by Matt Clarke

On June 30, 2022, the federal court for the District of Arizona found that the healthcare state prisoners get is frankly awful — unconstitutionally so. As is the amount of time many spend in isolation, where their psychiatric ailments are ignored, and they go hungry not only for food but also for recreation and social stimulation. So the Court vowed to issue an injunction forcing the state Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (DCRR) to clean up its act.

This is not the first time the Court has found the state guilty of violating prisoners’ civil rights during the long course of this case. The suit was filed in 2012 by a group of Arizona prisoners challenging conditions of confinement in the state’s ten prison complexes. In 2013, a class was certified consisting of all DCRR prisoners, plus a subclass of those confined to their cells for at least 22 hours each day. In broad terms, the lawsuit alleges that the provision of medical, dental, and mental health services to the class is unconstitutionally inadequate. And the subclass in isolation allegedly receives inadequate out-of-cell time, opportunities for socialization, nutrition, or mental health monitoring.

In 2015, after the ...

by Mark Wilson

On June 3, 2022, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that private companies providing services in jails and prisons are liable under state disability rights laws — even though jails and prisons themselves are not liable.

In October 2015, Andrew Abraham was arrested and confined in Clackamas County Jail, where healthcare and mental health care was contracted to Corizon Health, Inc. Recently renamed YesCare, it is a private firm with a troubling history. [See, for example: PLN, Mar. 2022, p.52; Nov. 2021, p.32; Apr. 2020, p.36.]

Abraham, who is profoundly deaf, communicates through American Sign Language (ASL). At his intake into the jail, a guard attempting to communicate without an ASL interpreter incorrectly flagged Abraham as a suicide risk. He was placed on suicide watch. Corizon Health/YesCare was responsible for his treatment and further assessment, but it had no ASL interpreter available, either. So staff failed to discover that Abraham was diabetic. For the next three days, until he was finally released, he was denied meals and insulin.

With the aid of attorneys John D. Burgess, Carl L. Post and Daniel J. Snyder of the latter’s eponymous Portland firm, Abraham filed suit in federal court for the ...

A growing carceral state has slowly replaced the coal industry in large swaths of Central Appalachia. But even here, a different future is possible.

by Judah Schept

Mitch Whitaker wants to be able to hunt with his birds. A certified “master falconer,” he hunts throughout the year with raptors on his land in Roxana, an unincorporated community in Letcher County, Kentucky. Whitaker is a fourth-generation resident of the county, hunting with and rehabilitating injured birds of prey on the same land that his grandfather defended from coal companies when they attempted to take it from him — as they did around the Central Appalachian coalfields, using the nefarious broad form deed in order to claim the valuable mineral rights under the ground of residents’ homes.

These days, however, coal companies no longer threaten to take his family’s land and livelihood. Instead, it’s the United States Bureau of Prisons.

In 2015, after nearly 10 years of discussion and planning, the Bureau of Prisons launched its official scoping and siting period to build United States Penitentiary Letcher and an adjoining Federal Prison Camp — a maximum security prison and minimum security facility on 700 acres in Roxana, a small portion of which ...

by Keith Sanders

On April 6, 2022, Pennsylvania’s Delaware County assumed control of its jail for the first time in 24 years, after terminating its contract with the Florida-based GEO Group. Prior to that, the 1,800-bed George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Thornton was the state’s last privately-operated county lockup.

GEO Group, the nation’s largest private prison operator, has managed the jail since 1998, when the firm was still known as Wackenhut and entered a private-public partnership with the county to build and run the jail. That partnership endured despite legal payouts for lawsuits filed over detainees’ wrongful deaths, including a $7 million settlement in 2018 with the survivors of a mentally ill detainee who was locked in solitary confinement and hanged herself with her bra. [See: PLN, Nov. 2018, p.36.]

In December 2018, the county signed its most recent contract with the firm, which was worth $259 million over five years. The fallout between the two dates to the following year, 2019, when employees said they were subjected to racist and sexist mistreatment by facility Superintendent John Reilly, Jr., and he resigned. [See: PLN, Mar. 2020, p.28.]

That same year, Democratic candidates took over the County Council, ...

by Kevin W. Bliss

On June 7, 2022, the federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky dismissed the case of a former jail detainee after she reached a settlement with the lockup’s privately contracted healthcare provider. However, the amount and most of the terms of the settlement between Kimissa Rowland and Southern Health Partners, Inc., (SHP) were not disclosed.

Rowland was booked on a drug charge into the Franklin County Regional Jail on July 28, 2017. She was being treated for ulcerative colitis (UC) at the time, and she soon suffered a flare-up of symptoms. That got her released on a medical furlough on September 11, 2017. However, her health insurance had lapsed, so she saw no other medical provider before returning to the jail two days later.

Jail staff suspected that she was hiding drugs when she returned and sent her to the hospital for a CT scan. When that revealed no foreign objects in her body, she was sent back to the jail with a note to see a gastroenterologist for follow up “as soon as possible.” She was also provided a five-day regimen of prednisone.

Before that was through, she went back to the jail’s medical ...

by Benjamin Tschirhart

In August 2022, private jail medical provider Advanced Correctional Healthcare (ACH) settled with the estate of a Missouri pretrial detainee who died of lung cancer after being refused medical attention for months. The agreement, which was for an undisclosed sum, came a few months after a jury ordered the company to pay $8.5 million in the case.

Beginning about two months after he was booked into Missouri’s Phelps County Jail on October 4, 2019, Bilal Hasanie Hill complained of illness and pain. When ACH staffers finally saw him in January 2020, they decided he had a pulled muscle and prescribed Tylenol. But by the end of that month, he also reported that his voice was changing and a lump in his neck was giving him difficulty swallowing. That earned him extra Tylenol, along with prednisone.

Hill, who was awaiting trial on federal drug and gun charges, continued to fill out sick-call requests in February 2020. By mid-month, his weight had dropped from almost 197 pounds to about 190. Less than a week later, it had fallen another ten pounds. His lab work looked normal, but his blood sample was not timely delivered, rendering the results suspect.

He ...

by Mark Wilson

Months after a government watchdog found wretched conditions at a privately operated New Mexico prison and called on federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to remove its migrant detainees, they remained there, holding a hunger strike in protest in September 2022.

Both ICE officials and the prison’s operator, Tennessee-based CoreCivic, denied any knowledge of a strike at the Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF) in Estancia, New Mexico. But the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, claimed the strike began on September 26, 2022, over complaints “ranging from egregious filthy conditions, medical and mental health neglect, and insufficient drinking water to prolonged detention, staff misconduct and unlawful retaliation.”

Earlier in the year, the Office Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, issued its first-ever “Management Alert” on March 16, 2022. Pointing to “critical staffing shortages that have led to safety risks and unsanitary living conditions,” OIG called on ICE to empty the prison and immediately move its migrant detainees to a different facility. See: ManagementAlert – ImmediateRemoval ofAllDetaineesfromtheTorrance CountyDetentionFacility,March 16, 2022; OIG 22-31.

The prison has been the site of numerous disturbances, including a November 2000 uprising in which ...

by Ben Tschirhart

On March 31, 2022, an agreement was entered by Michigan’s Macomb County paying $1.15 million to the estate of David Stojcevski, 32, a detainee who died from drug withdrawal while in custody in the county jail. Separately, the jail’s privately contracted healthcare provider, Correct Care Solutions (CCS) ...

by Kevin W. Bliss
After an Illinois prisoner developed a painful anal abscess and fistula, his medical care was “appalling” and the prison healthcare system was “dysfunctional.” But that’s just negligence, and the Constitution doesn’t protect prisoners from that.

That’s the takeaway from a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 23, 2022, which held that a lower federal court correctly granted summary judgment to Illinois prison officials and their privately contracted healthcare provider, Wexford Health Sources, in a suit brought by a former prisoner over his negligent medical care.

The prisoner, Michael Reck, was held by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) at Menard Correctional Center (MCC) in 2015 and 2016. He had a history of Crohn’s disease with perianal abscesses and fistulae, and he had already received surgeries for seton placement, fistulotomy, fistula plug and anorectal flap, according to the complaint he later filed.

That complaint alleged that through much of 2015 he submitted several request slips to be seen by a doctor for a perianal abscess and extreme pain he was experiencing. He said many of these requests were ignored, and when he finally was treated for his condition, both Wexford ...

by Ben Tschirhart

Some 20 newly unionized workers and their supporters manned a picket line at CoreCivic’s Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex (CAFCC) on August 12, 2022, after pay negotiations broke down over a company offer the union representative called “insulting.”

Despite alleged attempts by CoreCivic to thwart their vote, 17 maintenance workers at the prison in Eloy joined UA Local 469 Plumbers and Pipefitters Union in March 2022, after a National Labor Relations Board election. Union organizer Chad Jessee said that after not getting a raise from CoreCivic in almost 12 years, 15 workers voted for the union and two abstained.

Now CoreCivic has proposed “a 44 cent raise the first year, and 22 cent raises for each of the following two years,” Jessee said, explaining the firm’s proposed hike in the workers’ hourly pay, which is currently $22.

“That’s less than a $1 raise!” he said. “They haven’t had a raise in ten years and this is what they’re offered.”

Union member Dave Gossett said the workers keep vital prison systems running, including “boilers, kitchen equipment, HVAC, the fire system, all the plumbing.”

“When you don’t have working water or HVAC systems, when the toilets are plugged up, ...