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed the lawsuit seeking to enforce Washington’s Minimum Wage Act, which requires workers to be paid at least $12 an hour. GEO was paying detainees who participated in ICE’s Voluntary Work Program (VWP) just $1.00 per day. VWP workers “collect and distribute laundry, prepare and serve food, clean, paint interior walls, and use electric shears to cut hair.”
ICE contracts with GEO Group to house immigrant detainees ...
by Chad Marks
Lara Ann Gillis, a 47-year-old mother, died in December 2015 after spending just over 24 hours at a county jail.
Gillis was arrested on December 4, 2015 in Monterey County, California on suspicion of being under the influence of drugs, obstructing law enforcement and possession of marijuana. ...
