Two former Illinois jail guards who were employed by the Lake County Sheriff's Office north of Chicago were indicted October 29, 2014, on felony charges related to the death of a homeless man booked into jail for minor offenses.

Rodney Holmes and Robert Schlesser each face as much as two years to five years in prison for official misconduct, a Class 3 felony, in the Halloween 2011 arrest of Eugene Gruber, who was 51 and had been charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct.

After Gruber allegedly began fighting with guards trying to book him into the Lake County Jail, Holmes and Schlesser disabled Gruber with pepper spray and then threw him to the ground in one of the jail's shower areas.

The "take down," as jail officials called it, resulted in Gruber suffering a spinal cord injury.

Afterward, while ignoring Gruber's complaints about his back, the guards then dragged him through the jail to be fingerprinted and to take his mugshot.

A member of the jail's medical staff—then employed by private healthcare provider Correct Care Solutions, which has since been replaced by another private contractor—later checked on Gruber's condition, but told guards that Gruber was faking an injury, according to ...

Some enterprising prison guards at the River Correctional Institution set up a profitable smuggling operation for several years, accepting bribes from prisoners to smuggle cell phones and other contraband such as tobacco products into the Winton, North Carolina prison. At least one prisoner at that institution, Kenneth Dodd, paid thousands of dollars to those guards, employed by the GEO private prison group.

The contraband items were found after a search of the prisoner’s cell and their discovery triggered an investigation by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice (DOJ). Of course, whenever DOJ officials or their contractors are embarrassed by such blatant corruption, they generally reserve the most serious punishment for the prisoners involved, not the corrupt guards, who are generally fired and not prosecuted.

In this instance Mr. Dodd was prosecuted for his part in the smuggling operation for violation of 18 U.S.C. 201(b)(1)(C) and 18 U.S.C. 371, and pleaded guilty to bribing a private correctional officer. His sentence was enhanced by the district court judge under U.S.S.G. Section 2C1.1(b)(3), because the offense involved a “public official” in a “sensitive position.  This distinction is significant because private prisons routinely seek to avoid liability under federal statutes that cover ...

Despite recent efforts to reduce federal prisoner counts and corrections expenses, private corporations continue to reap a financial windfall from other people's misfortune.  Several corporations have fattened their balance sheets as private prison operators and numerous health care providers have received billions of dollars from the federal government, according to a U.S government website tracking federal spending.

Although unknown to most members of the general public, these private contractors in the past ten years have consistently won both competitive and non-competitive contracts with the department of Justice (DOJ) and the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the U.S. Marshals Services (USMS).  Following a pattern common to federal and state government agencies, these companies consistently appear in the top ten recipients of government outlays, performing services and facilities that government agencies and their employees either can't or won't provide.

Of course, one might ask why the government is unable to provide a core service such as running a prison, or hiring physicians to treat the prisoners confined in them, and might question the propriety of politicians accepting campaign contributions  from companies who provide these services. However, corrections has become big business in the past ten years, as indicated by the statistics. ...

Listing numerous instances of its medical, mental health and dentistry employees being assaulted by Rikers Island prisoners, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited Corizon Health, Inc. for willful violation of Section 5(a)(1) of the OSHA Act of 1970 by failing to provide a workplace that was "free of recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees in that employees were exposed to the hazard of workplace violence." Corizon faces $71,000 in fines, including a $1,000 fine for "failing to review and certify correctly the OSHA 300A illness and injury reporting form."

"OSHA found that the number of workplace violence incidents increased from eight in 2011 to 39 in 2013. In addition, during the course of OSHA's investigation, six workplace-violence-related incidents occurred between February 11 and March 14, 2014. These included threats, physical assault, a Corizon employee locked in a cell by an inmate and the circulation of a hit list of Corizon staffers targeted by inmates."

"Corizon failed to address the serious problem of assaults against its employees until OSHA began its inspection," according to OSHA Region 2 administrator Robert Kulick. "Corizon needs to develop and implement an effective, ...

This year, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit prison company, held its annual shareholder meeting on May 12, 2016. The meeting took place at CCA’s swank corporate office near the upscale Green Hills area of Nashville, Tennessee; the firm has a modern office with a large fountain in the middle of a circular driveway in front of the building.

Around 40 protestors showed up to demonstrate against CCA’s profit-driven business model, including activists with the Nashville Peace and Justice Center and a radical LGBTQ group. They chanted, carried signs that read “Invest in People not Prisons” and “Prison Profiteers are the Real Criminals,” shouted at shareholders arriving for the meeting, tried to stop vehicles from entering the area, and confronted security guards and police officers.

“Divest from this company!” one protestor yelled. “You’re making money off of people’s suffering! How can you sleep at night?”

There were no arrests.

Meanwhile, inside the shareholder meeting it was business as usual – and business for CCA was good. The company reported $1.79 billion in gross revenue in 2015 with net income of around $220 million, and CCA executives congratulated themselves on accomplishments during the past year, including the acquisition ...

An updated report by Detention Watch Network (DWN), in cooperation with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), has exposed the practice of “guaranteed minimum” bed quotas in detention facilities operated by or for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The term refers to the highly-criticized practice that originated by an act of Congress in 2009, requiring ICE to maintain a minimum quota of 34,000 detention facility beds at all times. [See: PLN, Jan. 2016, p.46].

The policy has been blamed for influencing ICE’s enforcement activities as well as discouraging releases of immigrant detainees in order to maintain the detention bed quota. However, the practice is not confined to ICE facilities. In their report, originally published in June 2015 and updated in June 2016, DWN and CCR revealed that the lockup quota also exists at detention facilities run by private, for-profit companies.

To compile the statistics used in the report, the organizations filed numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and examined records compiled by the National Immigrant Justice Center and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Details regarding bed guarantees in immigrant detention contracts with private prison firms were buried in the fine print.

“Because ICE does not ...

It took eight years but civil rights attorneys finally prevailed in a federal lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), entering into a settlement that requires prison officials to provide 11,000 mentally ill state prisoners with adequate mental health care. The class-action suit was filed in 2007 as a result of draconian cutbacks in mental health services at IDOC facilities.

The plaintiffs alleged violations of their liberty interests under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. § 12131 and the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794. The complaint named individual IDOC employees as defendants rather than the State of Illinois, as required by § 1983, and also sharply criticized Wexford Health Sources, Inc., the IDOC’s private medical contractor, which has been cited for inadequate medical care in Illinois and other jurisdictions. [See, e.g., PLN, March 2015, pp.38, 60; May 2013, p.26].

According to the lawsuit, “Mentally ill inmates in IDOC facilities are chronically underdiagnosed and undertreated ... subjected to brutality ..., and housed in conditions that beggar imagination ... mocked and abused by correctional staff, sprayed with caustic chemicals and derided for their illness.”
Under ...

Valley fever is widespread in the Southwest, yet Hawaii’s prison officials haven’t paid much attention to it, despite the recent deaths of at least two Hawaii prisoners who had the disease.

by Rui Kaneya, Civil Beat

In the spring of 2014, Melvin Wright was among a crew of prisoners who manned the morning shift in the dining hall at the Saguaro Correctional Center, an Arizona prison where about 1,400 Hawaii prisoners are housed.

Wright, convicted of attempted murder, was a baker, responsible for preparing cookies for fellow prisoners every morning. But, one day, he stopped showing up for work.

Worried, Matthew Murphy, who shared the morning shift, went to check up on him a few days later. He found Wright wrapped up “in a cocoon of four blankets” in his cell, trying to fight off a fever.

Murphy’s instinct was to get away from Wright before he got sick himself. But he soon realized that Wright wasn’t eating at all – he was too weak to make it to the dining hall on his own.

Murphy took pity on Wright and began helping him walk down the hallway, a task that he took upon himself three times a day.

“It became ...

Mother Jones magazine, known for its in-depth investigative reporting, was not content to merely skim the surface of the controversial private prison industry by viewing it from the outside. Prisons both public and private are notorious for their lack of transparency, typically justified in the name of “security” – which is another way of saying “move along, nothing to see here.” Prison walls don’t just prevent prisoners from getting out; they also prevent the public – and news media – from looking in.

That is the environment Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer sought to infiltrate when, using his own name and identifying information, he applied for a job with and was hired by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) at the company’s 1,576-bed Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana. CCA, Bauer said, needed guards so desperately that it “wasn’t interested in the details of my resume.” After spending four months employed as a prison guard at Winn, Bauer’s experiences were recounted in an epic 35,000-word feature story in Mother Jones’ July-August 2016 issue.

CCA operates detention facilities in 20 states for local, state and federal authorities, and has been dogged by scandals, abuses and prisoners’ right organizations for decades. Prison ...

Private prison companies like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group earn hundreds of millions of dollars each year, averaging between $2,771 and $3,366 in profit per prisoner based on 2014 data. According to In the Public Interest (ITPI), a not-for-profit organization that opposes the privatization of public services, the companies make money by cutting corners in staffing, health care, lower employee qualifications and reduced training, and substandard facility maintenance.

ITPI profiled ten case studies involving private prison firms to illustrate those shortcomings, including facilities located in Idaho, Ohio, Florida, Mississippi, California, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan. The case studies included not only corporations that operate prisons and jails, but also those that provide medical and mental health care, food services and reentry programs.

At the CCA-managed Idaho Correctional Center, the company concealed staff shortages by “falsifying records that hid 4,800 hours of uncovered shifts in a seven-month period in 2012.” CCA paid $1 million to state officials in compensation, was held in contempt by a federal court, was the subject of an FBI investigation and eventually lost its contract to run the prison. [See: PLN, Oct. 2013, p.28; May 2013, p.22].

When CCA purchased the Lake Erie ...