by David M. Reutter
On January 6, 2021, a federal court in California issued an injunction extending the provisions of a temporary restraining order it had handed down two weeks earlier and excoriated officials from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and their private prison contractor, the GEO Group, for their lies to the court and “abominable performance” in protecting immigrant detainees from COVID-19 at the Mesa Verde Detention Center near Bakersfield.
This was the second preliminary injunction Judge Vince Chhabria had granted in the case. A June 2020 ruling had left it up to ICE and the GEO Group to develop their own plan to test newly arriving detainees at the facility for COVID-19 and to isolate those who tested positive. The judge said that his prior ‘‘decision to avoid being intrusive turned out to be a mistake.’’
The lawsuit that sparked these rulings was filed in April 2020 by immigrant detainees who accused ICE of unconstitutional indifference to their risk of contracting the coronavirus at the Mesa Verde facility. They were joined in the suit by a separate group of ICE detainees at another California facility, the Yuba County Jail, which is not privately operated.
Ruling for the ...
by Matt Clarke
Once darlings of Wall Street, CoreCivic and GEO Group — the nation’s two biggest publicly traded private prison companies — have suffered a precipitous drop in stock prices, following a pressure campaign by foes of mass incarceration that has resulted in divestment of their stock by major investment funds and loss of credit at most American banks. Combined, the companies incarcerate 10% of U.S. prisoners and 80% of its immigrant detainees.
At the close of trading the first week of 2021, both firms’ stocks were significantly off their 52-week highs achieved the previous winter, before the March 2020 market crash related to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the broader market had largely recovered, shares of Florida-based GEO Group, the larger of the pair with nearly $2.5 billion in 2019 revenues, had lost over half their value, tumbling 53 percent to close at $8.68. Tennessee-based CoreCivic, which recorded just under $2 billion in 2019 revenues, had seen its stock price fall even farther — 63 percent — to close at $6.69.
As a result of its declining market value, CoreCivic was demoted in August 2020 from the S&P Midcap 400 to the S&P SmallCap 600, indexes used by investors ...
by Douglas Ankney
An October 15, 2020 report from the Santa Fe New Mexican revealed that in March 2020, the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) paid $1.4 million to settle a whistleblower complaint that exposed deficiencies of private health-care provider Corizon Correctional Health Care (Corizon) and the NMCD’s failure to ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 19, 2020, the parents of a prisoner who committed suicide a year earlier at a privately operated Tennessee prison filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Nashville-based CoreCivic, alleging the company’s employees ignored threats and attempts by the prisoner to kill himself as well as his history of mental illness.
The incident and subsequent cover-up attempts led to a futile referral for criminal prosecution, though two employees were dismissed by CoreCivic, the nation’s second-largest private prison operator with 2019 revenues of $1.981 billion.
According to a report by The Jackson Sun, CoreCivic’s four Tennessee prisons have a suicide rate nearly double that of prisons operated by the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC), accounting for 63 percent of the state’s prisoner suicides despite holding just 35 percent of the prisoner population.
Addison Smith, 27, was transferred to the South Tennessee Correctional Center in Clifton from the firm’s Trousdale Turner Correctional Facility in Hartsville on July 23, 2019. He was placed in administrative segregation because of suicide attempts and hallucinations dating back to his initial bipolar disorder diagnosis at age 10. He told a mental health counselor at the prison that he had been off his psychiatric ...
by Douglas Ankney
On July 31, 2020, a motion was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri revealing that CoreCivic and Securus Technologies (Defendants) had agreed to pay $3.7 million to settle a lawsuit alleging illegal recording of attorney-client conversations at the Leavenworth Detention Center ...
by Kevin Bliss
An analysis published on October 26, 2020 by Reuters showed U.S. jails that contracted with private health care companies had higher death rates on average among prisoners and detainees than those with government-run health-care programs. Reuters reviewed over 500 jails and found that of the five leading health-care contractors — Corizon, Wellpath Holdings Inc., NaphCare, PrimeCare Medical Inc. and Armor Correctional Health Services Inc. — death rates ran anywhere from 18% to 58% higher.
The 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that deliberate indifference to a jail detainee’s health care constituted “unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain,” violating the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment and opened the door for those in the jails’ care to file suit and hold the jails accountable. Subsequently, the 1980s saw the birth of the private health-care industry to help cover costs and shoulder this responsibility.
Next, the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 2000s saw the closure of mental health hospitals and ensuing growth of county jail populations and therefore, the private health care industry. By 2010, 62% of the nation’s jails had privatized medical care.
But Reuters points out that utilization of the health care industry ...
Corizon Health paid $40,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging it beached a contract with Nursefinders.
The February 26, 2016, settlement resolved a lawsuit Nursefinders filed in a Virginia state court, but which was removed to a federal court, on March 20, 2015.
Nursefinders employs nurses and other health-care professionals for ...
by Matt Clarke
Members of National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) maintained their place at the forefront of the movement for racial justice even while encapsulated in the National Basketball Association (NBA) bubble during the 2020 championship playoffs. The basketball court inside the Disney World bubble was proudly emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter” with an impossible-to-miss font size.
NBPA members went on a three-day playoff strike in August 2020, triggered by the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was left paralyzed, shot seven times as he leaned into a car. The strike resulted in an agreement between the league and players to establish a social-justice coalition and associated advertising with a focus on civic engagement, ballot access and reform of police and the criminal justice system. Franchises that own their own arenas pledged to “work with local elections officials to convert the facility into a voting location for the 2020 election.”
Yet the players and league were strangely silent about one of the owners exploiting incarcerated individuals for profit.
As reported in The American Prospect, Tom Gores, the owner of the Detroit Pistons NBA franchise, is a billionaire who founded Platinum Equity, a private ...
by Ed Lyon
In late July 2020, about 30 protesters stood all day in the rain in Bailey Park near the Forsyth County Detention Center (FCDC) in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to demand answers and action from Sheriff Bobby F. Kimbrough, Jr., and District Attorney Jim O’Neill in the death of John Neville, a Black prisoner who died in December 2019 from injuries sustained at the jail.
Just before Neville, 56, lapsed into a coma at FCDC on December 2, 2019, he managed to rasp to the sheriff’s deputies and jail nurse who had hogtied him, “I can’t breathe.” Two days later, on December 4, 2019, he died at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center without ever having regained consciousness.
In the interim, Kimbrough’s office got O’Neill’s office to drop its charges against Neville. As a result, the death did not technically occur in custody, so the sheriff was relieved of any duty to report its details to the state Department of Health and Human Services. The death was not publicly reported for six months and then only under pressure from the Winston-Salem Journal.
“It sounds like they rushed to get him out of custody so they would not have ...
by Derek Gilna
On October 22, 2020, New Jersey federal district court Judge William J. Martini ended a seven-year class action brought by New Jersey Department of Correction (DOC) prisoners complaining of excessive phone fees levied by Global Tel*Link (GTL), approving a settlement fund of $25 million. Prisoners had alleged that the company charged up to 100 times the actual cost of calls made from jail, stemming in part from of the practice of GTL paying high commissions to participating correctional institutions.
Under the terms of the settlement, individuals incarcerated in New Jersey prison and jails between 2006 and 2016 who used the GTL phone system, as well as individuals who received telephone calls through the company from New Jersey prisoners before June 2010 or in Essex County, N.J., before June 2011, would be able to file claims.
GTL also had been heavily criticized for requiring people receiving calls from a prisoner to make deposits into a company account and then keeping those deposits if the accounts became “inactive,” generally after the prisoner had been released. Plaintiffs had alleged in their initial complaint that, “Defendants fail(ed) to inform their customers that they will be charged a service or set-up fee ...
