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 ...

by Nancy A. Heitzeg and Kay Whitlock, Truthout

In the deep fog of the yard at Central California Facility for Women (CCFW), the bright shiny headlines declaring California Proposition 47 (which reclassifies certain property and drug felonies as minor, non-prison time offenses) the beginning of the end of mass incarceration seem so very far away. As women go throughout their daily grind of toxic drudgery at pennies per hour - cooking acrylic over outdated Bunsen Burners in unventilated rooms to make dentures for other state prisoners and MediCal patients, sewing jail jumpsuits and flags for the state of California in 10-hour stints - reform seems impossible.

The lieutenant who guides our university class visit seems to sense this, too. Despite his preliminary promises to us of remaining "politically correct," his contempt for these women is soon revealed - in stories of the closing of "unused" family visiting rooms to make way for a drug-sniffing dog kennel, in his celebration of an American sniper who surveyed all from a gun turret over-looking the solitary unit, in the unchecked assumption that every cry for assistance was thin cover for a scam. A loud speaker alert of an "unresponsive inmate down on the ...

by Mike Mosedale, Minnesota Lawyer

Among the peculiar ironies about the intersection of medicine, public policy and the law in contemporary American life, not many are weirder than the fact that only one segment of the nation’s population –and a largely reviled one, at that — enjoys a constitutionally-protected right to health care: the approximately 2.2 million people incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails

True, “enjoys” probably isn’t the best descriptor of how inmates feel about their unusual constitutional status – at least not judging by the volume of correctional health care-related lawsuits against prisons and, increasingly, their medical services contractors. Corizon – the largest of those companies and, until recently, Minnesota’s provider – has been sued over 1,300 times in the past five years.

All that litigation is made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding that the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment applies when inmates can establish “deliberate indifference” to a serious medical need, a standard established by the landmark 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision,  Estelle v. Gamble.  In subsequent cases, the high court expanded the standard to cases involving  future medical harms (second hand smoke from his five pack-a-day cellmate) and failure to ...