Seven years ago prisoners at a private prison in southeastern Colorado went on an all-night rampage, chasing the shorthanded staff from the premises, attacking suspected snitches, setting fires and causing millions of dollars in damages. Now documents filed in a long-running legal battle confirm what many prisoners have been saying all along – that prison officials received ample warning of impending trouble but failed to take action in time.

The 2004 riot at the Crowley County Correctional Facility, operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), has emerged as a kind of case study in the multiple ways things can go wrong in a for-profit prison. The night of the incident, the prison had only 47 employees on duty, including eight trainees, to supervise 1,122 prisoners. There had been growing tension at the facility for weeks over issues ranging from food and rec privileges to the presence of numerous disgruntled prisoners recently shipped in from Washington and Wyoming to fill beds. [See: PLN, Jan. 2005, p.26].

The Colorado Department of Corrections’ after-action report would later blast CCA officials for inadequate training and emergency response procedures – but the DOC’s own monitoring of the prison up to the night of the ...

An audit by the Florida Department of State found that the GEO Group, Inc., the nation’s second-largest private prison company, had been violating Florida law by making contributions to politicians from GEO’s Political Action Committee (PAC) in excess of the $500 limit.

In a letter to state election officials, GEO said it was operating as a federal committee and was not aware that by filing reports with state agencies it was bound by Florida contribution limits, which are lower than those allowed under federal law.

GEO Group disbanded its state-level PAC on May 18, 2011, but not before it had disbursed contributions to a number of Florida politicians. The PAC gave $500 to state Rep. Eseban Bovo’s successful bid to become a Miami-Dade Commissioner. It also gave $2,500 to Republican congressman Ander Crenshaw’s reelection campaign, but that donation was returned.

In the first quarter of 2011, the PAC gave money to U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and the U.S. Senate campaign committee of current Florida state Senate President Mike Haridopolos. Reports from GEO’s PAC also show contributions to politicians around the country, including Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

Such donations to lawmakers do not go unrewarded – see this issue’s cover story ...

A bill introduced in the Kentucky legislature proposed removing approximately 3,500 Class D state prisoners currently held in county jails and transferring them to private prisons owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Opponents claimed the bill made no fiscal sense. The state pays the counties $31.34 per prisoner per day to house Class D state prisoners (plus $9.00 per diem for jails that provide substance abuse treatment programs). CCA charges from $37.99 to $47.98 per prisoner per day.

Losing the Class D prisoners “would be devastating,” stated Grayson County Detention Center employee Darwin Dennison. “We count on the money generated by the Class D program to operate our jail and the female facility. If that money were to dry up, it could cost jobs. The jail annex houses nothing but Class D inmates.”

The counties would also lose the prisoners’ labor, which has been used in work release programs to perform maintenance and clean-up at parks and government buildings.

“The best thing about having a Class D program is that we are able to save the cities and county government a lot of money by providing inmates to work,” said Dennison. “This proposal could eliminate that program ...

On October 28, 2010, a 26-year-old prisoner named Terrell Griswold was found slumped over and unresponsive in his cell at the Bent County Correctional Facility, a private prison in southeastern Colorado. The official cause of death was listed as cardiac hypertrophy, or an enlarged heart. But Lagalia Afola says the circumstances of her son’s death are more complicated than that.

When it comes to the mysteries of prison health care, they usually are.
Griswold was serving a three-year sentence for burglary. Although she lives in Kansas City, Afola spoke with him often by phone. Terrell didn’t complain a lot, didn’t volunteer much about his health, she stated. She knew he was taking blood pressure medication but considered him in very good shape, and she was stunned when officials told her that he’d died of a heart condition that couldn’t have been foreseen.

“Initially, they just told me that he died of an enlarged heart,” Afola said. But over the past year she has tracked down medical records held by the private prison operator, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and the Colorado Department of Corrections; she’s pored over the official autopsy report and pointed out inaccuracies to the medical examiner; and ...

Guards at a private prison in Idaho looked on, but did not intervene, as a prisoner was beaten into a coma. Video footage of the January 2010 incident has sparked an FBI investigation into civil rights violations at the facility.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, operates the Idaho Correctional Center (ICC), which has long been condemned for high levels of violence.

In 34 years of suing more than 100 prisons and jails, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Stephen Pevar said ICC was the most violent prison he had ever seen.

Critics claim that ICC guards use prisoner-on-prisoner violence to force prisoners to snitch on their cellmates to avoid being transferred to extremely violent units. Prisoners have called ICC a “gladiator school” due to its reputation for violence.

Hanni Elabed, 24, knows all too well just how violent ICC is. He was serving a sentence of two to 12 years for robbery when he snitched on drug trafficking by ICC prisoners and guards, according to a subsequent lawsuit. He was placed in solitary confinement for his own protection when he complained that he was being threatened. Elabed was later returned to his original housing unit, ...

by Matt Clarke

In July 2011, anyone with at least $5 million to spare was invited to bid on a 373-bed, state-of-the-art, turn-key minimum-security prison on 30 acres of land in the cotton-farming town of Littlefield, Texas.

The tiny town, with a population of 6,500, agreed to build what was originally a private prison for juvenile offenders after developers convinced city officials there was a burgeoning market for prisoners that would allow Littlefield to rake in huge profits by renting cell space to overcrowded prison systems. The citizens of Littlefield were not allowed to vote on the issue.

The city’s haste to buy into the scheme to profit from keeping people locked up has cost Littlefield residents dearly. Initially, they spent $11 million to construct the Bill Clayton Detention Center. The city issued bonds to raise the money and still has more than $9 million in outstanding debt. The prison hasn’t generated revenue for the last two years, requiring the city to raise taxes and fees, fire municipal employees and suspend the purchase of equipment such as a police car just to make the $65,000 monthly payments on the bond debt. That allowed Littlefield to avoid defaulting on the bonds; ...

In March 2011, PLN reported on the political machinations that led to the construction of Florida’s Blackwater River Correctional Institution (BRCI), which is operated by GEO Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison firm. BRCI was opened at a time when there was excess bed space in Florida’s prison system and it was not needed, and one of the lawmakers who championed the facility had connections with GEO. [See: PLN, March 2011, p.1].

The FBI has since launched an investigation into potentially illicit conduct in connection with the legislative process involving BRCI.

The federal investigation apparently centers around former Florida House of Representatives Speaker Ray Sansom, who resigned in February 2010 amid a state criminal and ethics investigation. The main thrust of the state investigation, which was dropped in March 2011, involved allegations that Sansom had falsified the 2007-08 state budget to insert $6 million in appropriations for the construction of an aircraft hanger for Jay Odom, a prominent contributor to the Florida Republican Party.

GEO Group, incidentally, is also a major contributor to Florida Republicans. Through two political action committees, GEO gave $85,000 to the Republican Party of Florida from 2006 through 2009, plus tens of thousands of dollars in ...

by Matt Clarke

In September 2010, the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee calculated that over a four-year period, former Governor Bill Richardson (D) failed to collect $18.6 million in penalties from private prison companies that breached their contracts with the state by allowing their for-profit facilities to remain understaffed by 10% or more for at least thirty consecutive days. [See: PLN, March 2011, p.42].

Not much changed throughout 2010 and the first three months of 2011 despite New Mexico having a new governor, Susana Martinez (R), who appointed a new corrections secretary, Lupe Martinez (no relation). Martinez later resigned after her live-in boyfriend shot a snake on corrections property and was accused of tampering with evidence.

Records reveal that the state’s four private prisons had high understaffing rates for most of the period between January 2010 and March 2011. The worst offender was the GEO Group-operated Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs, which was above the 10% understaffing threshold for the entire 14 months and had an employee vacancy rate of around 20% for 12 of the 14 months. For seven months, from September 2010 through March 2011, the average vacancy rate was 25.24%.

The Guadalupe County Correctional Facility in ...

In March 2011, Michael Taaffe, 56, retired from his $91,000-a-year job as an assistant administrator for the Health Services Division of the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC). Three days earlier he had been hired by Correctional Health Partners (CHP), a private medical services company.

While employed with the ODOC, Taaffe had helped CHP land a multi-million dollar contract with the state’s prison system; the Oregon Government Ethics Commission is now investigating whether he violated the state’s “revolving door” statute after retiring from his government position.

Taaffe began working in the ODOC prison industries in 1996. He was later employed as a pharmacist before being promoted to an executive position with the ODOC’s Health Services Division in 2007.

Taaffe served on a three-member panel which, in March 2009, selected CHP over five other bidders to manage some of the ODOC’s medical services for prisoners.

However, he did not make the final selection or administer the contract, according to a May 10, 2011 email that ODOC Director Max Williams sent to Governor John Kitzhaber and the Director of the Oregon Department of Administrative Services, briefing them on the situation.

In June 2009, CHP became a “third-party administrator” of the ODOC’s health care ...

by Matt Clarke

In June 2011, the family members of an Oklahoma state prisoner who was murdered by his cellmate at a privately-operated GEO Group prison in Lawton, Oklahoma received a $6.5 million jury award.

On January 30, 2005, Lawton Correctional Facility prisoner Ronald L. Sites, 48, was strangled to ...