by Michael Thompson

Kansas has a mechanism in place that allows it to fine the medical provider contracted to serve the Department of Corrections (DOC). From just January through September of 2025, Centurion, the DOC’s private medical contractor, was fined $1 million. In fact, the five months with the most fines have happened since November 2024.

The fines are indicative that, rather than improving, privatized prison medical care in Kansas is worsening. In 2022, Kansas News Service investigated DOC medical care. At the time, DOC made getting any real information a nearly impossible task for the journalists. Even prisoners were stymied when trying to access their own data. Incarcerated individuals were given access to a computer and just 15 minutes to locate their own relevant data. The only substantive metric available to the investigators was the level of monthly fines. And under that metric, it appeared things were improving as the number of fines placed against Centurion was diminishing.

From January 2021 to May 2022, Centurion was fined almost 5,000 times, resulting in $900,000 in fines. But a chart showed shrinking monthly infractions. The last four months of that period averaged around 150 fines per month. …

The Montana state Department of Corrections (DOC) announced on March 23, 2026 that it will no longer send prisoners to a private prison in Arizona. Instead, it will send the roughly 600 out-of-state prisoners to a facility in Mississippi controlled by the same profiteer.

Montana, like other states that have locked up more people than they have space for, exports prisoners as a way to decrease overcrowding. In 2023, the DOC began sending prisoners to the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, a facility run by the for-profit company CoreCivic. While around 360 Montana prisoners remain incarcerated at Saguaro, 240 have already been transferred to the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, a lockup that is also owned and operated by CoreCivic. The state intends to rely exclusively on the Tallahatchie prison for out-of-state transfers, although it did not provide a timeline on when the switch would be complete, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

CoreCivic, as PLN has extensively covered for years, has a long record of understaffing, guards committing physical and sexual abuse, medical negligence, and wrongful death settlements in the dozens of prisons and jails it controls across the country. [See: PLN, Jun. …

by Abbey Kim

This article was originally published in Arkansas Advocate.

County jails in Arkansas hold some of the state’s most vulnerable people, including many experiencing mental health crises.Hundreds are detained in county jails awaiting psychiatric treatment or evaluation, according to data from the Arkansas Department of Human Services. Once the cell door closes, navigating an overburdened jail system is the only way to get medical treatment.

U.S. law requires jails to provide adequate health services. In 1976, the Supreme Court held in Estelle v. Gamble that “deliberate indifference” to an incarcerated person’s serious injury or illness amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. In 2002, a federal district court in Arkansasaffirmed that Arkansas’ jails had to provide timely assessments, care and treatment.

But jails have varying responses to incarcerated people’s health needs, according to Dr. Anne Spaulding, founder of the Center for the Health of Incarcerated Persons at Emory University.

Often, the ideals of the law collide with the realities of county budgets, understaffed medical systems and already vulnerable jail populations. More than 75 people have died in Arkansas county jails since 2020, according to data obtained through a Freedom …

by Chuck Sharman

In a verdict reached on March 4, 2026, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania awarded $1.5 million to the surviving sons of Louis Jung, Jr., 50, who died after receiving only sporadic treatment for his Type 1 diabetes during his 10-day incarceration with the Philadelphia Department of Prisons (PDP) at its Curran-Frumhold Correctional Facility (CFCF). Jurors made an additional award of $170,000 in punitive damages against PDP guard Lt. Wanda Bloodsaw, who ordered two fellow detainees to drag Jung back to his cell while he was dying of diabetic ketoacidosis.

Jung had been held at the jail since his December 2021 arrest on a robbery charge, his diabetes documented at intake. He was transferred to Norristown State Psychiatric Hospital for competency restoration in March 2023. Upon return to CCCF on October 28 that year, a nurse with the jail’s contracted medical provider, YesCare, measured his glucose level at 542, well above the 100 normally recorded between meals. But he was not taken to the infirmary nor an outside hospital. He died 10 days later on November 6, 2023.

With the help of attorneys from the Abolitionist …

by Michael Thompson

Mississippi has had recurring problems from the private healthcare providers they have hired for their prisons. The problems accumulating with VitalCore Health Strategies, their current provider, have pushed the state into hiring a law firm to monitor the contract.

Mississippi’s Department of Corrections (DOC) had provided its own healthcare services to incarcerated persons within the state until 1998. The University of Mississippi Medical Center was chosen at that point to provide the services; since then, four other private companies have contracted with the state. One of those companies, Wexford Health, was accused of paying consulting fees to a former Mississippi state legislator, Cecil McCrory, who pleaded guilty to bribing Chris Epps, a DOC corrections commissioner, to acquire state prison contracts. Mississippi collected $4 million from the company through a subsequent lawsuit.

Centurion followed Wexford in 2015 and were brought in under an emergency contract. A lawsuit from prisoners over the care level spurred the company to terminate its contract in 2020. Centurion claimed the problem was the state’s failure to invest in infrastructure and correctional staffing.

Centurion’s abandonment led to no-bid contracts awarded to VitalCore from 2020 through 2023. Despite Centurion and …

On March 26, 2026, the Idaho Department of Corrections (DOC) announced that it would be transferring hundreds of prisoners out of state to a private prison in Arizona. The transfer is intended to reduce overcrowding at the 10 prisons controlled by the DOC, according to a statement released by the agency.

One hundred and twenty prisoners have already been sent to the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex, a lockup owned and operated by private prison profiteer CoreCivic. Another 200 prisoners will soon be transferred to the facility, as the Idaho Statesman reported. The DOC also sends prisoners to another CoreCivic prison, the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona.

Idaho has a prison population that’s just under 10,000, but it only has a capacity of 8,200 beds. The DOC has sent around 700 prisoners to out-of-state facilities, which is around the same number as Montana—a state that recently switched from shipping prisoners to Arizona to a CoreCivic prison complex in Mississippi, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Apr. 2026, p. 41.] 

Source: Idaho Statesman

In early March, the administration of President Donald Trump (R) announced that it planned to offer a no-bid contract to an engineering and electronic services company to run the United States’s largest immigrant detention center, where one detainee was killed and at least two others have died in recent months.

In addition to the three deaths, the facility—Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas—was faulted during a recent inspection for having dozens of violations of national standards related to excessive force, disease, and other unsafe conditions. As reported by The Washington Post, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Detention Oversight performed a three-day inspection in February of this year that uncovered 49 violations. It was the first inspection of the lockup since it was hastily built and opened last summer. For comparison, the highest number of violations found during the office’s other inspections was only 13 so far this year.

Randall Kallinen, an attorney representing the family of a detainee who died at the facility in January 2026, said of the report: “Camp East Montana gets an F … not only are the detainees in danger of excessive force, they are also in danger …

The Frontier, a non-profit investigative news outlet in Oklahoma, recently found that seven detainees died from preventable causes in Tulsa’s municipal jail over a three-year period. These deaths occurred due to causes such as overdoses, suicides, an infection, and at least one restraint-related incident. The jail, which is small and windowless, typically locks people up who have been arrested on misdemeanor charges—and many of them suffer from severe mental illnesses.

City officials claim that each of the deaths were investigated by the Tulsa Police Department and assessed that no legal or policy violations had occurred. But when requested by The Frontier, the City has so far refused to provide documentation or video evidence from the jail to support their no-fault claim. As an expert interviewed by the publication pointed out, Tulsa’s refusal has the whiff of an admission of guilt. By not providing records, Joey Senat, a professor emeritus of media law at Oklahoma State University told The Frontier, “officials are sending the message that city employees did something wrong—that they in some way caused the death of detainees.”

In February, after news of the deaths broke, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols ordered “an additional …

With California’s declining prison population and a growing state budget deficit, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), a nonpartisan agency that provides policy advice to the state lawmakers, has recommended closing the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad.

While the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDRC) is already slated to close one facility this year, the California Correctional Facility in Norco (which could revert to becoming a luxury hotel), the LAO found that closing the Soledad prison would save an additional $150 million each year. The LAO report pinpointed the Soledad prison as a “strong candidate for closure” in large part because of the expected cost of future infrastructure projects to keep the facility in operating condition.

The cost of installing a planned video surveillance system, for example, alone will likely cost $10 million. Across the 25 state prisons in California, the CDCR estimates that it will need $2.5 billion to cover critical maintenance projects in the next ten years. At the same time, the state’s prison population continues to decrease; by 2030, the number of incarcerated people is expected to fall below 85,000, a drop of around 25,000 from 2020.

This decrease is in part due …

After a yearlong fight by advocates to prevent private prison profiteer CoreCivic from reopening its prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, city commissioners approved a special use permit on March 10, 2026, allowing the company to proceed.

Two people were arrested and multiple people ejected during the hour-long public comment period regarding the decision, which commissioners voted 4 to 1 to approve. CoreCivic, the largest owner of private prisons in the country, operated a maximum-security, federal detention center in Leavenworth that had a capacity of more than 1,000 detainees. That facility was closed in late 2021, after former President Joe Biden (D) issued an executive order that prevented federal agencies from renewing private prison contracts. President Donald Trump (R) reversed Biden’s order shortly after assuming office on January 20, 2025.

As part of Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, CoreCivic received a $60 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reopen the Leavenworth facility in September 2025. The contract was penned as CoreCivic attempted to bypass the city of Leavenworth’s development process by going directly through the court system. During the proceedings, which hinged on whether CoreCivic needed to apply for a permit, the company was placed under an …