An administrator for Armor Correction Health Services, Inc., was forced out of his position by Florida’s Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri.

The administrator, Lewis Hays, was involved in the death of Allen Hicks, Sr. 51, who died at the Hillsborough County Jail after languishing for days in his cell following a stroke. (See: PLN November 2014, p. 40). According to Hillsborough County officials, Hays “offered misleading information as to the existence of the notes” of Hick’s care. The review into Hicks’ May 2012 death also found Hays and his assistant “engaged in conduct that appeared to be intended to intimidate and coerce “the nurse who belatedly recognized Hicks’ stoke symptoms.

Pinellas County entered into a contract with Armor in 2013 for it to take over some medical care, including dental and mental health services, for its prisoners. Over the next two years, the deal is set to provide $6.5 million in revenue for Armor.

Hays was the chief administrator of the Hillsborough County contract. Rather than having his conduct there results in consequences for his career, it acted as a boom. He was promoted to regional vice president overseeing the Pinellas contract.

Armor CEO Bruce Teal rejected Hillsborough’s review of ...

Bernard Ammerman, the District Attorney of Willacy County, Texas believes that debt for privately-operated prisons may overwhelm the county's finances. In July 2012, he publicly complained that the county may not be able to repay the debt incurred for the construction and later renovation of a private "tent city" prison run by Management and Training Corporation.

Willacy County Judge John F. Gonzales, Jr. disagrees. He said that Ammerman simply does not understand the nature of the bonds used to finance the prisons. He, Ramon Vela of Velasco and Dan Rios of McAllen, attorneys who advise Willacy County, said that the county and its taxpayers are not responsible for repayment of the debt incurred in relation to the "tent city" prison near Raymondville.

Gonzales points to the fact that the debt incurred by the three public facilities corporations (PFCs) who built a U.S. Marshall's detention center, originally designed to house illegal immigrants, the "tent city" or "dome structures" and the county jail does not revert to the county should the PFCs fail to repay the debt. For instance, the county jail is financed and operated by the State of Texas, according to Gonzales.

Gonzales said that Ammerman also has his figures ...

The National Immigration Forum, a well-respected, non-partisan organization based in Washington, D.C., has published its most recent study of national immigration

enforcement policies, entitled, “The Math of Immigration Detention: Runaway Cost for Immigration Detention Do Not Add Up to Sensible Policies.”

The publication highlights what the organization calls the “exorbitant spending wasted on detaining hundreds of thousands of immigrants annually,” and the little-known fact that immigration enforcement in all of its forms now devours more federal money than all of the rest of the federal law enforcement community combined.  The principal question raised by the study is what the U.S. is getting for all of this money.

Like many other well-intended federal policies, immigration enforcement started off small.  Despite the fact that it was an open secret that millions of undocumented aliens worked in the United States, there was little pressure to rein in this human migration. American businesses need cheap labor to work in the fields, factories, and in other menial vocations. Deportations were rare, and confinement of the undocumented even rarer, except along the southern border with Mexico.  The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) charged with enforcing immigration policy at that time was the poor stepchild of the ...

The Nevada Supreme Court held a prisoner was entitled to the grant of a writ of mandamus to compel the Nevada's Chief Medical Officer to periodically examine and semi-annually report to the Board of State Prison Commissioners Board regarding the nutritional adequacy of the diet of prisoners.

Prisoner Robert Stockmeier sought mandamus and injunctive relief to compel Tracy Green, in her capacity as the Chief Medical Officer for the State of Nevada, to comply with NRS 209.382(1)(b). The district court denied the petition and an appeal ensued.

The appeal resulted in the Nevada Supreme Court reversing the denial with instructions to require Green to submit evidence to support her position that she was fulfilling her duty. On remand, she presented a report submitted to the board in 2011 and minutes from a December 2011 Board meeting where she informed she had found no nutritional deficiencies in her inspection of prisoner diets. The district court again denied the petition and another appeal ensued.

The Nevada Supreme Court pointed out that NRS 209.382(1) requires each prisoner be provided a “healthful diet.” Section (1)(b) requires the Chief Medical Officer “periodically examine” and report on a semi-annual basis to the board regarding the “nutritional ...

On October 3, 2012, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) announced that it had rejected a bid by the GEO Group, a private prison company, to operate the Kerrville State Hospital. GEO Care, a GEO Group subsidiary, was the only company to submit a bid after bid proposals for privatizing state hospitals were requested by DSHS early in 2012.

A requirement of the bid proposals was a 10% operational costs savings for at least four years. The method GEO used to accomplish this cost reduction is ultimately what sunk the proposal.

"The reason the proposal was rejected is telling of the problems with privatization--you make your money by cutting staff and paying them less while the care of your patients suffers," said Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Leadership, an organization which, along with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Public Policy Priorities and the United Methodist Church, stated their opposition to state hospital privatization in a letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry and the Legislative Budget Board (LBB).

The staffing cuts GEO proposed were radical--a 21% reduction in overall staffing from 542 to 428 and a reduction in psychiatric nursing ...

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), GEO Group and other for-profit companies must be driven out of Georgia's criminal justice system for it to be fair and effective, the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) argues in a recent report.

Having invested for years in state politics and lobbying efforts, private companies, the SCHR says, are now profiting off prison-dependent rural towns and Georgia's standing as the correctional-control capital of the U.S.

"With powerful companies like CCA and GEO," says SCHR's November 2012 report, "...Georgia runs the risk of having its correctional policy be driven by the financial need to incarcerate rather than sound policies regarding punishment and sentencing."

The state's burgeoning corrections budgets and incarceration rate forced Gov. Nathan Deal to reconvene Georgia's Criminal Justice Reform Council to ultimately make recommendations to the Georgia legislature. The ubiquity of criminal justice privatization, however, began with Georgia lawmakers.

Since 2003, Georgia politicians have accepted $382,333 in campaign contributions from private prison companies–the third-highest total of any state over the last decade. In the past year, CCA and GEO have opened two state prisons, adding to the other seven facilities they operate in Georgia under federal or state contracts, and now incarcerate ...

Despite the compassionate tone on immigration during the presidential campaign, the federal government continues to prosecute and incarcerate undocumented immigrants not for violent or property offenses, but simply for entering the United States. A September 2012 report from Austin, Texas-based Grassroots Leadership cites the millions of dollars spent on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions by the private prison industry as a leading cause.

Since 2005, when the Bush Administration launched Operation Streamline, which requires all undocumented border-crossers to be criminally-charged with unlawful entry or re-entry. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group - the two largest for-profit companies in the U.S. imprisoning undocumented immigrants - have seen their annual federal revenues increase by a combined $780 million. With the Obama Administration’s continuation of Streamline, CCA was paid $744 million and GEO was paid $640 million by the feds in FY 2011 alone.

According to Grassroots Leadership, contracts for Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons, which currently hold about 25,000 immigrant prisoners each, are driving those revenues.

"The terms of CAR contracts include incentives—and sometimes guarantees—to fill facilities near capacity with immigrant prisoners,"' the report said.

A CAR contract granted to CCA in October 2011 Grassroots Leadership said, stipulated that the ...

A Florida Circuit Court held the City of Pembroke Pines did not waive its right to deny water to a Correction Corporation of America (CCA) facility.

CCA bought a plot of land in 1988 in hopes of winning a contract to build a 750 bed women’s jail in unincorporated Broward County, who later withdrew plans to build the jail.  CCA then hoped to build an ICE detention center on the plot, but the federal government decided to not build that facility.

In 2000, the plot of land became part of the Town of Southwest Ranches.  No plans were presented by CCA for building on the industrial zoned cite.  CCA, however, was seeking to force the City of Pembroke Pines to fulfill its decade long quest to connect the site to its water utilities.

The Court held The City does not have a “duty” to provide that service in an area outside its jurisdictional limits.  There was no contractual agreement, city zone, or City Commission vote to require or allow such service.  As such, The City, was not required to provide water utility service.

See: City of Pembroke Pines v. Corrections Corporation of America, Florida Broward County Circuit Court, Case ...

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 ...