Wisconsin "Boondoggled" Into Buying Broken Down New Private Prison

After buying a private prison for $87.1 million, the Wisconsin Legislature is crying foul upon discovering the Stanley prison violates electrical, plumbing, and safety codes that will cost $5 million to repair. It's turning out that the entire situation, from the building of the prison to its purchase by taxpayers, was influenced by political lobbyists who had legislators on the take.

The Stanley prison, which confines 1,511 prisoners, was built by Dominion Asset Services in Edmond, Oklahoma. To build a prison in Wisconsin, the Legislature and Governor must agree with what is needed and the Building Commission must formally approve the plan. That process was circumvented to build the Stanley prison.

After the prison was built Attorney General, now Governor, Jim Doyle advised legislators that no prisoners could be housed at the prison unless the state leased or bought it. Dominion went into action after that opinion was issued in 2001.

Dominion hired lobbyists to push the Legislature to buy the prison. To help grease that wheel, Dominion gave $125,000 to Independent Citizens for Democracy, a campaign group illegally controlled by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala (D-Madison). That changed Chvala's position ...

Florida's Department of Corruption

by David M. Reutter

An underlying principle of our penal system is to instill respect for the laws and rules that govern our society. As such, those charged with running our nation's jails and prisons have an ethical obligation to set an example for all citizens, including employees under their watch and prisoners in their custody. Investigations of the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC), however, have revealed that more often FDOCS leaders are seeking to emulate the criminal acts of prisoners.

Where you follow, so shall you go. Prisoners, by their lot, are unemployed and confined in jails or prisons. As of August 2006, more than 50 key upper-level FDOC staff members have been fired or forced to retire. An additional 21, including former FDOC Secretary James V. Crosby, have been arrested and indicted. They are being transformed from the watchers to the watched.

To those familiar with FDOC's inner workings, the revelations come as no surprise. Everybody likes to use the phrase good ole boys club, thats what it is out there and they protect one another. There is a code of silence, says a former guard identified by First Coast News as Dave.

But ...

Florida Prison Canteen Operator's Offices Raided

by David M. Reutter

Agents from the FBI and Florida Department of Law Enforcement raided the office of American Institutional Services (AIS) on June 7, 2006 and seized the companys business records. AIS ran weekend visiting park canteens within the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC), and following the raid AIS was banned from further operations at FDOC facilities.

AIS was a subcontractor of St. Louis-based Keefe Commissary Network, which has operated all FDOC prison canteens since winning a no-bid contract in October 2003. [See: PLN, February 2006, p.22]. In 2004, Keefe took over operations of visiting park canteens and subcontracted with AIS to manage that part of its prison operations. Keefe has since taken over full operations of the visiting park canteens. We readily agreed to assume those duties, said Keefe spokesman Pat Farrell. Considering how prisoners and their families are being price-gouged, its understandable why Keefe was so eager to capitalize on that captive market.

A preliminary report indicated that FDOC was losing money on the visiting park canteen operations, but no explanation of how much money was being lost or how that occurred was given.

AIS is owned by Gainesville businessman Edward ...

by John E. Dannenberg

Aramark, Inc. is a Philadelphia-based $10 billion/yr. Fortune 500 company providing diverse institutional food services. Its Illinois-based subsidiary, Aramark Correctional Services, Inc., (ACSI), which bought out Wackenhut's Correctional Foodservice Management division in 2000, contracts with 450 prisons and jails in 40 states, serving over 300,000 prisoners. In addition to food, it provides commissary services, laundry services, maintenance, and vocational prisoner training in food services. But Aramark's record is replete with allegations of making political donations to gain contracts, over billing on their contracts, skimping on food portions, maintaining poor sanitation, and offering poor food quality. Contracts have not been renewed, fines have been levied and Aramark employees have been arrested for smuggling contraband into prisons. This report chronicles Aramarks checkered past in 19 states and Canada.

Colorado

At the El Paso County Jail in 2005, many of the 1,300 prisoners filed suit in the 4th Judicial District against foodservice contractor Aramark and the jail, claiming that Aramark's food fails Colorados statutory requirement for good and sufficient food for prisoners. Claims included repetition (turkey was served for five consecutive meals), spoiled fruit, and a 25% reduction in portion size beginning in March 2005. The situation was so ...

Many of the problems associated with imprisonment in the U.S. high staff turnover, prisoner neglect and abuse, and the introduction of contraband by employees, for example can be attributed to the paltry salaries and few benefits that most guards receive. But while low-paid guards must make do with their miserly paychecks, those at the top of the prison hierarchy especially the executives of private prison companies are living lives of lavish excess.

Like those they watch over, many prison guards make a barely livable wage. In Mississippi, for example, the starting salary for state prison guards is $19,620 a year; in Tennessee its $21,000 and in Alabama $25,352. These salaries are generally far less than those of their bosses. For instance, the commissioner of the New York Department of Corrections (DOC) makes $136,000 a year, and Californias top prison official earns $129,000. At the Bureau of Prisons, where annual pay for guards starts at $34,000 to $35,000, the BOP commissioner draws a healthy $160,000 salary. The dichotomy is perhaps most striking in Texas, however, where Brad Livingston, Executive Director of the Department of Criminal Justice, rakes in $165,000 a year more than 7 times the $22,400 starting salary of a ...

by David M. Reutter

Despite mainstream media pressure, public outcry, and a federal investigation, the Delaware Department of Corrections (DDOC) continues to keep its head in the sand about prisoner health care. Not surprisingly, it has resulted in another prisoner's death.

PLN reported the deplorable health care given to DDOC prisoners. See: PLN, Dec. 2005, pg 1. The Delaware Legislature, as we reported, refused to provide money to upgrade that care.

The latest DDOC prisoner death occurred at Young Correctional Institution (YCI). In the early morning hours on May 30, 2006, guards found Thomas J. Burns hanging in his cell. Burns had only been off suicide watch for a few hours.

Burns' saga began when police arrested him on a forgery arrant. When arrested, he was found at his sister's house in the midst of a suicide attempt, using pills and alcohol. He was taken to Christina Hospital, where he remained until taken to YCI.

Once at YCI, Burns, 56, was placed in a strip cell on suicide watch. Despite phone calls by mental health advocates to warn YCI that Burns would kill himself, a Correctional Medical Services counselor decided Burns could be removed from suicide watch. Within hours of ...

by John E. Dannenberg

On March 30, 2006, the U.S. District Court, N.D. Cal., ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to pay its backlog of overdue medical subcontractors bills within 60 days. The bills, some as old as four years, and totaling $58 million, had been submitted by contract medical providers at all of the 33 CDCR prisons, but not paid purely due to bureaucratic gridlock. As a result of non-payment, some providers were refusing to provide needed services, putting constitutionally adequate medical health care at risk.

Upon recommendation of the court's recently appointed CDCR health care receiver (see: PLN, Mar. 2006, p.1, Federal Court Seizes California Prisons Medical Care; Appoints Receiver With Unprecedented Powers), the court responded to the receivers emergency request to break the obvious logjam that was impeding prisoner medical care. The court called this yet another chilling example of the inability of the CDCR to competently perform the basic functions necessary to deliver constitutionally adequate medical health care, adding, the abdication not only threatens the health and lives of inmates but also has significant fiscal implications for the State.

The court referred to the March 27, 2006 report of its appointed Correctional Expert ...

by John E. Dannenberg

Prison Health Services (PHS), a subsidiary of America Service Group, Inc. (ASG), continues to face lawsuits and lose contracts for its deplorable record of prisoner health care gaffes in a dozen states. The old maxim Physician, heal thyself might be good advice for ASG, whose stock ...

Floridas Civil Commitment Center Under Funded and Out-of-Control

by David M. Reutter

When first created in 1999, Florida's Civil Commitment Center (FCCC) was hyped as a place to house sexually violent predators for protection of the public while providing sex offender treatment after completion of criminal sanctions.

Instead, FCCC has turned into a facility that treats less than one-third of its residents while releasing those who receive no treatment. To date, not one resident has completed the treatment regimen, but over 200 formerly-incarcerated sex offenders have been released from FCCC. A state audit found that FCCC failed to provide a therapeutic atmosphere; drug and alcohol use was routine, sex between staff and residents was not uncommon, pornography was available, and a racially-charged tension existed.

FCCC was created due to a 1998 law commonly referred to as the Jimmy Ryce Act, in memory of a 9-year-old Miami-Dade County boy who was kidnapped at gunpoint, sexually assaulted, murdered and buried inside several large planters by a handyman. The law allows for persons deemed sexually violent predators to be confined indefinitely beyond the expiration of their criminal sentence.

Initially, FCCC was located within a former drug treatment center adjacent to Martin Correctional Institution. ...

by John E. Dannenberg

Settling a long-simmering dispute in billing rates for medical treatment of jail prisoners, San Diego County has agreed to pay $1.5 million to multiple hospitals for bills dating back over three years. The health care providers had sued the county in 2004 to recover unpaid bills incurred by its Sheriff's Department. The agreement does not cover some emergency room doctors who have sued separately.

State law requires sheriffs to pay for medical care for their jail prisoners. To this end, the San Diego County Sheriff contracted to pay specified rates for prisoner care, but in 2003 unilaterally notified the hospitals that he would now only pay a lesser scale. The hospitals responded by submitting full-billed charges, which the sheriff proceeded to underpay. The full-billed charges came to $5 million. The settlement now calls for the county to pay $1,457,717 to the involved hospitals, on top of the $700,000 paid earlier.

The agreement permits the county to appeal one remaining question, namely whether the sheriff is responsible for medical costs of pre-arraignment detainees. The San Diego Superior Court ruled in October 2005 that the county is so obligated. [Note: Reversal of this holding would have the anomalous ...