On March 18, 2026, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) told state lawmakers that the state must immediately move to open a new new prison to account for a projected growth in prisoner numbers, according to The Colorado Sun.

Gov. Polis’ demand came as Colorado grapples with a $1 billion budget shortfall that the state legislature has cut social services to address. And, as one of Gov. Polis’ staff warned the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, a single prison—which would cost $200 million—may not be enough to account for the estimated influx. “We may even need two prisons,” the staff member said, despite Colorado adopting policies in recent years to decrease its prison population such as reclassifying crimes and changing sentencing structures.

Advocates blame the state Department of Corrections’ adoption of stricter parole policies that keep people in prison for longer time periods. As Kyle Giddings, deputy director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, told The Colorado Sun, the state’s parole board has been less likely to grant parole and far more aggressive in its enforcement of parole violations. “There is no piece of legislation that did this,” Giddings added. “These are just independent choices of …

by Chuck Sharman

A $950,000 settlement received approval from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on January 28, 2026, resolving claims against the City of Norfolk by the Estate of Philemon S. Vinson, alleging that his suicide in the city lockup should have been prevented by guards working for Sheriff Joe Baron.

The agreement does not include claims against Wellpath, which was the jail’s contracted healthcare and mental healthcare provider at the time; those claims are proceeding in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, which is overseeing Wellpath’s Chapter 11 reorganization, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.56.]

Vinson, 24, was picked up in August 2022 on a failure to appear warrant. He was denied bond and placed in the Norfolk jail. At intake screening, Wellpath Nurse Practitioner Sharon Rice asked whether he had “feelings that there is nothing to look forward to or [felt] hopelessness/helplessness.” Vinson responded that both statements were true for him. But he was not placed on suicide watch. In fact, Wellpath Director of Mental Health Services Anne Purkeson released him into the jail’s general population. He was found fatally hanged in his …

by Jo Ellen Knott

The New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) confirmed a third measles case at the Doña Ana County jail, bringing the state’s total to 13 so far this year, all occurring within Southern New Mexico carceral facilities. According to Searchlight New Mexico, the second case was confirmed in late March of this year, which also prompted a public health warning regarding potential exposure at the U.S. District Court in Las Cruces on February 24 of this year. Adding to the two cases reported at Doña Ana, two cases are in the Hidalgo County Jail and eight at the Luna County Detention Center.

While NMDOH officials believe the federal detainees were exposed out-of-state via Border Patrol custody, the highly infectious airborne virus poses a severe threat in crowded, congregate settings where social distancing is almost impossible. Despite official claims of prioritized safety, the outbreak follows a 2025 surge that saw 2,200 national cases and one death in New Mexico. Advocacy groups, including the New Mexico Prison and Jail Project, noted the terrifying speed of transmission in jails, echoing the failure to keep the detained safe and healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similarly, in Texas, …

On March 19, 2026, commissioners in Harris County renewed a $38 million contract to send detainees out of Texas to private facilities controlled by companies like CoreCivic. For years, the Harris County Jail has outsourced detainees in order to free up space; the new contract allows the jail to continue that practice for more than 1,000 detainees until at least 2027, despite the fact that some of the private facilities that accept the detainees face wrongful death lawsuits.

While Harris County ended a contract in 2025 that sent 300 detainees to a lockup in Mississippi, the jail has failed to meet the conditions of a remedial order imposed by the state in 2023 to bring it into compliance with minimum jail standards. [See: PLN, Apr. 2025, p.26.] The order, brought into effect in part due to severe understaffing, prevents several hundred beds from being used until it is lifted. Although the Harris County Jail passed a recent inspection earlier in March, the order remains in place pending further inspections.

The renewed contract came despite the deaths of several detainees dying after being shipped out of the Harris County Jail to for-profit prisons run by LaSalle Corrections …

by Chuck Sharman

The story repeats with depressing regularity. It begins with a man struggling with drug dependency, acquired from a prescription for pain medication. Depressed, he makes suicidal threats. His frightened partner calls sheriff’s deputies. They take him to the county lockup. There, his family blithely trusts that “if he’s in jail, he’s safe.” But the jail fails to maintain him on suicide watch. Its medical contractor monitors him only for withdrawal symptoms, not a potential suicide attempt. Unsurprisingly, he suffocates himself and dies. After several years of litigation, the county and its contractor pay a multi-million-dollar settlement to the dead man’s family without admitting any liability. No one is criminally charged. The worst that might result is the contractor might cut its ties with the jail.

That’s what happened after Nick Rapp, 34, ended up in a cell on New Year’s Eve 2019 in Washington’s Kitsap County Jail, where NaphCare, Inc. held the contract to provide detainees with healthcare. Two days later, he was in a hospital on life support after making a suicide attempt in his cell. Four days after that, on January 6, 2020, he was dead.

His parents, John and Judith …

On March 10, supervisors of the Shasta County Jail in Redding, California voted unanimously in favor of a three-year, $25 million contract with Mediko Correctional Healthcare to take over the jail’s medical and mental health services.

The jail, beginning on July 1 of this year, will stop contracting with its current healthcare provider, private healthcare profiteer Wellpath, due to the company’s long record of medical neglect and wrongful deaths both in Shasta County and at jails across the country. Wellpath filed for bankruptcy in late 2024, due in part to the 1,500 lawsuits the company was facing, most of which stemmed from deficient medical care for prisoners. The firm pulled out of bankruptcy in 2025 and continues to operate. [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.31].

Shasta County itself is facing several lawsuits from the family members of detainees who have died locked up in the county jail and under the care of Wellpath. Most recently, in February of this year, the mother of a 27-year-old detainee filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging that her son went untreated during a mental health crisis that led to his death by suicide. The detainee, according to the lawsuit, was placed …

by Michael Thompson

Kansas has a mechanism in place that allows it to fine the medical provider contracted to serve the Department of Corrections (DOC). From just January through September of 2025, Centurion, the DOC’s private medical contractor, was fined $1 million. In fact, the five months with the most fines have happened since November 2024.

The fines are indicative that, rather than improving, privatized prison medical care in Kansas is worsening. In 2022, Kansas News Service investigated DOC medical care. At the time, DOC made getting any real information a nearly impossible task for the journalists. Even prisoners were stymied when trying to access their own data. Incarcerated individuals were given access to a computer and just 15 minutes to locate their own relevant data. The only substantive metric available to the investigators was the level of monthly fines. And under that metric, it appeared things were improving as the number of fines placed against Centurion was diminishing.

From January 2021 to May 2022, Centurion was fined almost 5,000 times, resulting in $900,000 in fines. But a chart showed shrinking monthly infractions. The last four months of that period averaged around 150 fines per month. …

The Montana state Department of Corrections (DOC) announced on March 23, 2026 that it will no longer send prisoners to a private prison in Arizona. Instead, it will send the roughly 600 out-of-state prisoners to a facility in Mississippi controlled by the same profiteer.

Montana, like other states that have locked up more people than they have space for, exports prisoners as a way to decrease overcrowding. In 2023, the DOC began sending prisoners to the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, a facility run by the for-profit company CoreCivic. While around 360 Montana prisoners remain incarcerated at Saguaro, 240 have already been transferred to the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, a lockup that is also owned and operated by CoreCivic. The state intends to rely exclusively on the Tallahatchie prison for out-of-state transfers, although it did not provide a timeline on when the switch would be complete, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

CoreCivic, as PLN has extensively covered for years, has a long record of understaffing, guards committing physical and sexual abuse, medical negligence, and wrongful death settlements in the dozens of prisons and jails it controls across the country. [See: PLN, Jun. …

by Abbey Kim

This article was originally published in Arkansas Advocate.

County jails in Arkansas hold some of the state’s most vulnerable people, including many experiencing mental health crises.Hundreds are detained in county jails awaiting psychiatric treatment or evaluation, according to data from the Arkansas Department of Human Services. Once the cell door closes, navigating an overburdened jail system is the only way to get medical treatment.

U.S. law requires jails to provide adequate health services. In 1976, the Supreme Court held in Estelle v. Gamble that “deliberate indifference” to an incarcerated person’s serious injury or illness amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. In 2002, a federal district court in Arkansasaffirmed that Arkansas’ jails had to provide timely assessments, care and treatment.

But jails have varying responses to incarcerated people’s health needs, according to Dr. Anne Spaulding, founder of the Center for the Health of Incarcerated Persons at Emory University.

Often, the ideals of the law collide with the realities of county budgets, understaffed medical systems and already vulnerable jail populations. More than 75 people have died in Arkansas county jails since 2020, according to data obtained through a Freedom …

by Chuck Sharman

In a verdict reached on March 4, 2026, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania awarded $1.5 million to the surviving sons of Louis Jung, Jr., 50, who died after receiving only sporadic treatment for his Type 1 diabetes during his 10-day incarceration with the Philadelphia Department of Prisons (PDP) at its Curran-Frumhold Correctional Facility (CFCF). Jurors made an additional award of $170,000 in punitive damages against PDP guard Lt. Wanda Bloodsaw, who ordered two fellow detainees to drag Jung back to his cell while he was dying of diabetic ketoacidosis.

Jung had been held at the jail since his December 2021 arrest on a robbery charge, his diabetes documented at intake. He was transferred to Norristown State Psychiatric Hospital for competency restoration in March 2023. Upon return to CCCF on October 28 that year, a nurse with the jail’s contracted medical provider, YesCare, measured his glucose level at 542, well above the 100 normally recorded between meals. But he was not taken to the infirmary nor an outside hospital. He died 10 days later on November 6, 2023.

With the help of attorneys from the Abolitionist …