by Derek Gilna

In July 2016, just before trial, Sentinel Offender Services, a private probation company, agreed to pay a $200,000 settlement to LaSaundria J. Walker for illegally keeping her in jail after she completed her term of probation. Sentinel also agreed to pay Hills McGee $75,000 to settle a lawsuit after he was jailed for two weeks for failing to pay community supervision fees.

Those settlements were in addition to a jury award of $50,000 in compensatory damages and $125,000 in attorney’s fees to Kathleen Hucks, another Sentinel client, for false arrest and imprisonment. [See: PLN, Feb. 2017, p.48]. More than a dozen people have sued the company in both Richmond and Columbia counties in Georgia, plus a dozen more in other jurisdictions, accusing Sentinel of committing numerous civil rights violations.

Augusta attorney Jack Long has led efforts to prevent Sentinel and other private probation firms from profiting from improper business practices – which typically include imposing numerous fees on probationers, then having them jailed when they are unable to pay. The subject of an article published by the American Bar Association in 2014, Long, as well as other attorneys, have argued that Sentinel is not interested in ...

by Joe Watson

For three years, elected officials in Niagara County, New York refused to give the families of Tommie Lee Jones and Daniel Pantera the satisfaction of terminating the county jail’s contract with for-profit healthcare provider Armor Correctional Health Services.

Instead Armor left on its own terms, refusing a new deal with the county when local officials denied the Florida-based company’s demands for more money and negotiated a new contract with a different for-profit medical provider.

“There is no firing. They don’t want it anymore,” said Niagara County Attorney Claude A. Joerg, referring to the jail’s healthcare contract. “It’s not a response to the report from the state.”

The report to which Joerg referred was released in 2014 by New York’s Commission of Correction and blamed the December 2012 deaths of Jones, 51, and Pantera, 46 – both just two weeks after Armor entered into a three-year contract with the county – on Dr. Steven C. Gasiewicz, the company’s medical director at the Niagara County Jail. The report found the pair of deaths were due to “grossly inadequate medical and mental health care,” and recommended that the county consider severing its relationship with Armor.

Pantera, who reportedly suffered from ...

In March 2017, Special Master David R. Cohen filed a request with the U.S. District Court in Kansas, seeking to enlarge his investigation into whether the Leavenworth Detention Center (LDC) and the private contractor that operates the facility, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, which recently rebranded as CoreCivic), had improperly recorded privileged attorney-client meetings and shared those recordings with federal prosecutors. Having determined that the recordings were in fact made and shared, Cohen now wants to determine whether that practice was commonplace.

His review had already found 227 phone call recordings and at least 30 videos of attorney-client meetings in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City. Around 700 attorney visits may have been recorded without the parties’ knowledge – violating a fundamental protection for criminal defendants established by the Sixth Amendment.

Cohen, a federal law clerk, was appointed by U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson, who issued an order in August 2016 directing LDC and CCA officials to immediately stop recording private attorney-client meetings and phone calls. The order came after a hearing confirmed that CCA had made recordings of confidential conversations between prisoners and their lawyers, and gave some of them to prosecutors in response to grand jury ...

by Derek Gilna

In June 2016, In the Public Interest (ITPI), a non-partisan public policy group, published a report titled “How Private Prison Companies Increase Recidivism,” based upon the fact that for-profit prisons rely upon incarceration to generate revenue – thus they have no incentive to provide rehabilitative programs that reduce recidivism. In a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, this is a recipe for disaster.

According to a study by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), “50% of incarcerated people return to prison within three years of being released.” The ITPI report noted that “Academic research has found that incarcerating people in prisons operated by private companies, which have business models dependent on incarceration, increases the likelihood of those people recidivating.”

The report further said that while governmental agencies, which do need not to generate profit, typically operate prisons with the goals of rehabilitating prisoners and protecting public safety, private prisons are beholden to stockholders who expect to receive a return on their investment.

“Often,” ITPI wrote, “achieving the profit comes at a cost to prisoners, those who work inside the prisons, and the broader public.”

Private prison companies sell their services to government agencies on ...

by David Reutter

With the advent of privatized prisoner health care in Florida, a spike in deaths has hit levels not seen in 10 years. Yet, privatization remains popular with Gov. Rick Scott, the former CEO of a healthcare conglomerate that bilked the government out of millions.

When campaigning to become governor, Scott promised to cut prison costs by privatizing the prison system. Despite opposition from guard unions, Scott won the election. He, however, lost a quest to privatize the entire prison system because such a move required legislative action. [See: PLN, Feb. 2012, p.1].

The court ruling ending prison privatization left open the option of privatizing the prison health care system. Scott too that option, and in 2012 the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) signed contracts with two companies totaling about $1.3 billion. Both companies are familiar to PLN readers for their history of putting profit before any semblance of real care [See: PLN, June 2013, p.24].

Corizon Health won a $1.2 billion, five year contract to care for prisoners in about 44 prisons. Wexford Health Services received a $240 million contract over the same period for overseeing care at nine south Florida prisons. FDOC and Corizon ...

by Greg Dober 

In Alameda County, California, Corizon Correctional Healthcare is facing questions regarding campaign contributions to County Sheriff Greg Ahern.  While investigating two inmate deaths at Santa Rita jail, in Alameda County, television station, KTVU-2 uncovered public documents, which shows Ahern accepting $110,000 in campaign contributions during 2006-2013 from Corizon.   The Corizon contract with Alameda County, worth $237 million, is the counties largest contract and Corizon was Ahern’s largest campaign donor.

Corizon contributed to Ahern’s campaign fund despite the sheriff running unopposed in his reelection bids. Ahern defended the contribution by indicating that he used the money to fund a golf tournament to raise money for the sheriff’s deputy’s health and welfare fund.   Corizon wasn’t alone in funding the sheriff’s unopposed campaign bids.  Aramark, the food service provider at the jail, donated in excess of $11,500 from 2008-2009. In addition, two companies bidding for video services at the jail also donated a total of $20,000 to Ahern’s campaigns.

After the three-year contract expiration in 2011, the company was awarded consecutive one-year no- bid renewals at the recommendation of Ahern.  In a no-bid contract renewal, Ahern has continually recommended Corizon since 2011 despite the company’s performance problems at the ...

by Erin Rosa

One of the country’s largest immigration jailers and private prison companies spent $420,000 lobbying the Justice Department and federal lawmakers during the first three months of 2017, more than half of what they spent last year for lobbying services. The company has also nearly doubled the number of lobbyists working on its behalf.

According to Congressional disclosure reports released last week, the Geo Group, a Florida-based company that operates 74 correctional centers in the United States, spent the $420,000 on six different lobbying outfits, one of which employs two former aides of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The company gave $60,000 to national law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP to lobby Congress on issues relating to the 2018 national budget and homeland security expenditures, according to the records. The same firm employs David Stewart and Ryan Robichaux, former Sessions aides who are now working for the Geo Group.

In contrast, during the first three months of last year, disclosure reports show the Geo Group spent $110,000 on lobbying, and for the entirety of 2016 the company spent $830,000. At the end of 2016, the company had seven lobbyists working for them. Now, that number is thirteen.

With ...

by Rosalind Adams, BuzzFeed

TULSA, Oklahoma — By the time police arrived at the psychiatric hospital, one of the adolescent units was out of control. The new manager had been attacked, a handful of its teenage patients had barricaded themselves in a small room, and others were fighting with staff.

The officers called for backup, and three more police cars pulled up to Shadow Mountain Behavioral Health, which primarily treats young people. A “code green” blared over the intercom system, alerting employees across the hospital to the violence.

When a staff member unlocked the room the patients had shut themselves in, police pepper-sprayed the kids inside.

In the tumult, one staff member reported being stabbed in the forehead with a pencil. Outside, a patient scaled the 10-foot fence and, as employees watched in horror, began slicing his wrists with a piece of glass, three employees recently recalled. Running to reach him, another worker stepped in a hole and injured his ankle.

“It was crazy, mass chaos,” said an employee who saw the scene unfold.

Shadow Mountain is owned by America’s largest psychiatric hospital chain, Universal Health Services. A recent BuzzFeed News investigation raised grave questions ...

by David Reutter

Privatization has been all the rage in Florida’s prison system for some time. By 2003, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC), had contracts with private companies to operate its canteen, food service, and telephone operations. By then it also had several privately run prisons in its system.

PLN has chronicled incidents over the years to show that privatization is the fruit of political clout and often involve kickbacks that result in corruption. [See: PLN, Jan. 2006, p. 20; Mar. 2011, p. 1]. The problem is not confined to Florida, as the citizens of Mississippi learned after their corrections commissioner was recently indicted. [See: PLN, Oct. 2015, p. 42].

Gov. Rick Scott campaigned on cutting the FDOC’s budget, and one of his first acts in office was to pen contracts to privatize the entire prison system and its medical care. Due to a statutory provision, the move to privatize prisons was blocked by a court and failed in the next legislative session. The move to privatize prisoner medical care, however, moved forward.

Anyone who makes even a cursory investigation into prison privatization can easily conclude that it is tainted with corruption and poor-services from profit-mongering companies ...

by Derek Gilna

Ten years after the federal government passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which applied to Bureau of Prison (BOP) facilities, the Justice Department by rule has finally extended those same protections to the undocumented in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities.  PREA was passed by Congress after numerous studies determined that federal prisoners in the BOP system were often victims of sexual assault.

Although immigrant rights organizations lauded the move, as a positive one, they were quick to point out that it will not immediately affect those individuals confined in private facilities contracting with ICE to house immigration detainees. DHS and ICE hold approximately 34,000 detainees on an average day. Additionally, Juvenile rights advocates are also concerned about the risk of sexual abuse faced by the increasing number of unaccompanied children illegally entering the U.S. in recent months.

Most experts agree that sexual abuse is underreported by at least half in the BOP system, which generally houses American citizens and adult undocumented individuals convicted of crimes.  However, such individuals have various constitutional protections available to them and access to a grievance process and legal assistance, as well as telephone and restricted ...