by Scott Grammer

On August 13, 2018, Great Britain’s HMP Birmingham, operated by G4S (previously Group 4 Securicor), a private security company, had to be taken over on an emergency basis by the Ministry of Justice. An inspection of the prison found that prisoners were drinking, using drugs and committing acts of violence at will, and that the facility was crawling with roaches amid blood and vomit. The government took control from G4S, which had been awarded a 15-year contract to run the prison in 2011.

Britain’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, said the facility had experienced “dramatic deterioration” since the previous year’s inspection, and that the government should launch an investigation into conditions at HMP Birmingham, formerly known as Winson Green, the most violent prison in England.

In December 2016, HMP Birmingham was the site of a 12-hour riot involving as many as 600 of its 1,450 prisoners. Staff at the facility locked themselves into secure areas to avoid being assaulted; during an inspection, there was an arson attack on a staff car park that was supposed to be secure. Clarke said there had been an “abject failure” by the private prison operator.

Rory Stewart, Minister for ...

by Steve Horn

The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the parent organization of Prison Legal News, has filed lawsuits in Texas and Vermont arguing that the GEO Group – one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison companies – is a de facto public agency that should be required to comply with public records requests.

Filed in the 225^th Judicial District in Bexar County, the Texas case – Human Rights Defense Center v. The GEO Group, Case No. 2018CI16343 – resulted from a request submitted by HRDC that asked for records pertaining to complaints, claims, verdicts and settlements involving GEO facilities in that state.

However, nearly nine months after the request was filed, and after HRDC submitted a follow-up inquiry regarding the status of its request, GEO Group had not responded. Consequently, HRDC filed suit on August 27, 2018.

In its complaint, HRDC argued that GEO Group is a “[g]overnmental body” under Section 552.003(1)(A)(xii) of the Texas Government Code, and thus should fall under the purview of the Texas Public Information Act. That statute defines a “governmental body” as – among other things – “the part, section, or portion of an organization, corporation, commission, committee, institution, or agency ...

The prison phone industry, which provides telecom services for prisons, jails and other detention facilities, has a long and sordid history of exploiting prisoners and their families by charging exorbitant phone rates and fees. [See: PLN, Dec. 2013, p.1; April 2011, p.1]. Over the past decade the industry has steadily consolidated, with two companies supplying the majority of prison phone services: Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link (GTL). 

On April 2, 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that a proposed merger between Securus and the nation’s fourth-largest prison telecom, Inmate Calling Solutions, LLC (also known as ICSolutions or ICS), which would have resulted in further consolidation and thus even less competition, had been withdrawn by the firms. 

FCC staff had recommended to the agency’s chairman, Ajit Pai, that the merger be denied. Pai wrote in a terse statement that the FCC’s staff “concluded that this deal poses significant competitive concerns and would not be in the public interest.”

The parent organization of Prison Legal News, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), which co-founded the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice in 2011 to advocate for reforms in the prison telecom industry – including lower phone rates, the ...

by Scott Grammer

Frank Lara was the Assistant Director of the Correctional Programs Division for the federal Bureau of Prisons when, on January 24, 2018, he sent a memo to all Chief Executive Officers of the BOP. The memo required them to “submit eligible inmates ... for transfer consideration to private contract facilities.” 

The prisoners to be moved to the private prisons had to be male, non-U.S. citizens with good health and low security classifications, with 90 months or less left on their sentences. More specific criteria were included for prisoners to be sent to one specific prison: the Rivers Correctional Institution in North Carolina, owned and operated by GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison companies.

Shortly before Lara’s memo was issued, the BOP warned facility administrators that there would soon be a 12 to 14 percent reduction in federal prison staffing levels, meaning a projected loss of some 5,000 to 6,000 jobs. But Lara didn’t have to worry about his own job. By August 2018 he had retired from his position and gone to work for GEO Group; he is now the company’s Director of Operations, according to his Linkedin.com profile.

Prior to issuing the ...

by Chad Marks

“They don’t care who dies, how they die or what they do to you.”

That’s what former Kansas prisoner Sarah Loretta Cook said about Corizon Health, the state’s prison medical care provider. With expected increases in the Kansas prison population over the next five years, Corizon’s contract with the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) is projected to balloon from $70 million to $83 million annually. But the company’s track record in Kansas has not been stellar.

One prisoner developed a brain fungus resulting in the 27-year-old’s death. As for Cook, she had to have much of her colon removed after she did not receive her prescribed medication for months. She has now filed a lawsuit – one of more than 48 naming Corizon and the Kansas DOC involving medical care.

During fiscal years 2016 and 2017, state officials slapped Corizon with $3.4 million in penalties for failure to maintain its contracted staffing levels. The company was penalized another $2.8 million for the same problem in 2018, along with an additional $534,880 fine for not meeting other performance standards.

Since it was first awarded the DOC contract in 2014, Corizon’s performance has been audited annually by the University ...

by Kevin W. Bliss

The Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) has expanded the use of private contractors in the state’s prison system. With an annual budget of about $2.4 billion, the FDOC is increasingly shifting the burden of those costs to prisoners and their families through privatization.

Revenue from canteen (commissary) sales alone increased $4 million after the FDOC switched to a new vendor, Trinity Services Group. Net revenue payable to the state has reached $35 million a year due to the monopoly nature of the FDOC’s canteen services. Trinity has one of the largest revenue-generating contracts in the state’s prison system. 

Critics have claimed on several occasions that the FDOC was guilty of price-gouging. Jackie Azis, a staff attorney for the ACLU, said, “That’s not surprising at all to hear, and that’s something I’ve heard throughout my career.”

For example, a case of 54 Tampax at Walmart costs $5.86, while the same number of Tampax at the Lowell CI women’s prison costs $21.71. At the same Walmart, 12 ramen soups cost $1.94. In FDOC canteens, at $.65 per ramen soup packet, 12 would cost $7.80. 

Even within the prison system there are price disparities between the same ...

by Matt Clarke

On December 5, 2018, an Oregon federal court entered a $10 million judgment against Washington County and Corizon Health, Inc. in a lawsuit over the death of a detainee who was detoxing from heroin. 

As she was being booked into the Washington County jail in Hillsboro, ...

by Matt Clarke

In February 2019, Texas Prisoner Transportation Services (TPTS) informed its customers that it would cease operations that same month. CEO Ryan Whitten blamed the closure on new insurance rates that meant the company “simply can’t continue to operate.” The announcement came just days after a high-profile escape from a TPTS transport van prompted a manhunt for a double homicide suspect who remained at large for nine hours before being recaptured. 

Also in February 2019, U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch joined U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker in a letter demanding information from Joel Brasfield, the president of Nashville, Tennessee-based Prisoner Transportation Services, LLC (PTS), the nation’s largest private prisoner transport firm. Booker and Deutch had previously called for investigations into the transport industry, which is largely unregulated.

A July 2016 analysis by The Marshall Project found that private prisoner transportation companies were involved in over 50 crashes, 60 escapes and 19 deaths since 2000. The nonprofit news organization also noted in early 2019 that the status of an inquiry into the industry, announced in 2016 by the U.S. Department of Justice, remains unclear.

The prisoner who escaped from the TPTS van, 44-year-old Cedrick Marks, was ...

by Matt Clarke 

Private prison companies are known for their cynical motives. They lobby and give money to politicians to expand the for-profit prison industry, and have provisions in their contracts that guarantee minimum occupancy levels at many of their facilities – typically ranging from 90 to 100 percent. Such practices are understandable when you consider these companies operate detention centers for the purpose of generating corporate profit.

But CoreCivic, formerly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), recently drove the cynicism meter to new levels. It announced it had created a nonprofit foundation, allegedly to reduce recidivism, then funded it Trump-style by lending the use of its name but having others do the actual funding.

The company’s chief development officer, Tony Grande, announced the creation of a 501(c)(3) group, the CoreCivic Foundation, on January 10, 2019. The firm held a charity golf tournament that raised $531,000 in October 2018; it has held similar events for the past 27 years to raise money for charitable causes. According to CoreCivic, its new foundation will “support former prisoners, victims of crime and abuse, and underserved youth.” It specifically named Men of Valor as an organization that will receive funding. 

According to GuideStar, ...

by Steve Horn

Bernard Carter was incarcerated at the privately-operated North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan when he alleged a prison nurse coerced him into sexually uncomfortable situations.

In a federal lawsuit, Carter v. GEO Group, U.S.D.C. (W.D. Mich.), Case No. 1:16-cv-00667-RHB-PJG, Carter laid out the facts in his October 2016 hand-written complaint. He wrote that nurse Teresa L. Belohlavy performed numerous sexually coercive acts upon him, to which he had objected. Reporting the incidents up the chain of command through the grievance process, the GEO Group-owned prison’s administration was apathetic. Exhausting his other options, Carter filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan.

“In about Aug. 2015, [Belohlavy] would make sexual commands to me that made me feel uncomfortable,” Carter stated. “I told her I didn’t want her to speak to me like that and she said she wasn’t going to stop. She would tell me how she could see my penis through my shorts, that she wanted to give me oral sex....”

Carter claimed that things escalated from verbal comments to the physical.

“Then it got to where she would be touching me in ways that she shouldn’t have and it ...