by Keith Sanders

After a trial on November 3, 2021, a Missouri court ruled in favor of the state Department of Corrections (DOC) in a challenge to its decision replacing its private healthcare contractor Corizon with a competitor, Centurion Health.

At stake was a $1.4 billion seven-year contract to provide medical care to the state’s roughly 23,000 prisoners. Corizon, the largest for-profit prison healthcare provider in the country, had held the contract since 1992. But a spate of lawsuits and the company’s loss of contracts in Tennessee, Michigan, and Kansas prompted DOC to re-evaluate. It then granted its next contract to Centurion Health.

Corizon filed suit in state Circuit Court for Cole County, claiming that Centurion Health, a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Centene Corp., supplied false information in its bid proposal and participated in the bidding process in bad faith.

Specifically, the firm said that during a similar bidding process with the DOC in Tennessee, where Corizon is based, emails surfaced between the prison system’s chief financial officer, Wesley Landers, and a Centurion Health vice-president, Jeff Wells, showing that Landers provided Wells with internal documents regarding the contract. Centurion Health then won the bid, but the Tennessee DOC subsequently put ...

Brings total the firm is ordered to pay to $37.6 million

by Matt Clarke

On December 14, 2021, a Washington federal court issued additional orders in lawsuits against Florida-based private prison operator GEO Group for failing to pay immigration detainees the state-mandated minimum wage, adding over $14.3 million to the ...

On February 15, 2022, an on-going staffing crisis at Florida’s Citrus County Detention Facility (CCDF) prompted county officials to start fining its privately contracted operator, Tennessee-based CoreCivic, $2,500 a day for running the prison short-staffed. Three days later, on February 18, 2022, County Administrator Randy Oliver informed county commissioners that CoreCivic would have $77,500 deducted from its current invoice.

The fine is a wrist-slap for CoreCivic, which reported 2021 revenues of $1.86 billion. But it was sufficient to get company executives on their jet to the Florida jail, bringing along several temporary guards. The firm announced on February 10, 2022, that former CCDF Warden Mike Quinn and three other staffers were “no longer employed.”

That news followed the deaths of two female CCDF detainees. Lisa Ann Trombley, 48, jumped to her death from the second floor on October 17, 2021, three weeks after she was jailed for failure to appear on a charge alleging she violated her ex-husband’s restraining order with a text message to him. Valerie Susan Bogle, 63, was found dead of dehydration on November 2, 2021, in the isolation cell where she had been held since her arrest for battery four days earlier.

In his letter announcing ...

by Matt Clarke

On August 24, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that private companies providing health care for prisoners are not entitled to assert qualified immunity or appeal its denial.

The underlying case was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri by Brenda Davis and Fred Stufflebean after the death of their son, Justin A. Stufflebean, at the Buchanan County Jail (BCJ) on November 16, 2015. The 27-year-old had been held at the jail for the Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC) since his October 2015 sentencing for statutory rape.

During his sentencing hearing, Stufflebean’s physician testified that he suffered from Addison’s disease and hypoparathyroidism, endocrine disorders that “flare up” periodically, depress blood calcium levels, and can cause death in 24 to 48 hours if untreated. County Sheriff’s Deputy Brian Gross was present at the hearing and, afterward, walked Stufflebean across the street to the jail.

There, based on questions Gross answered, a fellow deputy, Dustin Nauman, entered “No” to answer intake form questions as to whether Stufflebean was:

• a medical, suicide, or mental health risk now;

• currently under a physician’s care; or

• a medical, mental health, or ...

by David M. Reutter

A settlement agreement setting out guidelines for care that the Vermont Department of Corrections (DOC) will provide to prisoners with Hepatitis-C was finalized on May 14, 2021, calling for enhanced screening of incoming prisoners and altering policies and procedures governing who can receive Direct-Acting Antiviral (DAA) ...

by Chuck Sharman

In a filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on January 5, 2022, Florida-based GEO Group—the nation’s largest private prison operator—laid bare its strategy to keep federal dollars flowing into the company’s coffers, despite a Presidential Executive Order that bars the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) from continuing to do business with the firm and its competitors when existing contracts expire.

When that order was signed by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) on January 26, 2021, critics, including PLN’s publisher, the Human Rights Defense Center, noted a huge loophole it left open by not extending its ban to the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the massive agency that includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which—because it owns few facilities of its own—housed the 20,866 immigrant detainees it held on January 16, 2022, in a sprawling network of some 200 contracted immigration detention facilities, including privately run facilities. [See: PLN, Mar. 2021, p.16.]

The new filing by GEO Group includes a “company overview” from November 29, 2021, in which the firm said it expects to report 2021 revenues of $2.3 billion despite losing $125 million in contracts canceled after Biden’s order by ...

by Kevin Bliss

On October 5, 2021, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down a California statute, Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32), barring private companies from entering new contracts with any government—including the federal government—to operate jails, prisons, or detention centers in the state after January 1, 2021, and setting a deadline of 2028 for all existing contracts to end. [See: PLN, Dec. 2020, p.30.]

The law was challenged in a pair of federal suits, the first filed by the Florida-based GEO Group on December 27, 2019, in which it said that closing the detention centers it operates in the state for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) would cost the firm $4 billion in lost revenue. The following month, on January 24, 2020, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ)—which was then operating under the administration of former President Donald J. Trump (R), a vocal opponent of immigration—also sued to block the law, arguing that AB 32 violated the ‘Supremacy Clause’ in Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which maintains that federal laws “shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”

After the cases were consolidated ...

by Matt Clarke

On June 3, 2021, a federal court in Illinois granted a state prisoner’s motion for sanctions against Wexford Health Sources for responding to a specific discovery request by providing 272,000 pages of documents it had converted into a nearly useless format.

With the assistance of Oakbrook attorney Daniel R. Flynn and his Pittsburgh co-counsel, Alec B. Wright, both with the law firm Leech Tishman Fuscaldo & Lampl, the prisoner, Donald Haywood, filed suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on March 23, 2016, accusing the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and Wexford, its privately contracted healthcare provider, of deliberate indifference to his serious mental health needs.

Defendants’ motion to dismiss Haywood’s original claim was granted by the Court on March 1, 2017. See: Haywood v. Wexford Health Sources, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 28416 (N.D. Ill.). His first amended complaint also succumbed to a motion for summary judgment by Defendants on June 5, 2019. See: Haywood v. Wexford Health Sources, 387 F. Supp. 3d 877 (N.D. Ill. 2019).

After his next amended complaint was filed, Haywood served a request on Wexford for production of documents, including “all ...

A lesson in why privatized prison health care is the wrong answer

by David M. Reutter

On Friday, January 18, 2022, three days before sentencing in a pay-to-play bribery and corruption scandal involving health care at the city jail in Norfolk, Virginia, attorneys for disgraced former sheriff Bob McCabe filed ...

by Kevin Bliss

On January 6, 2022, Ryan Shapiro, the 44-year-old founder of prison financial services firm JPay, was charged in federal court in Boston with conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Also named in the criminal complaint was Shapiro’s friend and neighbor in Florida, hedge fund manager Kris Bortnovsky, 40.

JPay was acquired in April 2015 by prison communications giant Securus Technologies, Inc. Both are now subsidiaries of Dallas-based Aventiv Technologies.

A third defendant, referred to in the probable cause affidavit as ‘Cooperating Witness 1’ (CW-1), provided incriminating evidence against the other two in return for leniency. The charging complaint lists a third defendant, David Schottenstein, 38, identified by the Miami Herald as a “member of one of America’s richest families.”

In a signed affidavit, CW-1 swore that he supplied insider information that Shapiro and Bortnovsky used to profit from the stock market on three separate occasions:

• just before a strong earnings report issued on August 22, 2017, by DSW, whose board includes two of Schottenstein’s cousins;

• just before a merger was announced on February 20, 2018, between Albertson’s and Rite-Aid, of which the same cousins had insider knowledge; and

• just before a hostile—and ultimately unsuccessful—takeover of ...