The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has held that a prisoner is not required to exhaust administrative remedies that jail officials do not let prisoners know exist. Additionally, the appellate court held that a jail official’s failure to promptly procure medical care for a pregnant prisoner who is leaking amniotic fluid constitutes deliberate indifference.

The matter was before the Court of Appeals after a U.S. District Court granted summary judgment to officials at the Lee County, Florida jail. On November 30, 2001, pretrial detainee Michelle Goebert, 41, was taken to a hospital because she had been leaking amniotic fluid for at least eleven days. Three days later her fetus’ heartbeat stopped, doctors induced labor, and the child was stillborn.

In her complaint, Goebert alleged that Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott, Captain Thomas P. Weaver and Dr. David Brown – an employee of EMSA Correctional Care, Inc., a subsidiary of Prison Health Services (PHS) – were deliberately indifferent to her serious medical needs. The district court’s summary judgment ruling was based on Goebert’s failure to exhaust administrative remedies as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA).

While that ruling applied to all the defendants, the court made different findings on ...

by Matt Clarke

In January 2009, the Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SWIRW) and the Bacon Immigration Law and Policy Program of the University of Arizona published a report on women held in Arizona immigration prisons. It dealt with three locations: Central Arizona Detention Center (CADC) and Pinal County Jail (PCJ), both of which are in Florence, and Eloy Detention Center (EDC) in Eloy. CADC and EDC are privately operated by Corrections Corporation of America under contract to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three are in small, remote desert towns far from the cities of Phoenix or Tucson.

The research was conducted by SWIRW researchers and trained law students who interviewed current and former prison-ers and attorneys, paralegals and social workers who work with the immigration prisoners. ICE, PCJ and CCA refused to allow their personnel to be interviewed.
Immigration prisoners are awaiting completion of an administrative process, not awaiting trial on criminal charges. Nonetheless, they are often treated worse than prisoners being held for felonies in the same prison.

“Few people realize that we are locking up huge numbers of immigrants every day and holding them for months and, in some cases, years at a time. They ...

by David M. Reutter

When 27-year-old Jonathan Magbie entered the District of Columbia Jail to serve a 10-day sentence, he was a quadriplegic confined to a mouth-operated wheelchair. Four days later he was dead.

D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith E. Retchin sentenced Magbie to jail after he pleaded guilty to ...

Leroy Holiday, Sr., 55, a regional warden for LaSalle Management Company, LLC (LMC), a private prison firm, was released on $5,000 bond after being arrested and booked into the LaSalle Parrish Jail in November 2008.

According to LaSalle Parish Sheriff Scott Franklin, Holiday was charged with improperly using prisoners and employees at a minimum-security prison for personal purposes. Franklin said Holiday had been charged with only one count of malfeasance, but his office had enough evidence to charge him with 40 additional counts and the investigation was ongoing.

Holiday was the warden of the LaSalle Correctional Center (LCC) in Urania, Louisiana, where the malfeasance is al-leged to have occurred. He also oversaw LMC-managed facilities in Catahoula, Concordia and Ouachita parishes.

LCC is run in cooperation with the sheriff’s office, which retains the ability to hire and fire employees and commission them for law enforcement. However, Franklin said Holiday was an employee of LMC, and referred questions about his employment status to company officials. Franklin also noted that Holiday’s law enforcement commission had been re-voked and he would not be allowed back on LCC grounds.

Source: www.thetowntalk.com

On October 31, 2008, a Hawaiian state court awarded $3,000 each in damages to three Hawaiian prisoners who were bitten by dogs while incarcerated at a private prison in Oklahoma.
Jonathan K. Lum, John Daffron and Frank Frisbee are Hawaiian state prisoners who were incarcerated at the Diamond Back Correctional ...

On November 7, 2008, prison guard Geno Lewis Hawkins was arrested by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and the Inspector General’s Office of the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) on a charge of sexual battery.

In August 2008, FDLE and FDOC initiated a joint investigation of Hawkins, a 43-year-old Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) employee, for having a sexual relationship with a female prisoner at the Gadsden Correctional Facility.

Hawkins was charged with one count of sexual battery and booked into the Leon County Jail without bond. His prose-cution is still pending.

In an unrelated case, Oregon Department of Corrections groundskeeper Paul William Golden, 37, was arrested on January 16, 2009 for sexually abusing six female prisoners at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility.

Golden worked as a landscaper at Coffee Creek from October 2004 until his April 2008 resignation, and supervised prisoner work crews. He was arraigned on 31 counts of custodial sexual misconduct, rape and supplying contraband, ac-cording to Lt. Gregg Hastings, a spokesman for the Oregon State Police. Golden has pleaded not guilty; his trial is set for June 23, 2009.

These are only two of numerous cases involving sexual abuse by prison staff nationwide, which ...

Cheney and Gonzales Indicted in Connection with Private Prison in Texas

by Matt Clarke

On November 17, 2008, a Texas grand jury returned an indictment against then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney and former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, charging Cheney with contributing to prisoner abuse in privately-run prisons and Gonzales with covering up the abuse by interfering with investigations.

The indictment named GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), CCA and Cornell Corrections as unindicted co-actors. It stated that Cheney and the companies, in a for-profit scheme, neglected federal prisoners by allowing them to be assaulted by other prisoners and denying them proper medical care, among other allegations.

Cheney’s ties with the private prison firms were twofold: (1) his $85 million investment in the Vanguard Group, which “appears on the top ten list of companies that house Federal detainees that are being rounded up by ICE officials,” and (2) his position as Vice President, through which he exerted “a tremendous influence on ICE and has a say in how much ICE will pay the said private prison per diem.”

The grand jurors stated it was “appalling to find that numerous elected officials from different levels of our government throughout our country to ...

Alaska prisoners may bring a third-party breach of contract claim against contract medical providers for medical negligence, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided August 28, 2007.

Joseph Miller, an Alaska prisoner, sued Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), asserting medical negligence and third-party breach of contract claims. The district court granted summary judgment for CCA on all claims. Miller appealed and the Ninth Circuit reversed.

In Rathke v. Corrections Corporation of America, 153 P.3d 303, 310 (Alaska 2007), the Alaska Supreme Court held that Alaska prisoners may sue CCA for breach of contract as they are the intended beneficiary of the state’s contract with CCA. In light of Rathke, the Ninth Circuit reversed the dismissal of Miller’s third-party breach of contract claim. See: Miller v. Corrections Corporation of America, 239 Fed. Appx. 396 (9th Cir. 2007).

Our cover story this month examines the travails of Geo Corporation, the second largest private prison company in the world in the state of Texas. We recently noted their pullout from the state of Pennsylvania. Also in this issue of PLN is the Texas court of appeals ruling upholding a $42 million wrongful death verdict against Geo. We are not singling Geo out. They are neither better nor worse than their colleagues in the private prison industry. Since its inception in 1990 PLN has opposed the private prison industry. In doing so we have never claimed or argued that government prisons were somehow “better” or a panacea of some sort. Rather the comparison is between rotten apples and rotten oranges.

But as the cover story illustrates, government prison officials are not hiring politicians and giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in “consulting fees” to push their “lock ‘em up agenda”. And when a prisoner dies because of short staffing, under trained guards or simple neglect, the warden at a government prison can’t expect to get a bonus for saving the company money. The most pernicious impact of the private prison industry has been its expansion of physical ...

Texas Court of Appeals Upholds $42.5 Million Award Against Wackenhut / GEO Group

by Matt Clarke

On April 2, 2009, a Texas Court of Appeals upheld a jury award of $22,000,000 in actual damages and $20,500,000 in punitive damages against Wackenhut Corrections (now known as GEO Group) in a lawsuit ...