by Benjamin Tschirhart
No one in prison expects to eat fine cuisine. The food served is merely intended to keep prisoners alive, with no thought given to how much it is or isn’t enjoyed. Yet certain people are seeing enormous benefits from prison food — just not prisoners.
In a report published in CovertAction Magazine on December 6, 2022, investigative reporter Lauren Smith sheds light on an old conundrum: Why is prison food so awful? As it turns out, we can blame something called the “secondary food market.” That’s where perishable food goes after its expiration date passes. According to Smith, this shadowy place is where “expired food gets reprocessed, repackaged, relabeled, and resold” by “food liquidators” to institutional bulk buyers — schools, hospitals, even prisons.
There are “scant regulations” in this market, Smith says, and “purchasing specifications” for institutional buyers are “silent” in regard to it. As a result, these liquidators and their bargain prices win institutional food service contracts “nearly every time.” However, she warns, “in the secondary food market, you get what you pay for” because “the saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’ has [never] been more appropriate.”
Citing a recent estimate by the federal Centers for Disease ...
by Jacob Barrett
On June 24, 2022, a prisoner in the Arizona Department of Corrections (DOC) accepted $20,000 to settle his claims of deliberate indifference and medical negligence against DOC’s privately contracted healthcare and mental healthcare providers: Centurion of Arizona and MHM Health Professionals, respectively. Both are subsidiaries of Centene Corp.,.
During his arrest for carjacking and robbery in December 2013, 44-year-old Edmund Powers attempted to flee and jumped off a highway overpass, injuring his foot in the fall. By the time he entered DOC custody in March 2015 to begin serving a 26-year-sentence, his foot had metal plates and screws. A specialist for DOC’s then-healthcare provider, Corizon Health, ordered him fitted with new orthopedics every eight to 12 months.
In prison, Powers’ orthopedics deteriorated. By April 2019, they were “months overdue” for replacement, according to the complaint he later filed. But Corizon Health nurse practitioner Lawrence Ende refused to order replacements because they were “too costly.”
The next month, while using the bathroom, Powers felt a sharp cracking pain in his foot and noticed a bruise-like discoloration with a hard protrusion. Recalling warnings that further injury to his foot might result in below-the-knee leg amputation, he immediately filed an ...
by Harold Hempstead
On July 15, 2022, in a case accusing private prison giant CoreCivic of a Tennessee prisoner’s wrongful death, a federal magistrate judge issued a gag order restricting public comments on the case made by Plaintiff’s attorney.
The suit was brought by Marie Newby in federal court for the Middle District of Tennessee, accusing CoreCivic of violating the civil rights of her son, prisoner Terry Deshawn Childress, 37, by failing to protect him from a fatal attack by his cellmate in February 2021. The murder happened at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC), which CoreCivic operates for the state Department of Corrections (DOC). Tymothy Blaze Willis, 23, was indicted for the killing in June 2021.
Tweets by Newby’s lawyer, Daniel Horwitz, led to the dust-up, which nearly overshadowed a more consequential ruling issued in the case by Judge Jeffery S. Frensley six days later. On July 21, 2022, the judge denied CoreCivic’s motion to quash subpoenas for confidential settlement documents from the case of another prisoner at the lockup, Boaz Pleasant-Bey, who accused CoreCivic of violating his right to practice his Muslim faith. See: Pleasant-Bey v. Tenn., USDC (M.D. Tenn.), Case No. 3:19-00486.
CoreCivic argued that the documents ...
by David M. Reutter
Twice in July 2022, the federal court for the District of Arizona spanked Centurion of Arizona, healthcare provider for the state Department of Corrections (DOC), issuing injunctions to correct mismanagement of prisoner medication.
On July 1, 2022, the Court issued a preliminary injunction requiring the state to keep a state prisoner hospitalized for treatment of his Valley Fever, after his medications were inconsistently administered by Centurion. That order came just two weeks after another injunction the Court issued on June 17, 2022, finding Centurion mismanaged medication for another state prisoner’s gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and ordering surgery for him.
The first case was brought by Christopher Brightly, a prisoner serving a sentence for aggravated DUI. He was first transported to a hospital emergency room with spinal meningitis in June 2019. The disease had been caused by Valley Fever, a fungal infection of the lungs becoming more common as climate change dries out the southwestern U.S.
When Brightly was discharged three weeks later, he was placed on anti-fungal medication to stave off a relapse of Valley Fever. He returned to the Arizona State Prison Complex in Tucson, just as DOC changed over to Centurion from its previous ...
by Eike Blohm, MD
After a federal court in North Carolina declined to stay a civil case against Wellpath and a nurse it employed accused in the wrongful death of a detainee at the Forsyth County Jail, the county settled its part in the case for $3 million on May 25, 2022.
The order denying the stay was issued by U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles for the Middle District of North Carolina on January 1, 2022. Wellpath and the nurse, Michelle Heughins, 47, had requested the stay pending resolution of criminal charges in the death of the detainee, John Neville.
Neville, who was 56, was arrested on December 1, 2019, on a misdemeanor charge and booked into the jail in Winston-Salem. Overnight, he experienced a medical emergency and fell from the top bunk onto the concrete floor. Guards found him confused. When he allegedly tried to bite them, he was “hogtied” and placed face down in an observation cell. Though he wheezed, “I can’t breathe,” it took guards 12 minutes to remove his restraints. By that time, he wasn’t breathing. CPR was used to restart his heart, but he was pronounced dead in a hospital two days later from a ...
by David M. Reutter
On June 21, 2022, the federal court for the Southern District of Florida significantly trimmed a class-action lawsuit alleging that private prison operator The GEO Group misled investors in its stock, causing them to suffer losses.
For the last three decades, GEO Group has contracted with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as prison systems in ten states where it owns and/or operates prisons. Though founded in 1984, the company was restructured as a real estate investment trust in 2013, allowing it to retain only 10% of its income each year — forcing it to rely on capital markets to fund growth investments.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General reported that several GEO Group detention centers had substandard conditions, inadequate medical care and overcrowding. [See: PLN, July 2018, p.40.] By the following year, the firm had lost some of its contracts to manage immigration detention centers, which then came under even more scrutiny after the Trump administration announced a “zero-tolerance policy” on immigration, separating migrant parents and children. [See: PLN, Jan. 21, 2019, online.] As a ...
by Harold Hempstead
On August 17, 2021, after the IllinoisDepartment of Corrections (DOC) paid $450,000 to settle claims of medical neglect that cost him the use of his legs, a state prisoner successfully petitioned a federal court to dismiss his lawsuit.
In September 2017, while held at Hill Correctional Center, Stephen Tripp developed a boil under his arm. He reported it to employees of Wexford Health Sources, Inc., DOC’s privately contracted healthcare provider. After the boil burst, a wound culture revealed that Tripp had a Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection. But no Wexford employee acted on that information.
Over more than 14 months that followed, Tripp’s wound swelled and turned red, with a thick yellow discharge. He suffered worsening weakness, dizziness, fever, nausea and vomiting. He developed a knot in the middle of his back on his spine, suffering pain when his back was palpated. As his legs became progressively more numb, the previously healthy man developed an unsteady gait. He soon required a walker. Then a wheelchair. All the while, he complained of pain when bending or stooping, constipation and urinary incontinence.
Finally, in December 2018, Tripp was taken to a hospital. There an MRI showed “a large epidural ...
by Jenifer Lockwood
A privately run jail in downtown San Diego is still holding federal detainees after receiving an “unprecedented” third exception to an executive order issued by Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D). Florida-based GEO Group, Inc., informed its 300 employees at the Western Region Detention Facility (WRDF) of the reprieve on June 24, 2022.
In January 2021, Biden issued Executive Order 14006, directing the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) not to renew any contracts with privately operated detention facilities. DOJ is the parent agency of both the federal Bureau of Prisons, which uses no private prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), which uses nothing else. The order did not affect contracts to hold migrant detainees for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Originally slated to close at the end of September 2021, WRDF received a six-month extension at the last minute. [See: PLN, Feb. 2022, p.28.] Before that expired at the end of March 2022, another 90-day extension followed. The latest extension came after DOJ filed another exception to the executive order. In its letter to employees, GEO Group said the jail will now remain open to ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
On November 14, 2022, Mississippi State Auditor Shad White submitted a civil demand for payment of $1.9 million to Utah-based private prison operator Management and Training Corporation (MTC) for violating its contractual agreement to fully staff the Marshall County Correctional Facility (MCCF) from 2017 to 2020.
MTC lost its contract with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to run the Marshall County Correctional Facility in September 2021, after it failed to maintain adequate staffing levels there. However, DOC Commissioner Burl Cain had nothing to voice but sympathy for the firm, saying it’s “difficult” to hire staff at the wages MTC was offering “that close to Memphis.”
Following an investigation by The Marshall Project into “ghost workers” for which the state paid at its two remaining private prisons in the state, both also run by MTC, White began an inquiry in late 2020. That found MCCF had been understaffed for nearly 12,000 mandatory shifts during the previous three years. Moreover, MTC had failed either to notify DOC or provide it a credit, though it was contractually required to do so.
As a result, the company earned an unauthorized $1.4 million at MCCF, while the vacant posts created ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
Wexford Health Sources had been sued over 50 times in just four years when the state of New Mexico terminated the firm’s contract to provide healthcare to state prisons. That was in 2007. So the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was understandably alarmed when, in 2019, the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) announced that Wexford had “submitted the winning bid” for the agency’s new healthcare contract.
ACLU made a request for all records pertaining to the decision, including Wexford’s bid. NMCD denied the request, claiming the records were property of a private company and thus not subject to the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act. A NMCD spokeswoman stated in an email that the documents were “protected from public inspection by the Procurement Code.”
In response to a court ruling, Wexford released a limited number of documents which were heavily redacted, obscuring more than they showed. In a lawsuit then filed for the ACLU in the First Judicial District Court, attorneys Laura Schauer Ives and Adam C. Flores of Kennedy Kennedy & Ives, PC, in Santa Fe accused the state of “blithely ced[ing] its mandatory duties under the Inspection of Public Records Act ...
