by Chuck Sharman

A $2.75 million settlement will help the surviving children of a detainee left to decompensate from her mental illness for seven and a half months before she died in Washington’s Clark County Jail in Vancouver. That was the result of an agreement reached in July 2025 between the Estate of Shelly Ann Monahan and officials with the County and its contracted jail healthcare provider, NaphCare, Inc.

Monahan was days away from her 28th birthday when she was booked into the lockup on felony charges on December 3, 2020. She had a history of drug use and repeatedly spent time in the jail after related arrests. During those incarcerations, jailers also became aware of her mental health struggles, placing Monahan on suicide watch the first time in 2014 and again the following year.

So it should have come as no surprise when she arrived at the jail the last time and was found to be under the influence of drugs. However, she was placed in the general population after a medical evaluation by NaphCare staff—without undergoing a mental health screening. Three weeks later, a nurse noted that Monahan “appeared disheveled, her room was a …

by Chuck Sharman

Meeting at the courthouse in Wilkes-­Barre, Pennsylvania, the Luzerne County Council approved three settlements in November 2024, totaling $645,330 in payouts on behalf of three former detainees at the Luzerne County Prison—two of whom committed suicides that jailers allegedly failed to prevent. That was on top of a $780,000 settlement approved the year before for another detainee’a unprevented suicide, pushing total payouts to $1,425,330.

Under terms of the first agreement, approved on November 12, 2025, the County paid $45,330 to Joshua S. Miller, whose federal civil rights suit claimed that he was subjected to a highly invasive strip search in April 2016, when tipped-­off guards found him and five other detainees with suspected contraband drugs after seeing visitors.

Miller, then 28, admitted that guards found and confiscated contraband from his pants. But they then took him to a conference room and strip-­searched him to look for more, leaving him naked and shackled while the door repeatedly opened and closed, exposing him to male and female workers in the office. Finding no more contraband at that point, he said that they ordered him on all fours atop a table and forced him to place …

by Michael Thompson

James Clubb was incarcerated in the Marinette County Jail on September 13, 2018, when he bit down on something hard and broke a tooth. At the time, for-­profit provisions company Aramark held “the exclusive right to provide food service” to “the County’s inmates, staff and visitors at the Marinette County Jail.” Clubb believed that the object that broke his tooth was a piece of plastic, like “the corner of a cutting board or something.”

At the time of the injury, he reported it to one of the guards but was told to submit a medical request. He submitted four or five requests but received no response until September 24, when he saw the nurse. Three days later, he submitted another request. Subsequently, the physician approved Tylenol and antibiotics for Clubb. The doctor also submitted a dentistry order which would be filled by “the first willing and available provider.” It was only after another visit to the nurse on October 11 that an appointment was set for October 19, more than a month after he broke his tooth.

Clubb filed a lawsuit for state claims on September 19, 2022, four years after the event. …

by Michael Thompson

Jails within Washington state are finding it increasingly difficult to arrange medical providers. In one example, when Kitsap County recently put out a request for a medical provider, only their current provider responded, Everhealth LLC, a subsidiary of Alabama-­based NaphCare. As a result, Kitsap County was forced to accept their $6.8 million bid for 2026 services. That was over $1 million beyond the previous year’s cost to the county and more than double the cost from just five years ago. In 2029, the price will spike again to $8.6 million.

Everhealth had apparently considered pulling out of Washington completely. They have said that of the six jails with which they currently work, only two will continue to provide services after the end of 2026.

Medical care is a fundamental right for incarcerated persons, so failing to provide it is not an option. And yet, jails in Washington struggle to get bids due to the high cost of medical services in jails and in Washington in particular. Devon Schrum of the South Correctional Entity (SCORE) described it as a crisis. After SCORE’s then current provider went into bankruptcy, they sought a new contract. SCORE …

The Tennessee Department of Correction (DOC) is asking Gov. Bill Lee (R) to increase the state’s contract with private prison profiteer CoreCivic, Inc. by $13 million.

On November 4, 2025, DOC head Frank Strada presented an annual budget request for the agency that nearly doubled the amount of money Tennessee paid to CoreCivic in 2024. [See: PLN, Aug. 2024, p. 17.] The Nashville-­based company operates four prisons in Tennessee: the South Central Correctional Facility, Hardeman County Correctional Facility, Whiteville Correctional Facility, and the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC), the largest prison in the state.

CoreCivic’s potential pay bump comes despite the fact the company has been fined more than $44 million over the last three years for a litany of contract violations, such as longstanding staff vacancies, prisoners being improperly placed in solitary, and skipped medical care visits. TTCC, in particular, has come under fire for a long record of assaults, murders, and understaffing in the decade since it first opened in 2016. Last year, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it was launching a civil rights investigation into the troubled TTCC as a result of the rampant abuses. [See: PLN, March …

by Chuck Sharman

The Board of County Commissioners of Ohio’s Montgomery voted on September 30, 2025, to pay $7 million to the Estate of Christian Black, who died at the county jail the previous March after being violently extracted from his cell and placed in a restraint chair. The claims resolved by the agreement had all been filed by the Estate against jail healthcare contractor NaphCare Inc., whose medical personnel were present during the extraction yet failed to provide lifesaving treatment to the detainee before he became unresponsive in the restraint chair.

Black, 25, crashed a stolen vehicle on I-­70 near Zaynesville on March 23, 2025, after an alleged burglary. He was taken into custody and booked into the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton. The next day, when he began to suffer a mental health crisis, a team of guards “dragged [him] from his cell” and “forced [him] face down on the floor” with “multiple” guards on his back, according to the complaint later filed on his behalf. 

The guards proceeded to “administer[] pepper spray, deployed Tasers and placed [him] in handcuffs” before putting Black in an emergency restraint chair, bending him over at the …

When the Iowa Department of Corrections (DOC) announced in July 2025 that it was beginning to seek proposals from private companies to take over health care services in state prisons, it prompted a mass exodus of staff. Over the course of several months, more than 60 of the roughly 300 employees in the state’s prison medical system resigned, with the expectation of pay cuts and a potential loss of their retirement plans and other benefits being major concerns. The state, according to The Gazette, cited rising operating costs and the need to update electronic medical records as reasons for the shift.

But in a meeting on November 14, 2025 with employees, Iowa DOC Director Beth Skinner reversed course and announced that the state had not accepted any bids and would drop plans to privatize. According to a medical employee who spoke to The Midwest Newsroom, the DOC may still consider a private contract for medical record updating. Multiple employees told the same reporter that the quality of prisoners’ healthcare would have declined had the outsourcing been approved.

While Iowa’s privatization scheme is now off the table, the resignations that followed the initial announcement are exacerbating …

by Chuck Sharman

“We’re spending millions on prison health care,” Mississippi House Corrections Committee Chairwoman Becky Currie (R-­Brookhaven) told Mississippi Today, “and we’re not getting any.”

That charge was made on the news outlet’s political podcast, The Other Side, on November 3, 2025, when Currie pointed the finger at the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and its contracted medical provider, VitalCore Health Strategies. As PLN reported, DOC Commissioner Burl Cain used emergency no-­bid contracts four years in a row to award the business to the firm before it finally won a competitive bidding process in 2024. [See: PLN, June 2025, p.14.] But when asked if the process was truly competitive, Currie said: “Not in my view.” Since then the firm has “never had enough nurses” to meet its obligations to a contractual “standard that is so sub-­par.”

The lawmaker toured state prisons herself in 2023, after realizing that “I was not going to find anything out … from Vital Core or [DOC],” she said. What she saw was shocking. “Most” of the health problems that prisoners presented “were huge.” Currie recalled one 23-­year-­old prisoner who lifted up her shirt and had “cancer …

by Chuck Sharman

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky granted final approval on September 17, 2024, to a $6.49 million settlement of a class-­action complaint filed on behalf of almost 600,000 prisoners in four states whose personal information was exposed in a 2022 data breach suffered by Lexington-­based CorrectCare Integrated Health LCC.

CorrectCare provided medical claims processing services to prisons and jails in California, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina in July 2022, when it reported a “misconfigured” web server had exposed 635,321 files containing the personal identifying information and personal healthcare information of prisoners and detainees. It was later determined that the information came from 572,453 victims who were imprisoned or detained in affected lockups.

Lead Plaintiff Virginia Hiley filed suit in December 2022, accusing CorrectCare of negligence, negligence per se, breach of implied contract, breach of fiduciary duty, invasion of privacy and unjust enrichment. Her suit and several others filed over the data breach were consolidated in May 2023, adding claims under consumer privacy laws specific to the states involved. An additional claim filed in the Northern District of Georgia was transferred to the Eastern District of Kentucky and consolidated …

by Chuck Sharman

A jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana returned a verdict on April 2, 2025, awarding $27.75 million in damages to former state prisoner Nathaniel Lake, after finding that staff of private prison giant CoreCivic failed to protect him from a brutal assault by a fellow prisoner at Crossroads Correctional Center (CCC) in Shelby. CoreCivic moved for judgment as a matter of law (JNOV) or a new trial. But the district court denied that motion on August 6, 2025. See: Lake v. CoreCivic, Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 152374 (D. Mont.).

Lake was convicted of attempting to rape a volunteer at a Missoula homeless mission where he sought shelter, and he was sentenced in 2016 to a 40-­year term—with 20 years suspended—in the custody of the state Department of Corrections (DOC). He was released when the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2019, finding the trial court erred in applying the state’s Rape Shield Law to prohibit Lake from presenting evidence that it wasn’t his sperm but that of another unidentified man which was found in the alleged victim’s underwear. See: State v. Lake, 2019 …