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 ...

Plans to de-privatize prisoner healthcare

by Ashleigh Dye

On December 11, 2021, the Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC) announced that the state Supreme Court had denied an Emergency Motion to Stay and Petition for Review filed by Armor Correctional Health, the private contractor whose termination DOC announced the previous July. ...

In an opinion reached on December 1, 2021, Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) in its suit seeking records from Armor Correctional Health Services, the contracted healthcare provider at the Palm Beach County jail.

HRDC, the nonprofit that publishes PLN, made its request to Armor under § 119.07(1)(a) Fla. Stat. (2021). The healthcare company responded that it was unable to comply. HRDC then filed suit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, where Armor is headquartered, seeking to compel production of the records. But Judge Beatrice Butchko denied the petition, accepting Armor’s contention. HRDC filed an appeal.

The Third District Court, observing that the right to access public records is one of constitutional magnitude, said disclosure is not a discretionary act. Even if the request could not be met for some reason outside of Armor’s control, the Court continued, an evidentiary hearing was still necessary to ensure that the refusal was factual and lawful, citing Clay Cnty. Educ. Ass’n v. Clay Cnty. Sch. Bd., 144 So. 3d 708, 710 (Fla. 1st DCA 2014), as well as Grace v. Jenne, 855 So. 2d 262, 263 (Fla. 4th DCA 2003).

The physical loss ...

We looked at all fifty state departments of corrections to figure out which companies hold the contracts to provide money-transfer services and what the fees are to use these services.

by Stephen Raher and Tiana Herring, Prison Policy Initiative

As people in prison are increasingly expected to pay for everyday costs (food, hygiene items, correspondence, etc.), the mechanics of how people send money to incarcerated people assumes heightened importance. Family members used to mail a money order to a PO box, and a day or two later, the money would be in the recipient’s trust account. [The term “trust account” is a term of art in the correctional sector, referring to a pooled bank account that holds funds for incarcerated people whose individual balances are sometimes treated as subaccounts. The term “trust” is used because the correctional facility typically holds the account as trustee, for the benefit of the individual beneficiaries (or subaccount holders).]

In those days, the most common complaint from family members and incarcerated recipients used to be about delays in processing money orders. Quick to use consumer psychology to turn a buck, a whole industry arose to provide faster—but vastly more expensive—electronic money transfers to incarcerated people. ...

On October 19, 2021, auditors for Dallas County, Texas, reported to commissioners that lax oversight allowed an employee in the county Sheriff’s Department (DCSD) to use hundreds of damaged debit-release cards to draw almost $700,000 from a trust fund for prisoners at the county jail—leaving the account $85,000 in the red.

Prisoners and detainees have their cash confiscated at booking and placed in trust fund accounts, which they can then add to and use for commissary purchases. When leaving the jail, they are given a debit card with the balance of their trust account on it.

After the county received notice that the prisoner trust fund was $85,000 overdrawn, an investigation uncovered the scheme and traced it to an employee, DCSD clerk Umeka Myers. She had worked for the agency 26 years when she was arrested and fired in April 2021. She was charged with property theft and is awaiting trial.

She had apparently discovered that damaged cards, thought to be unusable, were actually functional. Using 306 of them, she created duplicates of cards given to released prisoners, double-billing the county for almost $700,000 before she was caught. There was no policy or procedure to dispose of damaged cards then. ...