Former employees of Houston-based Turning Point, Inc., a private, for-profit company which contracted with Texas to provide substance abuse treatment in its state jail system, are revealing how supervisors pressured them to falsify Addiction Severity Index (ADI) scores to downplay mental illness issues and exaggerate alcohol and substance abuse.

Melissa Cantu was a therapist for over a decade before taking a job as a substance abuse counselor for a Turning Point rehabilitation program at the Dominguez State Jail. Stress from the "abusive workplace" she discovered there caused her to experience insomnia and break out in hives before she finally decided to quit the job only months after she was hired.

Cantu had been pressured to have the ASI scores of prisoners show that they were strong substance abusers without serious mental health issues. She was told to not to score the psychiatric component of the ASI greater than "one," the lowest score on the test, indicating that no mental health treatment was necessary. This meant that prisoners with serious psychiatric issues would be denied mental health treatment and placed into a substance abuse treatment program instead.

"Some clearly had anxiety, possible schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder," Cantu said. "But if they ...

By James McNair, Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting

This article was produced by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a new, nonprofit newsroom from 89.3 WFPL News and Louisville Public Media. Read more at kycir.org.

ELIZABETHTOWN -- Getting busted with a small amount of fake marijuana led to a more expensive lesson in criminal justice than Timothy Lee Cook could have imagined.

Cook, 54, agreed to a plea deal in Hardin County District Court last summer that kept him out of jail, but cost him $186 in fines and court fees. He couldn’t afford it himself. Bedeviled by mental disorders, he hasn’t held a job for more than 20 years. His 74-year-old mother put up the money.

Now Cook is tasting the cost of probation. Every month for two years, he has to pay a $25 monitoring fee to a company that serves as a privatized probation agency. Had he been arrested in one of the many Kentucky counties that monitor misdemeanor offenders themselves, the service wouldn’t have cost him a dime. And if Cook’s probation company had based its fee on his ability to pay, as district judges are supposed to ensure, his monitoring would be free or ...

Mike Ludwig, Truthout

Would you still use email if every message had a word limit and was automatically declared to be the property of your email provider?

What if every email cost $1 to send and the receiver could not answer back by simply hitting "reply?"

"Calling the electronic messaging offered to incarcerated people and their families 'email' would be an insult to email."

That's what it can be like to send an electronic message to a friend or loved one in jail or prison. For-profit companies like Corrlinks and JPay have already capitalized on the opportunity to offer painfully expensive "email" services to people incarcerated in some federal and state prisons. And prison phone companies, which have gouged prisoners and their families so deeply that federal regulators stepped in and capped rates for phone calls, are now offering their own services billed as "email for prisoners."

But prison watchdogs say these services are not like email at all.

"Calling the electronic messaging offered to incarcerated people and their families 'email' would be an insult to email," said Stephen Raher, author of a recent report on electronic messaging services for Prison Policy Initiative.

New technologies for communicating with ...

There are many arguments against the privatization of prisons, jails and other detention facilities. Over the years, Prison Legal News has published numerous articles detailing the problems with having a for-profit company fulfill the essential governmental function of incarceration – including higher levels of violence, higher average recidivism rates, lack of public accountability and, in some cases, outright corruption and fraud.

Such reporting has revealed common factors in the private prison industry that have contributed to deficiencies at for-profit prisons, such as inadequate staffing, inexperienced and low-paid guards, high staff turnover rates and inadequate medical care.

For private prison companies, their business model of cutting costs in order to generate profit unsurprisingly results in occasional lawsuits – “occasional” because engaging in litigation is a daunting task filled with procedural hurdles and complexities that are beyond the ability of the average prisoner, as most lack even a high school education. And in cases where a prisoner is rendered incapacitated or dies, a legal action seeking to hold a private prison firm accountable only results if there are family members willing to seek justice on the prisoner’s behalf.

However, when confronted with a lawsuit that reaches the point of an impending trial ...

The City of St. Louis, Missouri and Correctional Medical Services (CMS, now Corizon Health) both agreed to pay settlements in a lawsuit filed by the estate of a jail detainee who died due to heroin withdrawal.

Upon being booked into a St. Louis jail in July 2007, Isaac Bennett, Jr. told a CMS nurse that he was a heroin addict who had used the drug the day before his arrest. During the next 48 hours Bennett experienced diarrhea and vomiting, which were “[c]lassic symptoms of heroin withdrawal” according to his estate’s complaint. Despite those symptoms, he “was not given even the most basic medical treatments.”

On July 23, 2007, two days after his arrest, Bennett died due to “metabolic changes secondary to withdrawal from heroin causing disturbance of cardiac rhythm and resulting in cardiac arrest,” the complaint stated. His estate filed suit in federal court in 2010.

CMS, as is its usual practice, agreed to pay a confidential settlement. The district court approved a separate settlement agreement with the City of St. Louis on March 5, 2014, with the city agreeing to pay $10,000. See: Youell v. Correctional Medical Services, U.S.D.C. (E.D. Missouri), Case No. 4:10-cv-01180-TIA.

Additional source: www.stltoday.com

Following an evidentiary hearing on November 15, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge William J. Haynes, Jr. ordered Tennessee prison officials to provide medication to a prisoner with a severe case of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD) until he could be seen by a specialist.

Robert Z. Whipple III, a state prisoner housed at the Turney Center Industrial Complex, filed a pro se lawsuit in September 2013 against Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) Commissioner Derrick Schofield and eight other prison officials and private medical contractors, alleging failure to provide adequate medical care.

Whipple stated he was receiving treatment for GERD until May 2013 when the TDOC’s Pharmacy & Therapeutics Committee removed his prescribed medication, Prilosec, from the state’s formulary – a list of approved drugs that prison doctors can prescribe. The removal from the formulary prevented medical staff from renewing prescriptions for that medication for all prisoners, regardless of their medical needs. Instead, Prilosec, an over-the-counter medication, was placed on the institutional commissary list for prisoners to purchase. Whipple could not afford to buy the Prilosec he needed from the commissary, and accused TDOC officials and Corizon, a private prison medical contractor, of deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs in violation ...

Ownership of a privately-operated Oklahoma Department of Corrections (ODOC) halfway house near Tulsa has changed hands in the midst of at least two lawsuits and possible criminal charges stemming from allegations that the owner of a sandwich shop routinely subjected female work release prisoners to sexual harassment and abuse.

The complaints allege that employees with Avalon Correctional Services, which operates the Turley Residential Center, knew about the sexual misconduct but continued to send women to the business in return for kickbacks from the owner. [See: PLN, Jan. 2015, p.1].

Sub shop owner Abbas Kazemi Kia fled “to avoid prosecution” after Tulsa police conducted an investigation and raided the shop, according to a negligence lawsuit filed on November 18, 2014 by former work release prisoner Cassie Chambers. The suit names Avalon, the ODOC, Kia and three other businesses. [See: PLN, July 2015, p.63]. The sub shop abruptly closed after the police raid, according to the complaint.

Chambers alleged that Avalon knew as early as November 2011 “that Kia had sexually battered a program participant,” but kept sending women to his business because the private prison company “earned a kickback on wages paid to women in the work release program.” Kia ...

On March 25, 2015, state corrections officials conducted a shakedown at the privately-operated Marshall County Correctional Facility and seized weapons, cell phones and other contraband. Mississippi DOC Commissioner Marshall Fisher said it was believed that some staff members were complicit in bringing in contraband and that he expected criminal prosecutions to follow.

Recent shakedowns at five Mississippi prisons, both public and private, have resulted in the confiscation of nearly 200 weapons. Former U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott said the numbers so far suggest that the problem of weapons is more prevalent in private prisons. He also indicated that private prisons are using money “which could have gone into hiring enough guards to find and remove knives from prisoners, and they are sending those tax dollars instead to their corporate headquarters.”

For-profit prison company Management and Training Corporation (MTC), which operates three of the prisons involved in the shakedowns, including the Marshall County Correctional Facility, responded to the criticism by saying contraband is a problem at all prisons both public and private. Company spokesman Issa Arnita noted the company has created a K9 team that conducts unannounced contraband sweeps, and has installed a body scanner and anti-contraband netting.

According to Arnita, MTC ...

The February 8, 2015 suicide of a woman held at the Washington, D.C. Jail and a recent report that blasted the facility for “non-compliance with basic standards established by national corrections authorities” have once again focused a spotlight on conditions at the main jail in the nation’s capital, where more than 2,000 prisoners await trial or are serving misdemeanor sentences.

According to a press release issued by the D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC), Tawana Johnson, 46, was booked into the jail the day before she died on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of property, for allegedly breaking a window at her daughter’s apartment.

“I was angry about my window being kicked in,” said Johnson’s daughter, Erica. “I really didn’t want to have to call the police, but I had no choice.”

D.C. Corrections Director Thomas Faust stated Johnson had displayed no suicidal tendencies or bizarre behavior, but family members said they believed more could have been done for the woman, who had been treated for intoxication at the jail following a previous arrest.

“Some help. Some kind words. Some apologies, I mean anything – anything,” said Maria Johnson, another daughter.

While Johnson’s suicide was the first at the D.C. Jail ...

A Vermont Superior Court held the policy of the Vermont Department of Corrections (VDOC) to send hundreds of male prisoners to out-of-state facilities, regardless of whether they have close bonds with their young children, while keeping all women prisoners at in-state facilities, violates the equal protection clause and common benefits clause of the state constitution.

VDOC prisoner Michael Carpenter was transferred to the Lee Adjustment Center in Kentucky, operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), under a policy that was purportedly created to alleviate overcrowding in Vermont prisons. Carpenter is the father of twin boys who were four-and-a-half years old at the time he was transferred.

From their birth, Carpenter was with his sons every day caring for their needs. He was described as a “natural parent” by the boys’ mother, who said, “they wanted him more than me.” When he was first incarcerated the children were brought to visit Carpenter each week.

After he was sent to the CCA facility in Kentucky to serve his sentence, however, it was impossible for him to see his children. Carpenter filed suit, asking the court to issue declaratory relief and order the VDOC to return him to Vermont.

The Vermont Superior Court ...