by Matt Clarke

After a trio of federal court rulings in 2021 regarding the labor of immigrant detainees, the first one remained the clearest victory so far for plaintiffs. That was a decision on January 20, 2021, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, holding that detainee work programs at federal immigration detention centers operated by private companies are subject to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA).

Another decision that followed on March 5, 2021, presented the clearest loss, when a three-judge panel for the Fourth Circuit ruled that immigrant detainees were not “employees” of Tennessee-based CoreCivic covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA) at the New Mexico detention facility the firm operated for federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), so they were not owed minimum wage. [See: PLN, Dec. 2021, p.24.]

That was different from a verdict reached by a jury in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington on October 27, 2021, which will be the biggest win of all if it survives appeal. In that case Florida-based GEO Group, a CoreCivic competitor that operated a detention center in Tacoma for ICE, was ordered to pay $17.3 million in back ...

by Jacob Barrett

A recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit highlights the importance of producing expert testimony to refute assertions made by defendant health care providers that their inaction—especially when it results in the loss of an eye—is deliberately indifferent.

The Court’s decision on December 1, 2020, affirmed a lower court’s grant of summary judgment to Wexford Health Sources, Inc., and its fellow defendants, Dr. Anthony Carter and Dr. Kurt Osmundson, on the basis that James A. Donald, an Illinois prisoner under their care, failed to produce evidence that showed that Wexford and other defendants acted with deliberate indifference toward an objectively serious medical condition.

When Donald was convicted of drug crimes and sentenced to a term at Illinois River Correctional Facility (IRCF), he had two eyes. Now he has one. Prior to his incarceration, Donald had been diagnosed with glaucoma and keratoconus, a thinning of the cornea that causes distorted vision. To treat his keratoconus, he had left-eye corneal transplant surgery.

After he was imprisoned a few years later, his eye problems started flaring up, causing redness and poor vision. Donald was seen by Dr. Carter, an IRFC medical provider, who referred the ...

But Highlights Negligence of DOC and Wexford Health Staff

by Dale Chappell

Hinting that “another area of law” may provide relief, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on August 9, 2021, affirmed summary judgment of a lawsuit filed against the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) and its for-profit health contractor, Wexford Health Sources, in the suicide of an Illinois prisoners on their watch.

The Court acknowledged that the case painted a “sad picture” of the way Travis Fredrickson was treated in the Illinois prison system leading up to his suicide. Yet all of the errors and mishaps could not amount to a constitutional violation to support a federal lawsuit, so the Court reluctantly agreed with the district court’s dismissal of the suit.

It was no secret that Fredrickson struggled with suicidal thoughts. He’d tried to kill himself numerous times in prison and had been on suicide watch, or “crisis watch,” many times during his incarceration. But in a series of disciplinary transfers to other prisons, Fredrickson fell through the cracks. “Sloppy” was how the Court described prison staff’s conduct that led to Fredrickson’s death.

It also noted that he had been misled by staff when they told ...

by Chuck Sharman

Tennessee-based Corizon Health, one of the nation’s largest private for profit health care providers to prisons, with annual revenues of at least $800 million, announced on November 3, 2021, that it had received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) “to expand distance learning and telemedicine services to rural areas,” according to a company press release.

The grant from USDA’s Distance Learning and Telemedicine program totals $967,356, which Corizon promised to invest in “special equipment and a video conferencing platform to speak to and evaluate patients via video conferencing.”

“This is particularly important,” the firm added, when the patient is locked up “in a rural or remote area where the number of healthcare providers and specialty services available is limited or in some cases nonexistent.”
Yet that problem is itself a result of a conscious decision to move prisons and jails out of urban areas, so that “the most outsized jails are now in the least populous areas,” according to a June 2017 report from the Vera Institute of Justice.

An August 2017 report by the U.S. Census Bureau agreed, finding “that a disproportionate share of prisons and inmates are located in rural areas, while ...

by Jayson Hawkins

The private prison industry has been under fire recently across the country—from lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to federal policies mandating a slow and unsteady move away from for-profit prisons to scandals arising from inhumane conditions and rampant sexual assaults.

Feeling the heat from that fire—and with its flames fanned by a six-month grassroots lobbying campaign of the ACLU—Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) initially shied away from renewing the state’s contract with CoreCivic to operate Crossroads Correctional Center (CCC), a 664-bed prison located near the town of Shelby in the state’s remote Hi-Line region (named for being adjacent to the northernmost railway in the country.).

CoreCivic, the giant firm ($1.91 billion revenue in 2020) formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, is one of the largest for-profit prison operators in the country, and it has often found itself at the center of controversy. In fact, it is seen by many social justice advocates as a poster child for all that is wrong with the American criminal justice system, so the governor’s initial decision drew praise.

But on July 28, 2021, Bullock made an about-face and announced he was renewing the state’s contract with ...

by David M. Reutter

On December 11, 2021, New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court, County of Santa Fe, denied a motion to dismiss a suit filed by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of Prison Legal News (PLN) and Criminal Legal News (CLN), against Centurion Correctional Healthcare of New Mexico (Centurion) and the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD), seeking to pry loose public records from litigation related to the company’s provision of health care to New Mexico prisoners.

Centurion is a wholly owned subsidiary of Centene Corp., a massive $111.1 billion health insurer that also provides policies subsidized by Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and Tricare, the U.S. Department of Defense health insurance program.

On August 12, 2020, HRDC sent the company and NMCD requests “seeking all records of litigation,” including verdicts and settlements, “against Centurion and/or its employees or agents where Centurion and/or its insurers paid $1,000 or more to resolve claims” anytime “from January 1, 2010, to present.”

Centurion took over the contract to provide health care to NMCD prisoners on July 1, 2019, from another private firm, Corizon Correctional Healthcare, which had taken over from competitor Wexford Health Sources in 2013. But Centurion was then ...

by Jacob Barrett

On January 8, 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina approved a $2 million settlement to be paid by Buncombe County, North Carolina, for the wrongful death of Michele Quantele Smiley, a 34-year-old mother of six children left to die in a ...

A panel of judges in the Fourth Circuit agreed with the dismissal of an appeal brought by former ICE detainees held by CoreCivic at their Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico. The ruling was released March 5, 2021 in a case first filed in 2019.

Former ICE detainees who worked in the “voluntary” work program at the Cibola facility brought a federal lawsuit alleging they were employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and New Mexico Minimum Wage Act (NMMWA). They claimed they were not paid a fair wage and that CoreCivic was “unjustly enriched” by employing them.

Importantly, the parties agreed that the NMMWA should be interpreted in accordance with the FLSA and the unjust enrichment claim depended upon the success of their FLSA claim.

CoreCivic filed a motion to dismiss which the court granted after determining that the FLSA did not apply to immigration detainees because they were not “employees.” Minimum wage was not at issue in the lawsuit.

The detainees were represented in their appeal by attorneys Joseph M. Sellers, Michael Hancock, and Stacy N. Cammarano of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in Washington, D.C., and Robert S. Libman of Miner Barnhill & Gallard ...

by Ed Lyon

Regardless of what people without first-hand knowledge of prisons or detention centers believe, prisoners are generally not the blood-thirsty, brutal animals depicted in the media. In fact, especially in the face of SWAT-styled rapid response teams used within institutions, prisoners are mostly hopeless, helpless, often powerless individuals.

Even the most benign, traditionally-recognized form of protest used by prisoners to bring attention to and hopefully effect positive change for deplorable prison conditions—the hunger strike—is attacked by detention officials, courts and government agencies.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is charged with receiving, processing and detaining asylum seekers entering the country while their cases are reviewed. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Prisons, ICE does not own, staff and operate the majority of the detention facilities asylum seekers are housed in. Generally, private for-profit prison corporations build and staff these facilities and enter into contracts with ICE to house the detainees, supposedly within the policies, standards and rules set forth by ICE. Many local jails also house immigration detainees on a contract basis with ICE as well.

Hunger strikes have been occurring across the nation at these facilities since at least 2012, according to a June 2021 report by ...

In a landmark case, a federal jury decided against the GEO Group for paying $1 dollar a day wages to immigrant detainees at its privately-operated prison in Washington.

The facility in question is the Northwest ICE Processing Center (formerly the Northwest Detention Center) in Tacoma located on a toxic waste Superfund site and a lava flood zone. The 1,575-bed facility is run by GEO and holds detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is one of the largest facilities of its kind in the United States, although its population has dropped to about 400 since the pandemic.

On October 27, 2021, the jury found GEO was responsible to pay $17.3 million in back wages to more than 10,000 detainees who deserved a minimum wage, now $13.69 an hour. Additionally, U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan ordered GEO to return profits to Washington state in the amount of $5,950,340, and end its “voluntary” work program.

The lawsuit against GEO for what is essentially slave labor has been working its way through the federal courts for four years.

Detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center filed a lawsuit against GEO in 2017, with the assistance of the Seattle law firm of Schroeter ...