by Jack Smith IV, Mic

A new system called “video visitation” is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls. It’s inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence – but god, it makes money.

Losing Connection

The only way Lauren Johnson could see Ashika Renae Coleman at the Travis County Correctional Complex in Del Valle, Texas was via video conference from seven miles away in Austin.

Coleman and Johnson had met in 2012 in a rehabilitation program that tries to build trust and community among incarcerated women through theater. Both had been to prison for drug-related offenses.

Johnson got out in 2011. She became an activist helping former prisoners like herself re-enter society. Coleman had similarly altruistic ambitions when she was released, and planned to create a sober house for the formerly incarcerated. But after returning to a husband still suffering from addiction, she relapsed and ended up back in Travis County.

Johnson logged into the Securus Technologies website – a Skype-like communication system used by the Travis County jail – on her PC laptop. But the video player didn’t have the latest version of Java. When Johnson installed it, the system insisted she had not. So Johnson tried ...

According to its website, G4S is the world’s “leading global integrated security company.” Besides providing security services, it also operates private prisons and immigration detention centers, provides electronic tagging (monitoring) for offenders on community supervision and has a prisoner transport service – mostly in the United Kingdom. G4S also manages over 30 juvenile facilities in the U.S.

Despite its impressive portfolio of security-related services, G4S was assessed a £109 million ($164 million) fine plus tax by the UK’s Ministry of Justice in March 2014. The company admitted to charging the British government for the electronic monitoring of deceased, non-existent or already-incarcerated offenders. The fraud allegedly took place between 2005 and 2013.

According to Sadiq Khan, the UK’s Shadow Justice Minister, “This large sum of money G4S [is] repaying taxpayers shows the true scale of the wrongdoing that went on ... [and] led to huge damage to the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system.”

As a result of the electronic monitoring scandal, G4S was banned from doing business with the British government until the Ministry of Justice saw evidence of “corporate renewal.” The government lifted its ban in April 2014, one month after the security firm agreed to pay the ...

By Ghita Schwarz and Silky Shah, The Hill

In May, the nation’s two largest private prison contractors announced dramatic increases in their first-quarter earnings for the year. The GEO Group, Inc. (GEO) reported a 17 percent increase over the same period in 2015 and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) reported a more modest 5 percent rise. Also in May, the Obama administration declared its intentions to launch a series of raids to capture women and children who have fled violence in Central America. These two developments are not unrelated; CCA and GEO run the two largest family detention centers in the country.

Prison subcontractors, both public and private, depend heavily on the Obama administration’s expansion of immigration detention, and in recent years on the detention of asylum-seeking families fleeing violence in Central America. Their successes are attributable in significant part to lucrative immigration detention contracts with special prerequisites: “guaranteed minimum” payments, contractual provisions that require the government to pay local jails to incarcerate a minimum number of people per day. These guaranteed minimums function as local lockup quotas, incentivizing the detention of immigrants in specific facilities, almost all of which are operated or serviced by private contractors. 

Over the years, the detention system has increasingly ...

Federal immigrant detention has long been a boon to private prison companies Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, the nation’s two largest private prison firms, both of which trade on the New York Stock Exchange. Much of that success is the direct result of lobbyists employed by the private prison contractors.

Between 2011 and 2012, CCA and GEO spent over $4,350,000 competing for federal prison contracts. Many of those contracts involved the detention of undocumented immigrants. While that may seem like a lot of money, the two companies netted $1.4 billion in detention contracts from the federal government in 2011 alone. The more prominent lobbying firms that represent CCA include Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP; McBee Strategic Consulting, LLC; Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, Inc.; and Sisco Consulting, LLC.

According to their 2015 annual reports, both CCA and GEO Group receive over 40% of their gross revenue from the federal government – and a large amount of that revenue is from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for immigrant detention.

Grassroots Leadership and Detention Watch Network, both non-profit organizations that oppose prison privatization, reported that over half of ICE detention facilities are operated by private contractors. Those private ...

Immigration rights advocates are suspicious of a new government-funded program administered by GEO Care – a division of the GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison companies – that supplies cell phones to low-risk undocumented immigrants. Officials maintain that the $11 million cell phone program, reported by the Los Angeles Times in February 2016, helps ensure the recipients can keep in touch with their case managers and make scheduled immigration court hearings.

Those receiving the phones, which are provided at no cost, are generally families with children for whom there are few suitable facilities for detention. Approximately 25,000 immigrant families were apprehended at the southern border of the United States from October 1, 2015 through January 31, 2016 – nearly three times the number during the same period the previous year.

However, Jonathan Ryan, executive director of RAICES, a Texas immigrant advocacy group, was skeptical. “It is concerning whether the women are being tracked through their phones and whether their communications with counsel are confidential.... Considering the number of entities monitoring cell phones in general, it’s hard to believe they’re not being tracked at all,” he stated.

GEO Group, along with Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), has been ...

“We’re at a fork in the road,” Alabama state Senator Cam Ward, chairman of the Prison Reform Task Force, said in June 2014. “We have two paths to choose from and neither one is easy. Those of us on the task force can solve, it or federal courts can do it for us. It’s our choice.”

With the state’s prison system at around 192% of capacity, lawsuits pending over inadequate medical care and high levels of violence, and federal oversight due to pervasive staff-on-prisoner sexual abuse, Alabama has one of the nation’s most troubled Departments of Corrections. The state’s creation of the Task Force in early 2014 was a measure taken in an effort to avoid a federal court-appointed receiver or monitor over its prison system, as occurred in California.

PLN has been reporting for over two decades on deteriorating and abysmal conditions in Alabama’s correctional facilities. While prison systems in Southern states are typically at the forefront with respect to regressive policies and practices, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has been an outlier with its message of “incarceration means harsh and degrading punishment” – which may as well be its official motto.

Changes in criminal statutes resulted in ...

With the promise of saving taxpayer dollars to house a growing prisoner population during a cyclical crime wave in the early 1990s, Florida decided to experiment with private prisons. From the start, those involved in the push to privatize were tainted with ethical conflicts, and more than two decades later politics still rule the privatization issue while cost savings have proven elusive.

State lawmakers initially created the Correctional Privatization Commission (CPC) to push an initiative that the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) was reluctant to pursue: privatizing prisons. The CPC helped craft Florida’s 1993 statute that established the parameters for privatization.

Consulting for the CPC was Charles Thomas, a University of Florida criminology professor who was nationally known to specialize in prison issues. He contributed significantly to developing the law’s provisions. “I certainly had a fairly heavy hand in it,” he said.

He also had a heavy hand in the coffers of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit prison firm. At the same time he was consulting for the CPC, Thomas owned private prison stock and secured a $3 million fee from CCA in connection with Prison Realty Trust, a CCA spin-off company. While Florida’s Ethics Commission ...

In a positive sign of declining prison populations, on February 10, 2016, Idaho Department of Correction Director Kevin H. Kempf announced that all 173 state prisoners remaining at the Kit Carson Correctional Center, a Colorado facility operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), would be returned to Idaho and housed in government-run prisons.

The reduction in the state’s prison population has been surprising. In June 2015, Idaho had a total prison and jail population of 8,200 prisoners. Eight months later the state had 7,800 – an almost 5% decrease. The reduction was due to several factors, including changes in prison policies concerning parole and access to recidivism reduction programs.

According to Kempf, “Inmates are coming before the parole board prepared for parole.” This has enabled the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole to increase its rate of granting parole, according to the Commission’s executive director, Sandy Jones.

“[O]ur releases to parole in the last year literally have doubled,” she said.

Such factors have had a profound impact on the IDOC and the state, enabling the IDOC to return $1.2 million to the state’s general fund and leading Governor Butch Otter to reduce the IDOC’s proposed budget by $2.9 million for ...

In a case of alleged staff misconduct at a Delaware prison, nine prisoners filed suit in Sussex County Superior Court alleging that a former prison doctor sexually assaulted them on numerous occasions.

The prisoners’ lawsuit claims that Dr. Lawrence McDonald committed the assaults under the pretext of performing medical exams, and that his practices were so well known at Sussex Correctional Institution (SCI) that other employees referred to him as “Dr. Feelgood” and “the finger.”

McDonald is alleged to have performed unnecessary rectal exams, often without gloves, and “repeatedly touched, fondled, and digitally penetrated inmates ... for no legitimate medical reason.” One prisoner alleged he was fondled when he sought medical care for a rash on his face. Another prisoner said that Dr. McDonald made him say “thank you, doctor” after McDonald performed rectal exams on him. Another prisoner claimed McDonald stuck a needle in his groin for no apparent medical purpose.

The lawsuit states that prison officials ignored repeated complaints about McDonald’s misconduct and defended him against such allegations, retaliating against prisoners who complained. According to the suit, “Inmates complaining about the sexual abuse were often harassed, ridiculed or abused.”

Stephen Hampton, the attorney representing the prisoners, said all ...

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a warden who placed a double amputee prisoner with MRSA in a segregation unit without handicap accommodations was not entitled to qualified immunity.

When Martinique Stoudemire, 23 at the time, entered the Michigan Department of Corrections in 2002, she had a long ...