by Douglas Ankney

On April 2, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois denied relief to Wexford Health Sources, Inc., the private healthcare contractor for the state Department of Corrections (DOC), from a $750,000 jury verdict for delayed surgery that left a state prisoner to ...

by David M. Reutter

On May 1, 2023, following an order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit that reversed a grant of summary judgment to a guard at Colorado’s Mesa County Detention Facility (MCDF), a $2 million settlement was reached in a suit filed by ...

by David M. Reutter

West Virginia Division of Corrections (WVDC) officials agreed to pay $4 million on November 8, 2023, to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging unconstitutional conditions at the Southern Regional Jail (SRJ) in Raleigh County. The settlement provided for a cash payment to current and former detainee ...

Five days after the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) took over a state prison from private operator CoreCivic on October 1, 2023, a ceremony was held to rename the former Davis Correctional Facility. On the same day, October 6, 2023, a prisoner stabbed a guard at the medium-security facility now known as Allen Gamble Correctional Center (AGCC)—in memory of another guard fatally stabbed at another DOC lockup—underscoring violence that continues to plague the prison and the 1,600 men incarcerated there.

CoreCivic failed to maintain sufficient guard staff, which dwindled to just 161 before the takeover. Since then, staffing is down even more to just 106 guards, DOC said. Some couldn’t pass the state background check, according to DOC spokeswoman Kay Thompson. But 28% of the prison’s staff opted to stay with CoreCivic and transfer to another of its lockups. CoreCivic’s hourly pay for guards starts at $22.10, significantly higher than the $20.46 rate offered by DOC.

Oklahoma Corrections Professionals director Bobby Cleveland called low staffing a “big mess” for his union members, with a dangerously low ratio of one guard for every 15 prisoners. By comparison, the Arkansas DOC’s ratio is just 1:8. DOC boosted guard pay 30% in 2022, ...

On April 11, 2024, a Texas bankruptcy court rejected a proposed $54 million settlement that would have paid just a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars owed to prisoners who won judgments or secured settlement agreements from Corizon Health. Citing concerns about timely access to court documents for incarcerated claimants—many proceeding pro se—Judge Christopher M. Lopez of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas chastised lawyers at both tables before his bench for not knowing whether affected prisoners were “even aware that there is a settlement.”

As PLN reported, Corizon Health executed a “Texas two-step”: It first spun off its profitable ongoing prison and jail healthcare contracts into a new firm called YesCare, and it then shunted its liabilities onto a separate company called Tehum Care Services, Inc., which promptly filed for bankruptcy protection. The ploy almost worked, too, before an inappropriate relationship was revealed between the settlement mediator and a lawyer working for Corizon Health. [See: PLN, Jan. 2024, p.29.]

One Arizona prisoner claimant who objected to the proposed settlement, Anant Kumar Tripati, 69, sent copies of prison mail logs showing that there was no way he could have attended at least ...

by Douglas Ankney

Two former guards with Inmate Services Corporation (ISC), a private contractor that provided prisoner transports across the U.S., have been sentenced to federal prison for raping detainees in their charge. Marquet Johnson, 45, was sentenced on April 16, 2024, to 30 years in federal prison followed by five years of supervised release; he must also register as a sex offender. Fellow ISC guard Rogeric Hankins, then 37, was sentenced on July 11, 2023, to nine years in prison and three years of supervised release.

ISC provided transport for individuals arrested on out-of-state warrants. Hankins drove his ISC van to the jail in Olympia, Washington, on March 31, 2020, to transport detainee Jennifer Seelig to another lockup in St. Paul, Minnesota. En route, he parked at a Missouri rest stop on April 3, 2020, to let the detainee use the restroom. When she finished, Hankins took Seelig into the men’s restroom and began forcing her shirt up. The detainee tried to resist, but Hankins forced her to “perform a sexual act on him,” according to his plea agreement, before he “bent the victim over a toilet and raped her.”

Johnson admitted raping other detainees he bent over ...

by Matt Clarke

On November 7, 2023, a Vermont court ruled in favor of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News, in its request for records from Centurion of Vermont related to its contract to provide medical, dental and mental health care to prisoners of the state Department of Corrections (DOC) between 2015 and 2020.

Pursuant to the Vermont Public Records Act (PRA), 1 V.S.A. subchapter 3, HRDC requested that Centurion disclose records related to any legal claims that resulted in expenditures of $1,000 or more. Centurion responded that it was not subject to the PRA. Aided by Burlington attorney Robert Appeal and in-house counsel, HRDC sued Centurion for disclosure.

The parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment. Centurion alleged it was not subject to PRA, and if it was, the records were not public records, and, if they were, the records were exempt from disclosure pursuant to 1 V.S.A. § 317(c).

But the Court found controlling the decision in Hum. Rights Def. Ctr. v. Correct Care Sols., LLC, 263 A.3d 1260 (Vt. 2021), agreeing with the nonprofit that Centurion’s contract with DOC made it an “instrumentality” of the state and subject to ...

by Matt Clarke

In a settlement agreement effective October 23, 2023, California’sAlameda County agreed to pay $7 million to the estate and progeny of a detainee who died while incarcerated at the county’s jail in Santa Rita. The large settlement amount reflected the egregious neglect that allegedly contributed to ...

On December 1, 2023, Harris County, Texas, began sending up to 360 detainees from the county’s jails to a prison in Mississippi, under a contract with its private operator, CoreCivic. The County Commissioners Court approved the $11.3 million one-year agreement, which has renewal options, on November 14, 2023, just weeks after regulators from the state Commission on Jail Standards (TCJS) ordered the county to reduce population in its overcrowded jail.

Criminal court backlogs are blamed for overflowing the jail with 9,378 detainees—70% of whom are awaiting trial. Harris County Sheriff’s Office Chief of Staff Jason Spencer said the county looked at proximity, price and track record before choosing Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Mississippi, agreeing to pay CoreCivic $85 a day per detainee sent there to await trial from Houston, over 500 miles away.

Critics point to the prison operator’s track record, with numerous accusations of short staffing, excessive force and substandard health care in some 100 lockups nationwide. TCJS has no authority to go after CoreCivic for jail standards violations outside the state and no counterpart in Mississippi to do so, either. The Mississippi DOC provides no oversight for the lockup, which also holds detainees under contract from ...

In an essay published in Slate on December 14, 2023, former Florida prisoner Ryan Moser said that officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) were “essentially playing whack-a-mole” in their efforts to combat an epidemic of “jailbreaking” prison-issued electronic tablets.

The tablets are issued free to prisoners under DOC’s contract with messaging service provider JPay, a subsidiary of prison telecommunications giant Securus Technologies. The devices connect to the internet at kiosks unless prisoners hack into the operating software to enable connection via a contraband cellphone—a process known as “jailbreaking.”

Moser said the only time he used a jailbroken tablet was one Thanksgiving when phones were down—which happens a lot, he added—so he risked disciplinary measures to make a desperate call his family via WhatsApp. Providing free messaging would reduce the problem, he said. But JPay collects one 39-cent “stamp” for each message a prisoner sends, while DOC pays prisoners exactly nothing for the work they are compelled to do during their incarceration.

DOC could also give prisoners cheaper and more reliable access to phone calls, which are currently provided by Securus competitor ViaPath—formerly Global*Tel Link—at a charge of 13.5 cents per minute. Though some prisoners use jailbroken tablets to ...