The Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) and several of its contractors violated state law, according to two audit reports issued by the Comptroller of the Treasury’s Division of State Audit.

According to an April 2009 financial and compliance audit, the TDOC failed to generate employee separation notices within 24 hours of separation as required by state law.
Auditors found that 53 percent of the reviewed notices were filed an average of 10 to 18 days late, and as many as 23 days late in some cases. Such delays could negatively impact former employees’ unemployment benefits.

TDOC management also failed to assess and mitigate “the risks associated with information systems security, which increases the risk of fraudulent activity,” auditors found. While not revealing the “specific vulnerability identified,” auditors determined that TDOC staff “did not always follow the department’s Management Information Services Procedure Manual in order to maintain proper information systems security.” TDOC officials claimed they had “been closely monitoring these issues ... for over two years.”

Tennessee’s Financial Integrity Act requires agency heads to “submit a letter acknowledging responsibility for maintaining the internal control system of the agency” to the Comptroller of the Treasury by June 30 of each year. In ...

On August 21, 2008, a Louisiana appellate court affirmed class certification in a lawsuit involving prisoners and guards who were exposed to toxic chemicals following a train derailment.

The train derailed near Eunice, Louisiana on May 27, 2000, and seventeen of the derailed cars contained hazardous chemicals. Seven were torn open and two exploded. Two other cars were intentionally breached during the clean-up process.

Sixty-nine cars that were not derailed were moved to a siding about a mile from the South Louisiana Correctional Center (SLCC) in Basil, a private prison operated by LCS Corrections Services, Inc. (LCS). One of those train cars, owned by Union Tank Car Company (UTC) and leased to Dow Chemical, began to leak, releasing ethylene oxide for several days. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that inspection procedures by Union Pacific Railroad (UPR) failed to detect defective track joint bars, leading to the train accident.

Anthony Crooks and John Spellman were Louisiana state prisoners housed at SLCC at the time of the derailment. They filed separate lawsuits against LCS, UTC, Phillips Petroleum, Huntsman Petrochemicals, UPR, Dow and the State of Louisiana in state district court, alleging among other claims that LCS neither evacuated them nor allowed ...

Wexford Health Services paid $300,000 last year to settle a lawsuit regarding the wrongful death of an Illinois prisoner who died in June 2003 after suffering an asthma attack.

The complaint alleged Wexford failed to properly train and supervise its medical staff and failed to ensure its medical equipment was ...

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the grant of summary judgment to a doctor and two nurses employed by Correctional Medical Services (CMS). The lawsuit claimed an Eighth Amendment violation related to the treatment of a prisoner who broke his leg just above the ankle during a softball game.

While sliding into second base on August 9, 2002, Missouri prisoner Bryan Croft fractured his leg. CMS nurses Wanda Patton and Pam Tanner later admitted that Croft had an obvious fracture, as his foot was “not at the right angle” and he was in obvious pain.
Croft’s claim was based on the failure of the nurses to stabilize his leg before moving him.
Instead, they tried to move him onto a backboard by holding him by the shoulders and knees. When they did so, his “foot completely spun over backwards and hit the dirt.” They then loaded him on a golf cart and took him to the infirmary.

The Eighth Circuit found the “record showed the nurses’ acts conflicted with the emergency nursing protocol for fractures, and it is commonly known that an obviously fractured limb requires immobilization and stabilization, particularly before a person is moved and that failure to ...

“Beside my brothers and my sisters, I’ll proudly take a stand. When liberty’s in jeopardy, I’ll always do what’s right. I’m out here on the frontline, sleep in peace tonight. American soldier, I’m an American soldier...”


So goes the ringtone on Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce’s phone—as performed by Toby “’cause we put a boot up your ass, it’s the American way” Keith. Seconds into any conversation with Pearce on the issue of illegal immigration, you’ll find the song fits. Pearce is—in his mind—the “American soldier.” What’s more, just as he sees himself a soldier, Pearce envisions his home to be none less than the front in a war which threatens the very fiber of the nation.

“There’s been 133 nations identified crossing that border. Not just Mexicans, not just Hondurans, not just El Salvadorians, but 133 nations. Many of those are nations of interest, which means that they either harbor, aid and abet, or are somehow connected to terrorist activities,” said Pearce. “And yet they continue to cross that border. We’ve got prayer rugs that have been found down there, other things that have been found down there—and yet they [the federal government] continue to do nothing.”

Pearce is ...

TIME SENSITIVE!

Call to Action on opposing the Hylton nomination!

On November 9, 2010, a coalition of organizations -- including the Alliance for Justice, Human Rights Defense Center, Private Corrections Working Group, Grassroots Leadership, National Lawyers Guild, International CURE, Detention Watch Network and Justice Policy Institute -- announced their opposition to Stacia A. Hylton, who has been nominated to head the U.S. Marshals Service.

The Marshals Service handles security for federal courthouses, apprehends federal fugitives, and also oversees the detention of federal prisoners awaiting trial or immigration proceedings.

The day after the opposition campaign was announced, the Judiciary Committee scheduled Hylton's nomination for a hearing on November 17 -- within one week. Apparently the administration wants to push her nomination through before the opposition campaign cranks up and creates more controversy.

The opposition campaign against Hylton's nomination focuses on conflicts of interest based on her acceptance of $112,500 in consulting fees from GEO Group, the nation's second-largest private prison company, which has contracts with the U.S. Marshals to house federal detainees, and which obtained multi-million dollar contracts during Hylton's tenure as the Federal Detention Trustee.

A month before she retired from her position as the Federal Detention Trustee in February ...

by Matt Clarke

In 2003 and 2004, Texas state Senator Eddie Lucio, Jr. (D) was a consultant for Management & Training Corporation, a private prison firm, and Corplan Corrections, a prison design and development company. Now his son, state Rep. Eddie Lucio III, (D) has signed on to be a Corplan consultant.

Corplan’s CEO, James Parkey, typically sells desperate towns on high-risk government-financed prisons, promising them jobs and economic growth. Corplan builds the prisons with local government financing, such as project revenue bonds, but leaves after the construction is complete. How to fill the prisons is up to local officials.

“James Parkey and Corplan are prison developers who get paid when a prison is built,” said Bob Libal, a Grassroots Leadership anti-private prison organizer in Texas. “It’s not necessarily in their interest to make sure the prison project is successful.”

Past Corplan projects include a scheme to build a prison in Hardin, Montana that cost $27 million to construct but has sat vacant for years because the city has been unable to find prisoners to fill it. [See: PLN, Dec. 2009, pp.1, 8].

Corplan, based in Argyle, Texas, was also part of a group of companies trying to build a ...

In the past few years an outcry has arisen over the involvement of military and CIA medical professionals and psychologists in torture, including psychologically destructive solitary confinement of “war on terror” detainees at the Guantánamo prison camp. Some critics have even suggested criminal prosecution of the medical staff involved or, at least, revocation of their professional licenses.

In Maine’s prison system, too, prisoners — many of them mentally ill — are kept in isolation for months or years in the state prison’s 132-cell Special Management Unit, its “supermax,” in Warren. Some Maine doctors are now looking closely at the state’s supermax, saying that solitary confinement constitutes torture, and asking if the medical professionals and psychologists involved with the facility are complicit in torture.

“I do believe they should look at the big picture,” says Janis Petzel, of Hallowell, president of the Maine Association of Psychiatric Physicians, talking specifically about doctors who do “peer reviews,” a type of quality review, of Maine’s prisoner psychiatric care. “Twenty years ahead I don’t want to look back and say we were like the Nazi doctors.” When physicians encounter solitary confinement, she says, they “have a duty to speak out.”

In the recent legislative debate ...

On July 2, 2009, the estate and family of a mentally ill Oregon man who died in police custody settled claims against Multnomah County, a former deputy sheriff and jail nurses for $925,000. The case remained pending against the City of Portland, American Medical Response (AMR) ambulance service and numerous ...

A seemingly good idea before the housing market collapsed, the 525-bed, $58 million Wapato Jail has sat empty in Portland, Oregon since construction was completed in 2004. County taxpayers are paying approximately $5 million annually on debt service for the facility plus $400,000 to maintain the empty building each year.

During his campaign in 2006, Multnomah County Commission Chairman Ted Wheeler vowed to open the Wapato Jail. Since then, however, county officials have repeatedly tried, but failed, to do so.

Most recently the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) rejected a county proposal to lease Wapato as a minimum-security alcohol and drug treatment facility. Citing declining prison population forecasts and unstable state funding, on February 10, 2010, ODOC Director and former state senator Max Williams testified before the legislature’s Ways and Means Committee that the state should postpone a decision about leasing the Wapato Jail. Williams acknowledged that the state expects significant prison growth by 2013, but recommended that officials wait until 2011 to reconsider options for increasing prison capacity.

ODOC officials claim they could complete construction on the department’s own stalled Junction City prison for about the cost of leasing Wapato. Additionally, at least $17 million in start-up costs, remodeling ...