$3,000 Settlement for CCA Prisoner in Slip and Fall
by David M. Reutter
Corrections Corporation of America paid $3,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging a prisoner slipped and fell in her cell at the Hamilton County Workhouse.
Prisoner Kelia Robinson alleged that the ceiling in her cell had multiple leaks ...
$1,500 Settlement for CCA Prisoner in Slip and Fall Suit
by David M. Reutter
Corrections Corporation of America paid $1,500 to settle a lawsuit involving a slip and fall at the Silverdale Workhouse. While walking down a hallway on the way to church on May 8, 2005, prisoner Shirley Hambrick ...
$999.99 Settlement for Excessive Force against CCA Prisoner
Corrections Corporation of America paid $999.99 to settle a lawsuit by prisoner Timothy Groce, who alleged guards used excessive force upon him at Whiteville Correctional Facility.
Groce refused to remove his arm from his segregation cell “bean flap” on March 18, 2010, ...
$13,000 Jury Award to Tennessee Prisoner Held on Invalid Escape Warrant
A Tennessee federal jury awarded $13,000 to a former prisoner alleging he was unconstitutionally imprisoned and denied medical treatment while held in Tennessee prisons.
Samuel C. Key was serving a Georgia-imposed sentence in April of 1994 when he was ...
$4,000 Settlement for CCA Prisoner Injured During Transport
by David M. Reutter
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) paid $4,000 to settle a negligence claim stemming from a prisoner being injured during a transport from a drug and rehabilitation facility to CCA’s Silverdale Detention Center in Hamilton County, Tennessee.
The settlement ...
On March 15, 2012, suit was brought against Grady Judd, Sheriff of Polk County, Florida and the jail’s health care provider, Corizon Health Inc., for violating the constitutional rights of its juvenile prisoners. Plaintiffs filed for class certification, and temporary and permanent injunctive relief based on Fourteenth Amendment violations of the U.S. Constitution.
Plaintiffs raised five Fourteenth Amendment violations, alleging that the defendants:
- failed to provide the juveniles with “rehabilitative services,”
- failed to protect the plaintiffs from “unlawful force,” and “unreasonable restraints,” used by staff, and generally created “dangerously violent conditions of confinement,”
- demonstrated “deliberate indifference to their mental health needs” by removing juveniles from “suicide watch” and placing them in “punitive isolation without penological justification,”
- failed to provide prisoners with “necessary mental health treatment,” and
- exercised “deliberate indifference” in their disproportionate use of punitive isolation.
However, plaintiffs did not assert any state constitutional claim, federal or state statutory claim, or state law tort claim. Consequently, the court ordered plaintiffs to file a proposed finding of fact and conclusion of law explaining their “understanding of the governing constitutional standard.”
After reviewing a cumbersome 450+ pages submitted by plaintiffs and defendants, the court responded with its own 185-page finding of fact ...
Prisoners Pay Millions to Call Loved Ones Every Year. Now this Company Wants Even More
by Ben Walsh, Huffington Post
A captive market, no competition and government contracts that make monopoly-enabled price gouging the industry standard – it’s never been in doubt that the prison phone business is a very profitable model.
A presentation that the privately-held prison telecom company Securus made to investors that The Huffington Post obtained shows just how much money there is to be made as the state-sanctioned middleman between prisoners and the outside world: $404.6 million last year alone.
Securus, which provides phone services to 2,600 prisons and jails in 47 states, made $114.6 million in profit on that revenue in 2014. Securus’ gross profit margin – a measure of the difference between the cost to provide its services, and what it charges for them – was a whopping 51 percent. And Securus, with a 20 percent market share, isn’t even the biggest prison phone company. That would be Global Tel*Link, or GTL, which has a 50 percent market share, the New York Times reported. GTL drew national attention for its prominent role in the 2014 viral podcast Serial.
While Securus is already making massive ...
By James Kilgore, Truthout
Likely the most well-known prison profiteers in the United States are the Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group. Between them, these two firms pulled in about $3.3 billion last year running scores of private prisons and immigration detention centers.
However, these two firms are not alone in feasting at the trough of corrections expenditures. Many other companies, most of them off the popular radar, are also benefiting from epidemic prison and jail building. Some may even be operating in your neighborhood. Here we’ll do a quick sketch of several such companies, outline their activities, ponder their deeds of infamy and reflect a little on how to curtail their profiteering.
Turner Construction: If We Build it They Will Come
Let’s start with the construction sector. Prison construction managers don’t come with a tool box and a pick-up. They are world-class operators. The largest player in this field is New York-based Turner Construction, a subsidiary of the German giant Hochtief.
According to IBISWorld, Turner’s average annual income for prison and jail construction came to $278 million per year from 2007 to 2012. This represents lots of money in most quarters, but qualifies as only slightly more ...
Tennessee Prisoners Suing Private Prisons Not Required to File in Local Venue
by David Reutter
The Tennessee Supreme Court has held that a state statute requiring a local venue for lawsuits filed by indigent prisoners does not apply to actions that accrued while a prisoner “was housed in a correctional facility operated by a private corporation pursuant to a contract with the state or local government.”
When Tennessee state prisoner Sandy Eugene Womack arrived at the Whiteville Correctional Facility (WCF) in Hardeman County in February 2010, he had a cut on his right ankle. He alleged that he did not receive adequate treatment for the cut and, as a result, his right leg was amputated below the knee on September 28, 2010. WCF is owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
At the time he filed suit, Womack was housed at the DeBerry Special Needs Facility located in Davidson County, a state prison run by the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC). Womack filed his lawsuit in Davidson County, stating it was “CCA’s principal place of business” and alleging the company’s “negligent acts, omissions, and/or intentional acts ... result[ed] in the amputation of [his] leg.”
CCA moved to dismiss ...
Does Political Spending by Private Prison Firms in Oklahoma Influence Prison Reform?
by Joe Watson
Three private prison corporations, including the nation’s two largest, have contributed more than a combined $400,000 to political candidates in Oklahoma since 2004, prompting at least one prominent state legislator to question the correlation between political spending and the state’s stalled Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), a prison reform law enacted in 2012.
“Follow the money,” said state Senator Constance Johnson. “This whole notion of special interests having undue influence on the legislative process, this is proof.” Johnson, a long-time advocate of sentencing reform, said the Oklahoma legislature has increasingly become “pro-private prisons, pro-enhanced felonies; the thing I stand up and argue about all the time.”
A Tulsa World analysis of campaign finance reports disclosed by the Oklahoma Ethics Commission, published on January 6, 2014, revealed that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), The GEO Group, Inc. and Avalon Correctional Services, Inc. together donated $414,397 to the campaign coffers of Governor Mary Fallin, Lt. Governor Todd Lamb, House Speaker T.W. Shannon and at least 78 other state lawmakers, including the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Clark Jolley.
The analysis found that Fallin topped the list ...
