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 ...

by David Reutter

Private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) recently made a statement to Mother Jones magazine in response to the discovery of reporter who had been employed at one of its prisons in Louisiana. The operation was uncovered when a reporter was arrested after being spotted outside the perimeter of Winn Correctional Facility.

Winn Parish Sheriff Cranford Jordan’s office was called at approximately 9:30pm on March 13, 2015, by guards at the CCA-operated prison. The guards had spotted someone on prison grounds via a light from a cellphone. The person left in a rental car when guards tried to stop him.

The car was tracked to Mother Jones senior producer James West. Monica Bauerlein, co-editor of Mother Jones, issued the following statement, “James West was stopped by police while doing newsgathering in a public place and arrested when he refused to show the contents of his camera.” Jordan said West did not carry media credentials and had a camera-equipped drone with him.

Then, on March 17, a guard resigned his position at the prison after being a no-show for two days. The guard, who had been employed at the prison since December, was Shane Bauer, a senior ...

by Lonnie Burton

Ohio Governor John Kasich believes in privatization of some government functions as both a way to save the state money and improve the services that residents receive. So in 2011 he submitted a budget plan asking the legislature for authorization to sell as many as five state prisons to for-profit companies. But following the first sale, a series of embarrassing reports revealed numerous problems under private management.

The first – and thus far only – prison to be sold, the 1,798-bed Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Conneaut, was transferred to the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now known as CoreCivic) in 2012. CCA paid the state almost $73 million for the facility, and in exchange received a 20-year contract to house Ohio state prisoners along with a 90% bed guarantee provision. [See: PLN, Aug. 2015, p.42].

According to Neil Larusch, a Conneaut City Councilman who toured Lake Erie shortly after it was sold, the prison’s population quickly grew by 300 prisoners, requiring double bunking. He also noted that CCA hired the bare minimum of guards, resulting in a toxic mix of violence, drugs and squalid living conditions. Some prisoners, for example, were left without running water, requiring ...

by Lonnie Burton

On May 20, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated lawsuits filed by two federal prisoners who had sued the government and two prison contractors for failing to protect them from “valley fever,” an infectious disease, at a privately-run federal prison.

The Taft Correctional Institution is located in Kern County in central California. Although Taft is owned by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), its day-to-day operations are contracted out to a private prison company. Until 2007, Taft was run by the GEO Group, and since that time it has been operated by Management and Training Corp. (MTC). Taft was built in the San Joaquin Valley, where the soil is infested by coccidioidomycosis, commonly known as “cocci” – a fungus that when inhaled can cause a flu-like illness or pneumonia and is sometimes fatal.

In 2003, the number of prisoners at Taft infected with valley fever reached epidemic levels. The warden admitted there were “more cases of diagnosed valley fever at Taft than in all other federal prisons combined.”

In response to the outbreak, the BOP and the Centers for Disease Control initially developed a plan that included prevention protocols, but then quickly ...

by Derek Gilna

Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election early on the morning of November 9, 2016. Before that day was over, the stock prices for private prison companies GEO Group (GEO) and CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America) had significantly surged in value.

Opponents to prison privatization correctly pointed out that President-elect Trump had made no secret of his intention to start deporting “two or three million criminal aliens,” which apparently led to Wall Street’s reaction the day after he was elected, since over 60% of immigrant detainees are held in privately-operated facilities. Additionally, during his campaign Trump had made a comment in favor of private prisons, saying they seemed to “work a lot better.”

Given the inherent volatility of the stock market, it remains to be seen if these newly-inflated share values will be sustained – though the stock prices for both GEO and CoreCivic currently remain much higher than they were pre-election.

CoreCivic’s stock jumped from $14.19 per share to $20.31 per share the day after the election, and as of late March was trading at around $32 per share. GEO Group’s stock went from $23.88 per share on November ...

The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the parent organization of Prison Legal News, has joined a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s practice of holding young, immigrant children in prison-like facilities for indefinite periods of time.

In an amicus brief submitted to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on March 10, 2017, HRDC called the practice of locking up undocumented children brought across the U.S. border by family members “inherently harmful to the growth, development, and physical and mental health of children and adolescents, and ... permissible only as a last resort.”

The brief was filed in connection with Flores v. United States, a lawsuit challenging the government’s practice of locking up families that try to illegally cross the border into the United States, specifically women and children. HRDC is urging the appellate court, based in California, to rule in favor of the plaintiffs and order federal officials to immediately release undocumented children from detention centers.

According to the brief, which was joined by several other organizations, “the harms caused by detention of immigration children are not theoretical or speculative. Individual children who are currently being detained, and who will be directly affected by this ...

On February 15, 2017, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), PLN’s parent organization, condemned CoreCivic, the nation’s largest for-profit prison operator – formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America – for rejecting a shareholder resolution seeking independent audits of the company’s detention facilities.

CoreCivic’s objection to the audits was despite a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) that found the company’s federal prisons had higher average rates of prisoner-on-prisoner assaults, sexual assaults on staff, fights and suicide attempts in comparison with other privately-operated federal prisons. [See: PLN, Oct. 2016, p.22]. Since the report was released, CoreCivic has faced multiple shareholder lawsuits.

Following the OIG report, the U.S. Department of Justice announced plans to phase out the Bureau of Prisons’ use of for-profit prisons. On August 18, 2016, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates wrote in a memo that for-profit prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and ... they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.” [See: PLN, Sept. 2016, p.28].

The call for independent audits of CoreCivic facilities was included in a ...

by Christopher Zoukis

An October 2016 report released by In the Public Interest (ITPI), a research and policy group that opposes the privatization of government services, details the millions of dollars spent by for-profit prison companies to influence public officials.

The report tracks political expenditures by private prison firms, including Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now known as CoreCivic) and the GEO Group, to expand their role in the U.S. criminal justice system. The report exposes a serious flaw in the conventional belief that such companies will reduce costs, as some of the funds from taxpayer-paid private prison contracts are used for political contributions and lobbying intended to grow the for-profit prison industry and drain even more money from public coffers.

The report is organized around three distinct “avenues of influence” used by private prison firms. The first is the most obvious method by which the companies exert influence: campaign contributions. Between state, federal and local campaigns, the private prison industry spends millions of dollars each year supporting political candidates.

At the state level, the industry contributed over $2.5 million to 360 candidates for public office during the 2013 and 2014 election years. On the federal level, CCA and the ...

by Christopher Zoukis

In an odd twist in this age of prison and jail overcrowding, the Two Rivers Regional Detention Facility (TRRDF) in Hardin, Montana has had an awfully difficult time finding prisoners to fill its beds. Opened in mid-2007 as an intended economic boon for the area, the jail, which is overseen by the Two Rivers Authority (TRA), the economic development arm of the City of Hardin, has not been able to obtain enough contracts to cover interest payments on bonds used to build the $27 million facility, much less break even or generate profit. As PLN has repeatedly reported over the years, this has left city officials scrambling to locate prisoners for almost a decade. [See: PLN, Aug. 2013, p.42; March 2011, p.34; Dec. 2009, p.1].

The situation is dire for Hardin. The facility sat vacant for seven years until TRA entered into a contract with Louisiana-based Emerald Correctional Management to operate the jail in
May 2014.

Under Emerald, TRRDF, which has a capacity of 464 beds, housed just 250 prisoners under a contract with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Until November 1, 2015, it only housed Native American detainees.

That contract, the facility’s largest since ...