by Chuck Sharman

In a Facebook post on May 21, 2026, Albert Pugh reported hearing news from both prisoners and guards at Alabama’s Bullock Correctional Facility that Facility Administrator Jermaris Porter was arrested and walked off the job the day before by Law Enforcement Services Division (LESD) agents of the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

Pugh, 63, is the founder and Executive Director of Cullman Re-entry and Addiction Assistance, Inc., a nonprofit operator of halfway houses for those with “no place to go after completion of addiction-related programs.” Before his 2011 release from prison, he served 29 years for a robbery conviction that he was fully exonerated of in November 2024, according to the nonprofit Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, whose attorneys represented Pugh in that effort.

Porter had worked for the prison system just eight months, coming off a troubled tenure at Tennessee’s Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC), which is operated for that state’s DOC by private prison profiteer CoreCivic. As reported elsewhere in this issue, Porter and his then-boss, former TTCC Warden Vince Vantell, are accused in a federal civil rights complaint of involvement in a widespread drug smuggling ring at the …

by Chuck Sharman

Under the terms of a settlement reached on April 16, 2026, Colorado’s La Plata County agreed to pay $5 million to the estate of Daniel Foard, 32, whose death in the County lockup was both “gruesome and preventable,” according to the complaint filed on his behalf. Claims that the agreement did not resolve against Tennessee-­based Southern Health Partners (SHP), a private firm that still holds the contract to provide medical care at the Durango jail, are still pending.

When Foard was booked into the jail on failure to appear warrants on August 11, 2023, he admitted to taking fentanyl pills. An SHP nurse had him placed in a detox unit. Five days later, on August 16, his associated vomiting and diarrhea had subsided, but his heart rate, breathing and blood pressure remained elevated. Nevertheless, he was given a body scan in preparation to rejoin the jail’s general population (GP), collapsing repeatedly during the process. Guards allegedly mouthed to one another that he was “faking,” and SHP nurse Ashley Box eventually cleared him for GP early the following morning.

Later that day, after vomiting several times, Foard asked to return to the medical unit. …

The Kansas Department of Corrections (DOC) announced on May 14, 2026 that it would drop its troubled healthcare contractor and replace it with a separate company. In a bidding process that included seven other prison healthcare profiteers, Kansas decided to replace its current contractor Centurion Health with VitalCore Health Strategies beginning on July 1 of this year.

Centurion, which does business with at least 11 other state prison systems and claims to provide services to 275,000 incarcerated people, has a long track record of abuse and neglect. In New Mexico, Centurion won a 40-­month contract with the state DOC; during that time, as PLN previously reported, the company paid out over $8,396,751.00 to settle 47 claims—including 13 cases where prisoners died. [See: PLN, Dec. 2024, p.1.] Centurion’s record in Kansas is much the same.

A 2022 investigation by The Capital-Journal and the Kansas News Service, for example, found that Centurion had been fined 5,000 times in a 16-­month period, for a total of nearly $1 million in fines. Later reporting from The Beacon, a nonprofit news source based in Kansas City, revealed that Centurion’s performance reports got worse in the years after 2022.

…

by Douglas Ankney

On November 26, 2025, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled that Columbiana County Sheriff Brian McLaughlin did not violate Ohio’s Public Records Act (“Act”), RC 149.43 and declined to award sanctions to prisoner Terry Brown.

In August 2023, Brown requested numerous records from McLaughlin related to the Columbiana County Jail (“Jail”). McLaughlin produced only two records; declined to provide the requested records related to the Jail’s retention policy because he had previously provided those records to Brown; and explained that he did not have any further records because those records would be kept and maintained by the two previous private companies that had operated the Jail. Those two companies were Correctional Solutions Group, L.L.C. (“CSG”) and Community Education Centers, Inc./GEO Group, Inc. (“GEO”).

McLaughlin suggested to Brown that he request the records from CSG and GEO. Instead, Brown petitioned the court for a writ of mandamus compelling McLaughlin to produce the requested records. The court divided Brown’s records requests into three broad categories: (1) “policy-­records requests”; (2) “personnel records requests”; and (3) records documenting retention policies. The court observed that, because Brown had not sued CSG or GEO, or requested records from either …

by Michael Dean Thompson

The Tulsa Municipal Jail holds just 70 people. For a jail that size, according to a 2021 Department of Justice study, national data suggests that a person might die every 10 to 15 years. It is possible the Department of Justice undercounted national deaths, but that wouldn’t make the number of Tulsa deaths any less shocking.

Until 2017, Tulsa County held the city’s arrestees. The city paid $809,000 per year for the services, which included a dedicated pod for people with mental illnesses, as well as onsite medical staff. But that year, the county nearly doubled its price to $1.47 million annually. This led the mayor, G. T. Bynum, to make the “business decision” to build the city’s own jail.

The windowless jail sits underground within a parking garage beneath the city’s downtown civic center. It was originally classified as a lockup facility, meaning it could hold people up to ten days. Lockups are not required to have onsite medical care. Anyone that fails a medical screen must be moved to a different facility, yet it often holds people who are in dire need of services. For Tulsa, jail guards, not medical …

by Michael Dean Thompson

Prison healthcare profiteer NaphCare is a private company based in Alabama with over $300 million in revenue that is expected to exceed $1 billion within ten years. The company recently announced it is withdrawing operations from more Washington jails. In a statement, NaphCare said, “Unreasonably large civil verdicts have significantly increased liability exposure throughout the industry, making it more difficult for providers to sustainably operate in certain jurisdictions.”

The company operates in 23 states across the country, including Alabama, Nevada, Texas, and Virginia. By 2022, it had seen more than 150 lawsuits for “constitutionally inadequate and established practices,” according to a lawsuit in which a federal jury awarded $25 million to a former Pierce County prisoner whose leg needed to be partially amputated due to NaphCare’s medical neglect. Another, more recent lawsuit placed the lawsuit count at over 250.

NaphCare, like many other prison healthcare profiteers, contracts a flat fee for its services. This encourages them to lower their standard of care. Jim McLane is the founder, owner and board chair of NaphCare. He told the Birmingham Business Journal that the key to his company’s profitability is that it puts up “barriers …

Washington state officials asked a federal judge on April 28, 2026 to force The GEO Group to let health inspectors into the Northwest ICE Processing Center, an immigrant detention center the private company runs in Tacoma for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Washington has received over 3,500 complaints regarding conditions at the facility; for months, state health inspectors have tried to gain access to the site to investigate these claims.

While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the health inspections could take place, GEO has repeatedly turned inspectors away. [See: GEO Grp., Inc. v. Inslee, 151 F.4th 1107 (9th Cir. 2025).] So far, officials from the Washington Department of Health have tried to conduct inspections 10 times since 2023. In February of this year, GEO petitioned the Court to rehear the case and pause its order while the company prepares to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court denied both of GEO’s requests, allowing the ruling to formally take effect in April. [See: GEO Grp., Inc. v. Inslee, 166 F.4th 1188 (9th Cir. 2026).]

As reported by the Washington State Standard, the thousands of complaints …

The auditor for Mississippi announced on April 13, 2026 that Management & Training Corporation (MTC), a Utah-based private prison company, owes the state $7.4 million. MTC operates two prisons in Mississippi—East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian and Wilkinson Correctional Facility in Woodville—as well as 19 facilities in seven other states, making it the third-largest private prison company after The GEO Group and CoreCivic. The demand, which State Auditor Shad White said was among the largest civil demands in the history of his office, arose from MTC’s failure to maintain enough staff to ensure the safety of prisoners and guards.

White’s investigation into MTC began more than five years ago, in response to allegations that the level of understaffing at its prisons violated the contract the company signed with the state Department of Corrections (DOC). As PLN reported, White demanded $1.9 million from the firm in November 2022, but MTC eventually paid $5.125 million in September 2023, after nonprofit The Marshall Project flagged up to $7 million that the DOC had been charged for ghost workers on shifts that were never actually completed. [See: PLN , Jan. 2023, p.58; and Mar. 2024, p.57.] White, in seeking a new $7.4 …

On August 16, 2023, detainee Daniel Foard, 32, died on the floor of his cell at the La Plata County Jail. Foard died from a perforated duodenal ulcer that, according to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by his family in 2025, was “highly treatable.” The lawsuit—which listed defendants including the Board of County Commissioners, local Sheriff Sean Smith, and the jail’s private medical contractor Southern Health Partners—also alleges that jail guards ignored Foard’s pleas for help and medical attention over a 15-hour period.

While Foard’s case is still in litigation, the complaint has prompted the La Plata County Jail to improve its protocols for sending detainees out for medical evaluations. As the Durango Herald reported, nurses at the jail have adopted a policy of “when in doubt, send them out” as a general practice. The hospital they are being sent to, however, has returned several detainees without receiving care, according to Smith.

In one instance, a detainee was taken to the emergency room at Mercy Hospital, the county’s primary hospital, only to be quickly discharged and sent back to the jail. Not long after, a guard returned the same detainee to the hospital, which “determined that he …

by Chuck Sharman

In an agreement signed on March 26, 2026, private prison and jail medical contractor NaphCare paid an $875,000 fine to the state of New York to settle charges that the company violated state licensing laws and was operating illegally. As part of the settlement, the Alabama-based firm also agreed not to do business in the state for five years.

In 2020, NaphCare created a subsidiary, Proactive Healthcare Medicine PLLC, to execute a contract with Onondaga County to provide medical care to detainees jailed at the County Justice Center (OCJC) and the Hillbrook Juvenile Detention facility, both in Syracuse. Under New York Business Corporation Law (BCL) Article 15 and New York Limited Liability Company Law (LLCL) Article 12, a PLLC like Proactive is one of two types of businesses that may be licensed to practice medicine in the state—not a Limited Liability Corp. (LLC) like NaphCare. Additionally, the business must be wholly owned and controlled by physicians licensed in the state.

At the time it signed the jail contract, Proactive listed its owner as CEO Rita Armitage, who lived in Alabama but was licensed to practice ophthalmology in New York. Proactive’s President and Corporate …