On Dec. 2, 2005, Prison Legal News filed a civil suit against The Geo Group, Inc. (formerly Wackenhut Corrections) in the Circuit Court for Palm Beach, Florida, demanding access to public records held by the company.
The Geo Group is a for-profit company that operates privatized prisons, including two Florida prisons, and its contract-based fees are paid with public (taxpayer) funds. Pursuant to Florida's public records law, The Geo Group is required to produce requested public records pursuant to Public Records Law, F.S. 119.01(1).

Prison Legal News's editor, Paul Wright, submitted written public record requests to The Geo Group in April, 2005, requesting information related to lawsuits that resulted in settlements or verdicts against the company, as well as contract audits, violations and court-ordered injunctions. While The Geo Group provided a limited amount of information related to one category of the requested records, it ignored the other requests and never responded to a second record request submitted in September.

In its lawsuit, Prison Legal News alleges The Geo Group's failure to provide the requested public records is illegal, malicious and willful, and is designed to delay Prison Legal News from obtaining the records because they are critical of The Geo ...

The Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) has awarded three contracts for Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite monitoring of sex offenders. The contracts come on the heels on legislation that allocated $3.9 million over a three-year period to put certain sex offenders on lifetime GPS supervision, even if their sentences or parole terms have expired.
Two of the contracts will keep constant watch over child sexual predators as part of the Jessica Lunsford Act, which was named for a 9-year-old girl who was kidnapped and killed by a registered sex offender in February 2005. The Lundsford Act was passed unanimously by the Florida legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush on May 2, 2005. It requires a minimum 25-year sentence for offenders convicted of sexually assaulting a child 12 or younger plus lifetime electronic monitoring upon release, and expanded monitoring of sex offenders who commit crimes against older children. The act only applies prospectively; i.e., to crimes committed from the date of the legislation forward, but could apply to released sex offenders currently under state supervision.

The GPS monitoring contracts were initially awarded to Satellite Tracking of People (STOP) for northern Florida, and G4S Justice Services, a division of ...

Lane McCotter, once the director of the Utah Department of Corrections, has been appointed to a justice of the peace bench in Utah. The McCotter era remains a high-point of prison violence in Utah's history cumulating in the death of a prisoner who had spent 16 hours strapped naked to a restraining chair in 1997. Forced out of office two months after the restraining chair incident, McCotter became a prison consultant and an executive for Management Training Corporation, a Utah-based private prison company. Meanwhile, Utah ceased using restraint chairs in its prisons and settled the civil rights lawsuits against McCotter and the prison system for $200,000.

McCotter started his first job as prison system director in the Texas prison system in 1985. By 1987, he was forced out of that position by allegations that he intentionally erased portions of a videotape showing the beating of a handcuffed, shackled prisoner. McCotter claimed the erasure was an accident. From there, McCotter went to work as director of the New Mexico prison system, where he stayed until 1991. In 1992, he took over as head of the Utah prison system.

McCotter was hired by the federal government in 2003. He and three other ...

by Bob Williams

The United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has reversed the dismissal of a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 prisoner complaint against the CCA facility at Youngstown, Ohio, finding the complaint did state a claim of municipal liability against the District of Columbia who contracted with the Ohio-based private prison.

Morris J. Warren was a District of Columbia (the District) prisoner incarcerated at the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) prison in Youngstown, Ohio, pursuant to a contract between the CCA and the District. While there, Warren alleges he was subject to inhumane treatment including being forced to lie on a cold floor naked between 15 to 20 hours" every day; denied cell running water or toilet water [for] over 72 hours, weeks at a time;" tear gas sprayed in cells and pods daily; deprived of medication for a month; forced to endure a blood draw with others in his pod using common needles; and destruction of property. As a result, Warren claims he caught pneumonia, suffered a stroke, and was infected by yellow jaundice.

Warren claimed the District knew or should have known" about his treatment and did nothing to stop it. In support of this, ...

by Matthew T. Clarke

2005 has turned out to be a violent year in Oklahoma prisons. Between January and July, 2005, the prisons in Oklahoma suffered multiple riots, multiple murders of prisoners, and extensive probes of drug running.
The stage for 2005 was set in 2004. In 2002 and 2003, 274 state prisoners were given disciplinary write ups for possession of a weapon. In 2004 alone, 351 prisoners were given disciplinary writ ups for weapons possession. This prevalence of armed prisoners, combined with an acute shortage of guards in Oklahoma's state prisons, set the stage for an increase in prison violence. Thus, it was no surprise when in 2005 violence exploded in Oklahoma prisons with three state prisoners murdered by mid-July and several riots having occurred in that same time period.
Sometime in the night of January 29th to 30th, 2005, Ronald Stiles, 48, a prisoner at the Lawton Correctional Facility (LCF) was strangled to death. LCF is a private prison run by GEO Group, Inc. Stiles was serving 10 years for possession of contraband. His cell partner, Robert M. Cooper, 32, who is serving life without parole for a first-degree murder, is the main suspect.

On March 22, 2005, ...

A 500-bed federal detention center may have caused more problems than it solved for cash-strapped Willacy County, Texas. Three county commissioners have already been convicted of accepting kickbacks from companies involved with the prison, and a state senator's ties to three contractors has raised ethical questions. The detention center is now the focus of a federal bribery investigation and a lawsuit filed by the county.
Between June 2000 and March 2003, Willacy County commissioners Israel Tamez, 58, and Jose Jiminez, 67, accepted a series of bribes totaling more than $10,000 in exchange for their votes in awarding lucrative prison contracts. Both men pled guilty to bribery charges on January 4, 2004.
Also charged and convicted was David Cortez, 70, a former Webb County commissioner. Cortez plead guilty in May 2005 for conspiring to obstruct, delay and affect commerce" for helping secure a contract for the detention facility. He admitted funneling at least $39,000 to county commissioners to help an unnamed consulting firm get part of the prison contract.
Sentencing for Tamez and Jiminez was postponed until January 2006 pending the outcome of the continuing federal investigation; Cortez's sentencing also was postponed by the federal district court in a sealed order. ...

by John E. Dannenberg

A six percent increase in property tax collections due to soaring real estate prices will add an estimated $150 million to Los Angeles County coffers in the coming year. County supervisors have allotted $68.5 million of that to reverse the cutbacks in the County Sheriff's budget for jails in the past three years that have resulted in 200,000 prisoners being let out early, the vast majority after serving only 10% of their sentences.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca plans to hire 500 new deputies and add 4,474 new beds to the jail system, a 25% increase in capacity. High-risk offenders will be moved into the Twin Towers downtown jail in an effort to counter the pattern of five detainee murders in the past two years at the hands of under-supervised fellow prisoners. An additional 63 deputies will be hired to perform safety checks" on prisoners. This was in response to the infamous security breach wherein a high-risk prisoner was able to freely roam the Central Jail to seek out and murder the witness who planned to testify against him. [See: PLN, April, 2005]
Beginning in 2002, Sheriff Baca was forced by budget cutbacks to reduce ...

U.S. Corrections Corporation Stock Suit Settled for $13.2 Million

The former owners of U.S. Correctional Corporation (USCC) have agreed to settle a lawsuit over misuse of the employee stock-ownership plan for $13.2 million.

Prior to 1998, when it was purchased by Corrections Corporation of America for $225 million, USCC ran ...

By Silja Ja Talvi

Published: March 9, 2005

"Don't forget that Jesus himself was a prisoner."
--New Mexico Department of Corrections Secretary Joe Williams, at the
American Correctional Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, January 2005.

"Strongly guarded & is the separation between religion and government in
the Constitution of the United States."
--James Madison, author of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Betty Ramirez is a career correctional officer who actually loves her job.
She believes in the power of rehabilitation and redemption for the women
she is responsible for guarding and protecting. More than anything,
Ramirez believes they deserve a second chance.

Or a third, a fourth or a fifth, as the case may be. New Mexico's
recidivism rate is the nation's third highest and, by some estimates, up
to 85 percent of women who are incarcerated and released within this state
will end up back in prison.

Ramirez, nonetheless, believes in the potential for rehabilitation of even
the most hardened inmates. "Most of these women are sorry for what they
have done," she says, "But have run into bad luck and bad situations."

A petite woman with a powerful presence, Ramirez is one of the few
Corrections ...

Private Prison Firm Donates $53,000 To California's Governor Schwarzenegger

by Marvin Mentor

Newly-elected Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who boasted during his campaign that he "couldn't be bought," accepted $53,000 in November, 2003 from Wackenhut Corrections Corp., a Boca Raton, Florida-based private prison contractor. Wackenhut recently changed its name to Geo Corporation.

Geo, which operates four minimum-security facilities in California for the California Department of Corrections (CDC), was on the verge of having a 224 bed prison it operates at McFarland, California closed on December 31. Wackenhut President Wayne Calabrese told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview that they had also given $5,000 to Schwarzenegger's recall campaign against former Governor Gray Davis. Wackenhut's $58,000 was the largest amount they had given to any California politician.

Former Governor Davis was widely criticized for his acceptance of over $3.4 million in donations from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), the prison guards' union. "We were frustrated with the previous administration," Calabrese said. "We thought we should support a candidate and governor who has articulated support for public-private relationships.... We want to do everything we can to preserve our business base in California."

Geo's own Florida lobbyist, David Ericks, is close to ...