On February 17, 2012, a Pennsylvania jury awarded a former prisoner 8400,000 in a suit over medical negligence resulting in serious injury to him.
Derrick Jones was a Pennsylvania state prisoner incarcerated at SCI Albion on March 12, 2006, when he fell in his cell and was seriously injured. Five days ...
After years of high rates of escapes, poor supervision and rumors of sweetheart deals between politicians and private companies, the curtain is finally being pulled back on New Jersey's halfway houses.
A New York Times investigation last year concluded that nepotism and poor regulation have allowed Education and Health Centers of America (ECHA) and the Kintock Group–the two purportedly nonprofit groups that run most of New Jersey's halfway houses–to rake in millions of dollars and further their own money-making schemes and political agendas at the expense of taxpayers, victims of violent crimes, and offenders trying to successfully transition back into society.
In December 2012, the Times reported that Kintock had paid its founder, David D. Fawkner–a former probation and parole officer who started the company in 1985–about $7 million in salary and benefits over the past decade, while his daughter, brother-in-law and son-in-law were paid more than $2.5 million altogether during the same period.
Kintock, which is based in Pennsylvania but has most of its operations–including five halfway houses–in New Jersey, had $39 million in revenues in 2010, according to the company's most recent disclosure forms to the Internal Revenue Service.
In recent years, Fawkner's annual salary has been as ...
Since the for-profit California Forensic Medical Group (CFMC) took over healthcare at the Santa Cruz County Jail last year, the medical staff has been forcing police to take more injured suspects to the hospital before they get booked, likely because the potential liability would hurt CFMC's bottom line
"If the (jail) staff is at all wary," says Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark, "they turn us right around."
Unfortunately, it might have taken a jailed heroin addict's death on Nov. 20, 2012 to persuade CFMC to extend the practice to prisoners withdrawing from drug abuse.
On Thanksgiving morning, the family of Brant Monnett, 47, was notified by the jail that the Santa Cruz tattoo artist was found unresponsive in a detoxification cell, given CPR and declared dead two nights prior. The county coroner's office had not yet determined the cause of his death by the time local media reported the story.
Monnett, who had family in nearby Redding, Calif., and a daughter in Oregon, was the third person to die in the Santa Cruz jail since August and the second since the medical staff was privatized in September. Yet, jail Lt. Shea Johnson said that care for prisoners has improved ...
Five of eight prisoner deaths since 2011 at the Metro Corrections jail in Louisville, Ky., are currently under investigation, all of them involving allegations against private healthcare contractor Corizon Inc. that it provides inadequate treatment to maintain its revenues.
Investigations into two of those deaths last year–of prisoners Samantha George and Savannah Sparks–led to the resignations of six Corizon employees in December 2012, after Metro said they "may" have contributed to the deaths. Jail officials and Louisville police, however, are continuing to investigate.
Meanwhile, as Corizon faces lawsuits from prisoners and their families throughout Kentucky and many of the other 28 states where the company has jail contracts, Metro and its director, Mark Bolton, are considering how they could conscionably renew Corizon's $5.5 million contract. Bolton said in February he believes that Tennessee-based Corizon waited too long to have one of its doctors treat George and Sparks.
"The more we looked into it, the more disturbed I was getting as to some of the service delivery gaps in the healthcare of those individuals," Bolton told the Nashville Tennessean.
George reportedly died Aug. 8, 2012 of complications from a severe form of diabetes, compounded by heart disease and, Bolton argued, a ...
By the time Jan Brewer replaced Janet Napolitano as Arizona's governor in 2009, it had been 22 years since the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) built the first prison in the United States designed exclusively for permanent lockdown, a prison that–with cruel irony–became the prototype for Supermax prisons across the country.
Even before Brewer assumed the governorship and brought Charles Ryan out of retirement to run ADC, Arizona's prisons and jails were known to be ruthless and inhumane. Local demagogues like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and state Sen. Russell Pearce had long been exploiting the degradation, neglect and abuse of prisoners, accepting campaign contributions from private prison corporations, and conspiring with special interests to profit off mass-incarceration.
And yet, by tapping Tea Party extremism and kowtowing to prison profiteers, Brewer and Ryan have taken a prison system already infamous for its draconian practices and unfettered incompetence made it deadlier and even more vindictive and profit-driven than reform advocates feared possible.
Today, as Brewer approaches the end of her term, the number of Arizona prisoners incarcerated in private facilities continues to increase, even while the overall prison population has declined in recent years.
ADC, which operated under a $1.1 billion-budget ...
FIN has gained access to a confidential report by Tim Higgins, the Investigation and Intelligence Coordinator for the Idaho Department of Corrections (DOC) regarding rampant prisoner-on-prison violence at the Idaho Correctional Center (ICC), a Boise prison operated by Corrections Corporation of America. The report blamed the extraordinarily high level of violence at ICC--which has four incidents of violence forever one in the entire rest of the prison system--on CCA's failure to suppress gang activity or investigate and prosecute incidences of prison violence.
The report dealt with 105 incidents of violence which occurred at ICC between January 1, 2008 and August 5, 2008, for which Incident/Exercise Notification Report forms were completed. Higgins reviewed those forms and the rest of the investigation files. He also interviewed the prisoners involved in the violence and reviewed what kind of corrective measures had been taken.
The report revealed a pattern of gang-driven violence which fell into four categories: simple battery (34 incidents), aggravated battery (18 incidents), extortion for rent (15 incidents), and extortion to force prisoners to assault other prisoners (5 incidents).
Generally, extortion for rent involved weaker prisoners, mainly sex offenders, being beaten and all their consumable commissary being taken. Victims were normally told ...
Hurricane Sandy and a lack of preparation or training for unusual weather helped prisoners at the notorious Logan Hall halfway house to run rampant, including a mass escape of fifteen prisoners.
Although designated a "halfway house," Logan Hall, which is operated by Community Education Centers (CEC), a private corporation based in New Jersey, is designed and run more like a jail. Prisoners are locked into small rooms and the facility is surrounded by tall fences topped with razor wire. The doors and gates are electrically-operated. When the power failed as a result of Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012, they all clicked open.
The opened doors allowed dozens of the 547 Logan Hall residents to get into the hallways. Once there, they destroyed furniture and vending machines, tore signs with messages such as "Stop Lying" and "Admit When You Are Wrong" off the walls and threatened the guards and female residents.
The CEC workers on duty were unable to organize an effective response to the mayhem. The workers are poorly paid, trained and equipped. None of them knew how to start the backup generator. None even had a flashlight.
One supervisor confronted a group of male residents wearing improvised face ...
On November 16, 2012, Avalon Correctional Services, Donald Smith and Tiffinay Smith agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by Ravenswood Investment Company and Ravenswood Investments III (Ravenswood) over alleged corporate irregularities by the Smiths. The settlement calls for Avalon to purchase all the common shares of stock held by Avalon's non-management minority shareholders for $4.05 in cash plus the pro-rated portion of a fee expense pool not used to cover fees and expenses awarded by the court (this would add between 0 and 30 per share) and, subject to some exemptions, a callable three-year, non-voting preferred share of Avalon with an annual dividend of 7% and a face amount of $1.75.
The lawsuit originated in an Oklahoma federal court when Avalon filed a request for a declaratory judgment that Avalon was not required to allow Ravenswood to view corporate books and records because it was incorporated under Nevada law and Nevada law had no such requirement. Ravenswood had made several requests to view corporate records citing Oklahoma law, OKLA. STAT. tit. 18, §§1065, 1002(a) and 1130(D).
Ravenswood filed a counterclaim, alleging that the Smiths had breached fiduciary duties and usurped corporate control by orchestrating the departure of all of Avalon's ...
In February 2012, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) agreed to stop housing juveniles at a privately-run prison in Leake County, Mississippi and enact multiple reforms to protect both the juveniles and the adult prisoners who will remain behind from abuse by prison employees.
The Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF) was opened in 1999. It was designed to incarcerate prisoners who are 13 to 22 years of age. Initially, it was owned by a group of private investors. They sold it to GEO Group in August 2010. In February 2012, it housed 958 prisoners.
WGYCF was designed to house juvenile prisoners who had been convicted as adults. However, conditions at the prison were so abysmal that, in November 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (NPP) and Jackson civil-rights attorney Robert B. McDuff filed a class-action civil rights suit pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in federal court alleging violations of the prisoners' constitutional rights.
The suit alleged that WGYCF employees smuggled drugs into the prison, beat prisoners, sexually assaulted prisoners, placed prisoners in isolation for lengthy periods and denied prisoners medical care and educational programs. In the consent ...
On February 10, 2012, the Texas Board of Criminal Justice approved a $46.8 million contract with Huntsville Memorial Hospital to provide health care for the 13,900 state prisoners in the Huntsville, Texas area. This may be the first step toward the creation of a prisoner health care system based upon contracts with regional hospitals in a statewide network.
In 2011, the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, the health care provider for about two-thirds of Texas state prisoners, gave notice that it want out of its contract for prisoner health services due to escalating costs and mounting losses. In response, the Texas Legislature authorized the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to explore other ways to provide prisoner health care and to curb associated costs. The contract with Huntsville Memorial may be its first fruit. Prison officials claim that the contract may reduce their costs by up to 30% by eliminating the need to transport Huntsville-area prisoners to Galveston to receive medical care.
The contract will last for 3.5 years and obligates Huntsville Memorial to provide nine secure beds in a secure wing of the Walker County hospital, emergency-room services, medical imaging and outpatient surgery.
TDCJ executive director ...
