by Chuck Sharman

The Board of County Commissioners of Ohio’s Montgomery voted on September 30, 2025, to pay $7 million to the Estate of Christian Black, who died at the county jail the previous March after being violently extracted from his cell and placed in a restraint chair. The claims resolved by the agreement had all been filed by the Estate against jail healthcare contractor NaphCare Inc., whose medical personnel were present during the extraction yet failed to provide lifesaving treatment to the detainee before he became unresponsive in the restraint chair.

Black, 25, crashed a stolen vehicle on I-­70 near Zaynesville on March 23, 2025, after an alleged burglary. He was taken into custody and booked into the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton. The next day, when he began to suffer a mental health crisis, a team of guards “dragged [him] from his cell” and “forced [him] face down on the floor” with “multiple” guards on his back, according to the complaint later filed on his behalf. 

The guards proceeded to “administer[] pepper spray, deployed Tasers and placed [him] in handcuffs” before putting Black in an emergency restraint chair, bending him over at the …

When the Iowa Department of Corrections (DOC) announced in July 2025 that it was beginning to seek proposals from private companies to take over health care services in state prisons, it prompted a mass exodus of staff. Over the course of several months, more than 60 of the roughly 300 employees in the state’s prison medical system resigned, with the expectation of pay cuts and a potential loss of their retirement plans and other benefits being major concerns. The state, according to The Gazette, cited rising operating costs and the need to update electronic medical records as reasons for the shift.

But in a meeting on November 14, 2025 with employees, Iowa DOC Director Beth Skinner reversed course and announced that the state had not accepted any bids and would drop plans to privatize. According to a medical employee who spoke to The Midwest Newsroom, the DOC may still consider a private contract for medical record updating. Multiple employees told the same reporter that the quality of prisoners’ healthcare would have declined had the outsourcing been approved.

While Iowa’s privatization scheme is now off the table, the resignations that followed the initial announcement are exacerbating …

by Chuck Sharman

“We’re spending millions on prison health care,” Mississippi House Corrections Committee Chairwoman Becky Currie (R-­Brookhaven) told Mississippi Today, “and we’re not getting any.”

That charge was made on the news outlet’s political podcast, The Other Side, on November 3, 2025, when Currie pointed the finger at the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and its contracted medical provider, VitalCore Health Strategies. As PLN reported, DOC Commissioner Burl Cain used emergency no-­bid contracts four years in a row to award the business to the firm before it finally won a competitive bidding process in 2024. [See: PLN, June 2025, p.14.] But when asked if the process was truly competitive, Currie said: “Not in my view.” Since then the firm has “never had enough nurses” to meet its obligations to a contractual “standard that is so sub-­par.”

The lawmaker toured state prisons herself in 2023, after realizing that “I was not going to find anything out … from Vital Core or [DOC],” she said. What she saw was shocking. “Most” of the health problems that prisoners presented “were huge.” Currie recalled one 23-­year-­old prisoner who lifted up her shirt and had “cancer …

by Chuck Sharman

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky granted final approval on September 17, 2024, to a $6.49 million settlement of a class-­action complaint filed on behalf of almost 600,000 prisoners in four states whose personal information was exposed in a 2022 data breach suffered by Lexington-­based CorrectCare Integrated Health LCC.

CorrectCare provided medical claims processing services to prisons and jails in California, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina in July 2022, when it reported a “misconfigured” web server had exposed 635,321 files containing the personal identifying information and personal healthcare information of prisoners and detainees. It was later determined that the information came from 572,453 victims who were imprisoned or detained in affected lockups.

Lead Plaintiff Virginia Hiley filed suit in December 2022, accusing CorrectCare of negligence, negligence per se, breach of implied contract, breach of fiduciary duty, invasion of privacy and unjust enrichment. Her suit and several others filed over the data breach were consolidated in May 2023, adding claims under consumer privacy laws specific to the states involved. An additional claim filed in the Northern District of Georgia was transferred to the Eastern District of Kentucky and consolidated …

by Chuck Sharman

A jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana returned a verdict on April 2, 2025, awarding $27.75 million in damages to former state prisoner Nathaniel Lake, after finding that staff of private prison giant CoreCivic failed to protect him from a brutal assault by a fellow prisoner at Crossroads Correctional Center (CCC) in Shelby. CoreCivic moved for judgment as a matter of law (JNOV) or a new trial. But the district court denied that motion on August 6, 2025. See: Lake v. CoreCivic, Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 152374 (D. Mont.).

Lake was convicted of attempting to rape a volunteer at a Missoula homeless mission where he sought shelter, and he was sentenced in 2016 to a 40-­year term—with 20 years suspended—in the custody of the state Department of Corrections (DOC). He was released when the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2019, finding the trial court erred in applying the state’s Rape Shield Law to prohibit Lake from presenting evidence that it wasn’t his sperm but that of another unidentified man which was found in the alleged victim’s underwear. See: State v. Lake, 2019 …

by Chuck Sharman

Susie Annie Balfour, who spent 33 years incarcerated at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF) before her 2021 release, died on August 5, 2025, the victim of metastatic breast cancer that she blamed on exposure to toxic chemicals in cleaning agents she was forced to use in her prison janitorial job. The 64-year-old left behind a lawsuit which is still pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. Fortunately, she was also able to leave a deposition testimony for trial, after fighting the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and other Defendants for the right to do so and winning on January 7, 2025.

Balfour had already been diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer, which was terminal, when she filed her suit in 2024. Proceeding under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, she accused DOC officials of exposing her without protective gear to cleaning chemicals that were known to cause cancer and then failing to diagnose and timely treat her when she became sick, thereby demonstrating deliberate indifference to her serious medical need in violation of her Eighth Amendment rights.

Named Defendants in her suit also included Jackson HMA, which ran the Merit …

by Chuck Sharman

On September 18, 2025, less than a month after losing a bid to dismiss a wrongful death suit filed by the survivors of a detainee murdered in the county lockup, San Diego County filed a crossclaim against its jail medical contractor, NaphCare, along with the firm’s subcontracted mental health care provider, Liberty Healthcare. The unusual move by the county against its jail medical contractors was the latest twist in the suit by the survivors of the dead man, Brandon Yates.

Yates, 24, was arrested in January 2024 on suspicion of burglary, after he was found sleeping in a stranger’s backyard shed. Though he was struggling with mental health and addiction issues, he was booked into the County’s Men’s Central Jail in downtown San Diego. Less than a day later, he was found naked and dead on his cell floor, his hands and feet “bound behind his back,” as the complaint later filed on his behalf recalled. His cellmate, Alvin Ruis, had tortured and sexually assaulted him, the complaint continued, before he “choked and smothered Brandon to death.”

Ruis, 36, was a “bypass inmate” supposedly not allowed contact with staff or other detainees because …

by Michael Thompson

Cordell Sanders spent eight years in segregation housing at the Pontiac Center in Indiana after committing multiple disciplinary offenses. While being held apart from others, he suffered from severe mental health issues, harmed himself, attempted multiple times to take his own life, and was found to suffer antisocial personality disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and depressive disorder. Psychologists and psychiatrists employed by Wexford Health created treatment plans as a result that included antidepressants, psychotropic, and mood stabilizing drugs. He has since then brought a lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Corrections health services provider Wexford Health Sources, Inc. for deliberate indifference to his mental health needs by failing to advocate for his removal from administrative segregation resulting in the exacerbation of his mental health issues.

The district court granted a Motion for Summary Judgement filed by the defendants. Sanders appealed and it was affirmed on August 28, 2025.

Circuit Judge Lee noted the tragedy of this case, pointing to Sanders’ severe mental health problems and that the segregation “did little to address them.” Nevertheless, he found that Sanders had been unable to overcome the very high bar of deliberate indifference. Lee cited …

by Chuck Sharman

Back in January 2020, Carlos Escobar Mejia, 57, was in a car in San Diego when he was pulled over by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents. Though he had lived and worked in the U.S. since 1980, he was not a citizen and had no work authorization. CBP arrested him for the immigration violations. At an April 2020 hearing before an immigration judge, Mejia was deemed a flight risk and turned over to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Its agents put him in the Otay Mesa detention center, a 1,400-bed lockup operated under contract by for-profit private prison giant CoreCivic.

By that time, the COVID-19 pandemic was underway, and several employees and migrant detainees at the lockup had already tested positive for the novel coronavirus that causes the disease. Prison officials dragged their feet in providing masks to detainees, forcing them to sign liability waivers to get one, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, June 2020, p.32.] The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sued on their behalf, and within weeks, Mejia was named on a list of medically vulnerable detainees that a federal judge …

by Chuck Sharman

Under an agreement filed with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida on April 10, 2025, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters agreed to pay $150,000 to the Estate of Esther Truax, a mother of five who died by suicide while in custody of the City jail in December 2021.

Truax, 35, had been booked into the lockup several times previously, so jailers were “well aware” of her mental health issues and previous suicide attempts when they booked her into the jail after an arrest on drug charges on December 1, 2021, according to the complaint later filed on her behalf. Nevertheless, the complaint continued, a jail nurse cleared her for placement in the jail’s general population. There she tied a bedsheet around her neck three days later and plunged over the second-floor balcony railing.

That didn’t kill her though; fellow detainees managed to haul Truax back onto the balcony. She was then placed on suicide watch on the third floor, though another jail nurse thought her suicide attempt was faked to get medication. While in this stage of her confinement, jail records later showed, Truax didn’t receive all of the withdrawal …