On August 2, 2024, Florida-­based Armor Health Management LLC petitioned the Miami-­Dade County Circuit Court to liquidate its assets to Enhanced Management Services (EMS), as part of a global settlement with creditors. That will free EMS and its owner, Dr. Jose Jesus Armas, of the bulk of debt owed by Armor—which Armas also founded.

The company’s original petition to assign its assets, filed in the circuit court on October 11, 2023, disclosed that $1.455 million was owed to secured creditors, including BankUnited, plus $319,714.68 in outstanding payroll and related expenses; another $153.5 million in unsecured debt included unpaid bills owed to pharmacies, consultants, diagnostic services, clinics and other subcontractors. It also included $12 million in verdicts and settlements in over 100 lawsuits filed by current and former prisoners or their estates.

Armor named Daniel J. Sterner with Development Specialists, Inc. as its assignee to “liquidate the assets of [its] estate” and then “pay and discharge in full, to the extent that funds are available … all of the debts and liabilities now due.” BankUnited sold its note to Merrick Bank, which negotiated a $3 million loan balance that was included in the assets EMS agreed to buy. Under the settlement ...

The Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPC) in Tacoma, Washington, owned by private prison giant The GEO Group, Inc., is the sole detention facility in the state of Washington for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In 2023, state lawmakers targeted it with House Bill 1470, imposing numerous requirements on private detention facilities in the state. GEO Group sued in federal court for the Western District of Washington and moved to preliminarily enjoin enforcement of HB 1470, arguing that its provisions violate the Supremacy Clause and Contract Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In a series of March 2024 orders, the Court agreed and enjoined enforcement of most of the law.

The doctrine of intergovernmental immunity derives from the Supremacy Clause, freeing federal government activity from regulation by states. Private entities that deal with the federal government may also assert immunity under this doctrine, and they may sue to block discrimination when state law treats private entities worse than others are treated.

GEO Group asserted that HB 1470 violated this doctrine because, by its plain terms, it applied only to NWIPC, regulating it in ways that no other facility in the state is regulated. The Court agreed that although the statute defines ...

Miami-­based Armor Correctional Health had virtually no experience in providing medical care to prisoners when Dr. Jose Jesus Armas started the firm in 2004, but over the next few years it amassed millions of dollars in contracts with county jails through apparent political maneuvers and promises of huge financial savings, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2006, p.29.]

Those promises turned out too good to be true. Armor racked up more debts than it could repay, much of it from settlements and judgments for inadequate medical care. That has now led to liquidation proceedings in a Miami court, from which firm founder Dr. Jose Jesus Armas currently stands to benefit, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Nov. 2024, p.51.]

Wisconsin’s Milwaukee County also got stuck with a tab that Armor owed for denying medication to a mentally ill detainee in the county jail. That $1.05 million was paid by the county on September 29, 2023, to Omar Wesley.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at age 21, Wesley was arrested for attempted bank robbery but found not guilty by reason of his mental illness. After treatment with clozapine in a mental health facility, he was transferred to the county’s Criminal ...

Private jail medical providers usually win contracts with promises to save a county money. But after two federal lawsuits filed in federal court for the Northern District of Ohio in 2023 against Ohio’s Richland County and its privately contracted jail medical provider, Advanced Correctional Healthcare (ACH), the jail dropped the firm. ACH has resolved both suits in 2024; though as a private entity settling with a a private citizen, it has avoided disclosing whether an agreement was even struck, much less for how much.

In one of the suits, ACH was accused of ignoring complaints from detainee Zachary Marshall, 35, as well as signs of sepsis that killed him in December 2021. His sister, Lacee Bowersox, who is administrator of his Estate, agreed to dismiss her claims against ACH Nurse Christopher Smith in May 2024; however, no settlement agreement was announced or docketed with the Court. Plaintiff is represented by Columbus attorney Abigail F. Chin of Cooper Elliott. See: Bowersox v. Adv. Corr. Healthcare, Inc., USDC (N.D. Ohio), Case No. 1:23-cv-02287.

The other suit was filed by the father of detainee Maggie Copeland, 29, who was found unresponsive in her jail cell in May 2022. She was pronounced dead a ...

by Douglas Ankney

In an April 2024 article, Willamette University Van Winkle Melton Professor of Law Laura I. Appleman traces the profit motive in American criminal punishment from colonial times, aiming to better understand and reform the way private companies exploit prisoners and their families.

Appleman identifies the investors, corporations and profiteers—she calls them “Big Capital”—in four historical eras or “Transformative Periods.” In the first were 16th and 17th-century British merchants who transported convicts and the indentured poor to the American colonies, where they were sold for their labor, generally on tobacco farms. The merchants profited both from the sale of their human cargo their transport.

After the Revolutionary War, this practice died, replaced with “contractual penal servitude”—convicts rented out to private businesses. New York’s Auburn Prison, opened in 1817, was the first of these “industrial prisons,” which sold prisoners’ labor to private businesses that leased the prison structures as well as the prisoners themselves. They were forced to work 12 to 14 hours per day and brutally beaten if they were too slow or broke equipment.

Convict leasing moved offsite in the Second Transformative Period after the Civil War. In the South, Appleman noted, local courts sentenced many Black ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

With the Harris County Jail (HCJ) short 139 guards, minimum staffing ratios set by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards (TCJS) have mathematically capped the number of beds that can be filled at the Houston lockup. As a result, the County has been shipping excess detainees to privately-operated jails—CoreCivic’s Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi and two for-profit prisons run by LaSalle Corrections in Texas and Louisiana.

Meanwhile, when TCJS inspectors gave their signoff to a safety inspection on August 20, 2024, it was HCJ’s first passing grade in nearly two years. Yet the score may not have been fairly earned; TCJS admitted providing “technical assistance” to jailers during the inspection. TCJS Executive Director Brandon Wood insisted that the help amounted to nothing more than a “clarification” of agency standards “to make sure that everybody was on the same page and had a clear understanding of what would be expected.” But inspectors found that jailers were miscalculating the state-mandated minimum staff-to-detainee ratio, on top of which 15 of some 15,500 required guard rounds were logged late.

“These were minimum standards that had to do with supervision and life safety, and supervision is the reason we’ve been ...

by Douglas Ankney

After winning a temporary restraining order (TRO) directing the medical contractor for the Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC) to treat his colon disease, state prisoner Arthur Burnham’s location was unknown on September 10, 2024. That was the date when the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado’s latest order was returned undeliverable in a habeas corpus petition that the prisoner also filed, after letting his earlier win languish.

The prisoner’s disappearance is troubling given his medical risk, which prompted the Court to issue its TRO on October 4, 2023. Burnham, 53, had filed suit pro se the previous July while incarcerated at Centennial Correctional Facility (CCF). He alleged that beginning in October 2022, he submitted multiple kites complaining of “severe intestinal pain and putrefaction of the colon,” which went unanswered by DOC healthcare contractor Correctional Health Partners (CHP).

Finally, in February 2023, Burnham was taken offsite for a colonoscopy, which revealed “inflammation of a diverticulum in the intestinal tract, causing fecal stagnation and pain,” as well as a colon hemorrhage and a potentially cancerous polyp. He had an emergency medical visit with CHP Nurse Practitioner Villani in February 2023 to address a “week-long bleeding out of ...

For-profit prison healthcare contractor Corizon Health had a sordid reputation even before it attempted a legal maneuver known as the “Texas Two-Step,” using that state’s laws to put its valuable assets in a new company called YesCare and creating a second company called Tehum Care Services to assume its remaining liabilities—including payouts owed to prisoners for negligence and malpractice—before promptly declaring the firm’s bankruptcy.

As previously reported in PLN, questions arose over ownership of Tehum, while a Court-appointed mediator in the bankruptcy case, former judge David Jones, resigned after it was revealed he was living with an attorney representing YesCare—even as the firm was attempting to use the bankruptcy proceedings to wriggle free of the bulk of what it owes for lawsuits filed by current and former prisoners. [See: PLN, Jan. 2024, p.29.]

Despite such questionable legal antics, and Corizon Health’s lengthy record of providing inadequate healthcare to prisoners, Maryland officials agreed to extend the company’s contract in March 2024. Now operating as YesCare, the firm had already received $700 million for supplying medical services in Maryland prisons and state-run jails since 2018. The nine-month extension is worth another $125 million.

Gov. Wes Moore (D) and state Treasurer Dereck Davis ...

by David M. Reutter

Jails face a monumental task in the provision of medical care. Those who’ve just been arrested are often experiencing withdrawal from drugs or alcohol. Other pre-existing medical conditions are routine and routinely severe. Then there are the mentally ill, who land in jail because communities lack resources to treat their conditions—even though jails and guards also lack training and expertise to provide adequate care. Into the breach step privately contracted providers, promising to fill the need. But their results belie that promise, demonstrating only that profit comes before service.

How else to explain the marketing materials distributed to prospective customers by jail healthcare contractor Turn Key Health Clinics LLC? In those, the firm bragged that after taking over healthcare at Oklahoma’s Tulsa County Jail in 2016, emergency transfers to hospitals fell by an eyepopping 77% in just a few months. The number of days detainees spent hospitalized also cratered by 35%. Did they suddenly get healthier? Or were they simply denied care?

The answer seems obvious, yet jails continue to turn to private providers like Turn Key. For one, it comes with a staff of credentialed personnel already employed, so sheriffs don’t have to vet and ...

On August 2, 2024, after losing a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a Jeffrey Simms-­Belaire, a former detainee at Oregon’s Washington County Jail (WCJ), private jail medical contractor NaphCare, Inc. secured an agreement with a settlement of $78,325.50 to drop his civil rights claims against a nurse practitioner (NP) employed by the firm. The move came just months after the company advised the federal court for the District of Oregon on March 28, 2024, that it had settled claims in another suit filed by Tammy Thomsen over the death of her husband at WCJ.
In both cases, no settlement details were docketed with the Court, but PLN has requested documentation, since NaphCare was acting as a public instrumentality. Meanwhile remaining claims are proceeding against the firm and the County that were filed by Simms-­Belaire, a paraplegic with no feeling in his legs and feet who is now an Oregon state prisoner.
After an October 2017 arrest in Kansas, Simms-­Belaire was extradited to Oregon and booked into WCJ to await trial. The detainee used a wheelchair and medical shoes issued at the Kansas jail to protect his feet from rubbing against it, since he suffers from a condition that ...