In 2025, officials with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office failed to investigate at least seven reported cases of sexual assault that occured at Otay Mesa immigration detention center, a facility run by private prison profiteer CoreCivic that locks up nearly 1,500 federal immigration detainees.

As reported by CalMatters, a 2020 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between CoreCivic and the sheriff’s department granted Otay Mesa’s warden Christopher LaRose the authority to decide whether or not to investigate rape allegations. CoreCivic, in a response to CalMatters, said that it had conducted administrative investigations for each of the seven sexual assault cases, but that the company does not conduct criminal investigations because it is not a law enforcement agency.

CoreCivic operates two of seven private immigrant prisons located across California, and it isn’t clear if similar MOUs exist between these facilities and local law enforcement agencies.

The Otay Mesa prison is the subject of a separate legal battle with San Diego County as a lawsuit claims the company illegally blocked a public health inspection of the facility. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had initially cleared county officials for the inspection, but that decision was reversed …

Armor Health, the company that held a $24 million contract to provide healthcare at the Lee County Jail, gave local Sheriff Carmine Marceno a $50,000 donation four months before the medical contract was terminated, according to the The News-Press in Fort Myers. On February 23, 2024, Armor health made the payment to a political action committee (PAC) that supported Marceno’s reelection campaign. Another company, Enhanced Health Solutions LLC, wrote a $1,000 check to the PAC on the same day. Both companies are led by the same CEO and share the same address in Miami.

The donations came as the three-year contract that Armor Health held with the Lee County Jail, which locks up around 1,600 detainees, was up for an additional one-year renewal. Armor Health, however, must not have plied Marceno with enough money as the company’s contract was cancelled in June 2024. Five months later, in November of that year, Maceno won re-election with 90.6% of the vote.

Armor Health, like most of the private healthcare companies that contract with jails, has a long track record of medical neglect and preventable deaths. In 2023, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office terminated a $98 million contract with Armor after …

by Chuck Sharman

On January 16, 2025, a grand jury in Georgia’s Richmond County reported that its inspection of the County jail revealed serious overcrowding, with mattresses on the floor pressing many cells into double-occupancy. As if to underscore the problem’s seriousness, a detainee was violently assaulted and stabbed on January 23, sending him to the hospital with nine stab wounds. Five fellow detainees have been charged in that attack.

GA Code § 15-12-71 (2024) requires grand juries in each of the state’s 159 counties to physically inspect its jail every year. The grand jury seated in state Superior Court for Richmond County for its November 2025 term conducted the inspection on January 6, 2026, presenting its report to Judge R. Ashley Wright on the term’s last day. Although jailers quibbled about the exact number, the Grand Jury reported that the Charles B. Webster Detention Center in Augusta was operating at more than 126% of its designed capacity.

That “inadequate ability to house its jail population,” the report noted, was reflected in the fact that the jail was “set up to house 1,065” detainees and prisoners, but there were 1,346 confined there on the date of …

by Rudi Keller

This article was originally published in the Missouri Independent.

Whether prisoners die while in state custody is not used to measure the performance of Missouri’s private prison health care contractor, the state’s top corrections official told lawmakers on January 14, 2026.

The 14 performance standards in Centurion Health’s contract track timelines for services, such as dental visits and physical exams, but do not include inmate mortality, said Travis Foley, director of the Missouri Department of Corrections.

During most of a two-hour hearing of the Missouri House Corrections Committee, Foley sought to tamp down reports that Centurion medical staffwalkedout of the Jefferson City Correctional Center in October. Under questioning from state Rep. Gregg Bush, a Democrat from Columbia, Foley listed several of the performance measures and said he would provide the full list.

“Is any of them mortality?” Bush asked.

“No,” Foley replied.

“Okay, so that’s not actually a measure that we’re measuring from our health care vendor,” Bush said.

“Not in terms of the outcome,” Foley said.

For several years,advocatesforprisonerrights have been sounding alarms about the historically high number …

In late February 2026, reporting on the Dilley Immigration Processing Center revealed harrowing details about the conditions under which families are being detained at the facility.

Dilley received public attention last month following the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest in Minneapolis of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy wearing a bunny hat and Spiderman backpack. Ramos and his father were then sent to Dilley, with the boy caged alongside hundreds of children who have been detained there for months. (Both Ramos and his father were released after 10 days, due to the intervention of Congress members and a judge.)

Dilley, located about 75 miles south of Laredo, was first opened in 2014 during the Obama administration and, after being scaled back, closed in the last year of the Biden administration. Republican President Donald Trump re-opened Dilley in spring 2025, as part of his administration’s crackdown on immigrants. The number of detainees at Dilley has risen sharply in recent months to more than 1,300 people, with many of them children being held for longer than the 20-day limit established by a longstanding court order.

The Texas detention facility is run by CoreCivic, the Nashville-based private prison …

by Brett Wilkins

This article was originally published in Common Dreams.

Private prison company GEO Group on February 12, 2026 reported a company record of $254 million in profit last year—a roughly 700% increase over 2024—driven by asset sales and contracts with theTrumpadministration to build several new USImmigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities across the US.

GEO Group secured approximately $520 million in new or expanded contracts in 2025, based on annualized revenue,accordingto company founder and executive chairman George Zoley.

“This represents the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our company’s history,” Zoley said during an earnings call on February 12. “We have entered into new contracts to house ICE detainees at four facilities totaling approximately 6,000 beds.”

Those facilities are: Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan; Folkston Processing Center at the D. Ray James Correctional Institution in Georgia; and a so-called “deportation depot” at the Baker Correctional Institution in Sanderson, Florida.

“Thecensus across our active ICE facilities has continued to steadily increase from the third quarter at approximately 22,000 to …

Prisoners in Illinois can face decades of medical neglect, as in the case of Johnnie Flournoy, a 74-year-old prisoner locked up at the Pinckneyville Correction Center around five hours south of Chicago. Imprisoned since the early 1990s, Flournoy was diagnosed with glaucoma in 2002. But, according to reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times, he spent years getting shuffled from one state prison to the next—and during all that time, he never received the cheap prescription eye drops that would have allowed him to manage the condition.

Instead, when Flournoy finally received treatment following multiple grievances and winning two settlements, he had to undergo five surgeries. He’s now lost all vision in his left eye and struggles to see from his right, and he still isn’t able to access the eye drops, which are available through insurance for as little as $10. “They let me go blind,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times, “and they still ain’t doing nothing.”

Flournoy’s story is a common one in the drastically understaffed facilities that make up the Illinois prison system. Since 2019, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) has been under a consent decree to improve health care. And yet, years …

by Michael Thompson

President Donald Trump (R) signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025. The tax spending bill was passed along party lines and is so massive, that it is likely only a few lawmakers read it through before voting. Resting within the bill were massive cuts to Medicaid, which will force rural hospitals to reduce services or even shut down entirely. A consequence of these cuts is that access to lifesaving health care will be even more remote for 60% of people incarcerated in American prisons and 25% of those in jails.

Carceral-impacted people tend to have shorter life expectancies and experience health problems at higher rates than the general public. Beyond higher substance abuse rates, they struggle with higher rates of Hepatitis B and C, HIV, mental health issues, and asthma as well. Nevertheless, 19% of state prisoners never see a doctor when they are incarcerated, while many have passed years without seeing a doctor before incarceration. In addition, two percent (2%) of women enter incarceration while pregnant.

Prison healthcare is terrible in most cases. While the U.S. Supreme Court identified healthcare as a right for prisoners, providers are given immense …

by Matt Clarke

On December 1, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that jailers could not be held liable for the death of a Georgia pretrial detainee caused by lack of medical care. The Court’s rationale was that the jailers followed the advice of medical personnel and it was not obvious that the symptoms were that of a perforated ulcer rather than drug withdrawal.

When Kevil Wingo was booked into the Cobb County Jail for possession of 0.2 grams of cocaine, “he was complaining of nausea, vomiting, and abdominal discomfort. He was also heard pleading with God, saying that he would never touch drugs again should he survive.” This caused nurse Yvette Burton (who worked for Wellstar Health Systems, the jail’s contracted provider of health care) to believe he was suffering from opiate withdrawal when she saw him at 12:45 a.m. on September 29, 2019.

Wingo was placed on a 5-day period of “withdrawal checks” every 12 minutes, admitted into the infirmary, and scheduled to see a physician in the morning. His very loud complaining of being unable to breathe and needing hospitalization disturbed other detainees. Deputy Lynda Marshall “relayed …

by Chuck Sharman

In a filing with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama on January 26, 2026, state prisoner Joseph Allen Renney said that he had reached agreements with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and its contracted medical provider, Wexford Health Services, settling claims he filed against them over amputation of his toes and part of his foot. The partial amputation allegedly resulted from inadequate medical care that Renney received for an infection. While a victory for Renney, the settlement and its payout amounts remain shielded from PLN.

Renney, now 60, is diabetic. He was incarcerated at Limestone Correctional Facility in March 2021 when he broke his left big toe and it “quickly became infected,” according to the complaint he later filed. He was sent to an outside podiatrist in early April, who recommended partial amputation of the tip of the toe “the sooner the better” to stop the infection’s spread. Instead, Renney got oral antibiotics that failed to quell the infection and gauze to clean his festering wound himself. He waited until July 2021 to see an outside podiatrist again for what was supposed to be the surgery.

However, an …