by Matthew T. Clarke

On September 21, 2004, a Travis County, Texas, grand jury handed down 33
felony indictments against people and corporations associated with
Republican U. S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom Delay and the
Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee (TRMPAC). The
indictments included two first-degree felony charges of money laundering
and thirty third-degree felony counts of accepting, soliciting or making
illegal campaign contributions. First-degree felonies in Texan carry a
maximum of life in prison and a $10,000 fine while third-degree felonies
carry a maximum of ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Corporations
convicted of third-degree felonies may be fined up to $20,000.

The scandal centers around illegal corporate contributions made to TRMPAC
that were funneled on to state legislative political campaigns. The
contributors included: Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care ($100,000);
Diversified Collection Services, Inc., California ($50,000); Sears Roebuck
and Co., Illinois ($25,000); The Williams Companies, Inc., Oklahoma
($25,000), Westar Energy, Kansas ($25,000); Cracker Barrell, Tennessee
($25,000); Bacardi USA, Florida ($20,000); Questerra. Corp., Virginia
($25,000); and Cornell Companies, Inc., Texas ($10,000)--the third-largest
private prison corporation in the U.S., which operates 71 correctional
facilities nationwide for federal, state and local governments.

According to ...

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 has tanked by over 55% from March 2005 to October 2006, based largely on negative publicity from PHS. Even more disturbing is that PHS is the nation's largest for-profit provider of prisoner health care, with 110 contracts in 37 states, meaning that its low-budget solution to prisoners' health needs has become bad medicine for an increasing number of our nation's prisoners. This report is an update to PLN's six earlier reports since 2002 on PHS's sordid performance (see, e.g., PLN, May 2005, p.34 and Aug. 2005, p.1).

Alabama

Alabama's Department of Corrections (ADOC) has been the target of major federal-court ordered health care reform at the Tutwiler, Limestone and Donaldson prisons, and continues to be troubled turf for PHS. On March 6, 2005, 53-year-old insulin-dependent diabetic Teresa Morris died of what PHS called natural causes at the Tutwiler Prison for Women. Visibly unnatural, however, was Morris' condition at the time ...

by Michael Rigby

Documents filed as part of a $204 million lawsuit directly, contradict the
Virginia Department of Correction's (DOC) initial assertion that a stun gun
played no role in the death of Lawrence James Frazier, and may implicate
Correctional Medical Services (CMS) in a wider coverup. The documents were
filed in federal district court in Roanoke between July and October, 2003,
as part of the lawsuit brought by Frazier's family against the DOC, CMS,
and prison doctor Larry Howard.

Frazier, a diabetic, was one of roughly 500 Connecticut prisoners being
held in Virginia prisons under state contract. The lawsuit contends that on
June 29, 2000, while imprisoned at the Wallens Ridge State Prison, a
Virginia supermax, Frazier was repeatedly hit with 50,000 volts from the
Ultron II stun device as he struggled with guards. Frazier, bleeding from
the mouth, was then strapped to a gurney and left unattended; he lapsed
into a diabetic coma and died five days later. A coroner's report
determined that Frazier, 50, died of a heart problem "due to stress while
being restrained following stunning with the Ultron II stun device."
Soon after Frazier's death, the DOC commissioned a study by a private
consultant. Not ...

by Gary Hunter


Bobby Whitworth, former Corrections Commissioner and Parole Board Member, was booked into the Fulton County Jail on Friday, July 25, 2003. Charged with felony public corruption, Whitworth, 56, is the first such official ever to be indicted on corruption charges in connection with his duties. Whitworth's career with the Georgia DOC spanned nearly three decades. He started in the Farm Services Division in 1973, moved up to Corrections Commissioner in 1990 and was appointed to the Parole Board in 1993.


Neither was Whitworth a stranger to scandal. His move from Corrections Commissioner to parole board member resulted from his mishandling of a sex scandal at a women's prison. As a board member Whitworth went on to become one of the most influential figures in Georgia Corrections history. Whitworth, and then Parole Board Chairman Walter Ray, brokered multiple million-dollar deals between private businesses and Georgia Corrections for handsome "consultation" fees. Whitworth's influence-peddling is what led to his current troubles [PLN, Mar. 2003].


Chief witness for the prosecution is none other than Walter Ray, who was forced to resign his position along with Whitworth when the scandal broke. Ray turned state's evidence after special prosecutor Pete Skandalakis conveniently cleared ...

By Silja JA Talvi, Santa Fe Reporter

Prison program sparks lawsuit. Faith-based initiatives are all the rage these days, particularly when hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding have been available to programs and agencies that tow the religion-and-social-services approach favored by the Bush administration.

When the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) started looking into New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's willingness to sign on as one of 26 governors who agreed to establish their own faith-based offices, they discovered that the state already had a sprinkling of such programs
underway.

One of the programs that piqued the FFRF's interest was the Christian-based Life Principles/Crossings residential segregation pod, housed within the Corrections Corporation of American (CCA)-run New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility in Grants.

FFRF sought out more information on the prison program, and located a March 9, 2005 SFR cover story, Beyond the God Pod: A new era of Christian programs makes life better for some women prisoners--the ones who believe.

That story was the result of a day-long visit to NMWCF, which sparked an ensuing investigation into CCA's plan to extend this residential religious model to all of its other privately owned prisons in the US, in partnership with a ...

The latest development in the unsavory Texas VitaPro scandal is the jailing of a court reporter for botching the transcripts in the VitaPro trial.


In 1995, George W. Bush was the governor of Texas and James "Andy" Collins ran the Texas prison system which was involved in a multi-billion dollar rapid expansion. Ballooning from 35,000 to 150,000 prisoners in seven years, the prison system had been allowed special "emergency" contracting powers, sidestepping state bidding requirements. During that time, Collins used the special procedures to defraud the taxpayers out of millions of dollars. The fraud took many forms, but inevitably resulted in single-bid contracting on such items as razor wire and the inedible VitaPro meat substitute.


Shortly after he retired, amid rumors of a pending state indictment, Collins gave an interview to Texas Monthly magazine which appeared in the May 1996 issue. In the interview, Collins stated that people well above him in state government were involved in the VitaPro scam and that he would take them down with him if the State of Texas indicted him. The only person above Collins in the governmental hierarchy was the governorGeorge W. Bush. The state did not indict Collins.


In January 1998, one ...

Correctional Medical Services (CMS), a private provider of medical services to jails and prisons, lost a jury verdict in a case brought by a former Lake County, Illinois, Jail prisoner's estate alleging that CMS violated the prisoner's constitutional rights, resulting in his suicide. The jury awarded compensatory damages to the ...

According to the Toronto Star, on September 20, 2002, more than a hundred prisoners at the privately-run Superjail in Penetanguishene, Ontario, used a battering ram to attempt an escape. According to the Ontario Provincial Police, the prisoners, who were armed with homemade weapons and equipped with crude gas masks, breached several layers of security. However, Central North Correctional Centere (CNCC) officials, speaking to reporters later that day, refused to confirm that a battering ram or weapons were used. According to them, the disturbance was limited to a 175-man housing area and all of the prisoners were back in their cells less than two hours after the disturbance began.


CNCC is run by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), a Utah-based private prison company. It was designed to help replace 20 older jails around the province. The plan calls for two more superjails in Maplehurst and Linsday and envisions savings of $500 million a year.


The superjail has a total of 1,184 beds, 32 of which are designated for women. Prisoners at CNCC consist of about 1,000 serving up to a day less than two years and around 200 pretrial detainees. According to a confidential provincial cabinet document leaked in 2000 the ...

A Florida Jury awarded a Martin County Jail guard, Ronald Keeler, $515,813 against a private medical provider. Keeler sued Correctional Physician Services (CPS), who provided medical care to jail prisoners, and New Horizons of the Treasure Coast, Inc., who was a subcontractor to provide mental health services to prisoners. Prisoner ...

It is often said that you can tell a lot about a society by checking the condition of its prisons. Based on the way prisoners in Alabama are treated (or, more accurately stated, not treated), citizens of that state have a lot to be worried about. With only a few months left to go on his sentence for marijuana possession, 43-year-old prisoner Timothy Oliff caught a cold that he just couldn't shake. Oliff's complaints went ignored by prison health care workers at the Elmore Correctional Facility until several days later when he became so ill that fellow prisoners had to carry him to the gate for emergency help.


Three days later Oliff died at the Montgomery Baptist South Hospital. Although neither prison officials nor hospital brass would comment on his death, Oliff's sister, Diane Aman, said doctors at the hospital told her he had died of pneumonia and had the worst stomach infection they'd ever seen. Aman also said they told her that prison health care workers had been too late in getting Oliff to the hospital for the emergency care he needed.


Also refusing to comment on his death are officials of NaphCare, Inc., the for-profit company that, until ...