by Matt Clarke
The non-partisan Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report in February 2021 entitled, Immigration Detention: Actions Needed to Improve Planning, Documentation, and Oversight of Detention Facility Contracts. Key findings in the report included a failure of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to follow its own guidelines when contracting for immigrant detention beds and lax contract oversight putting the health and safety of immigration detainees at risk. The report concluded that ICE contracts and pays for thousands of immigrant detention beds it does not use wasting hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Although ICE detains an average of 48,500 foreign nationals each day and is the lead agency responsible for providing safe, secure, and humane confinement for detained foreign nations, it does not build and operate its own immigration detention facilities. Instead, when ICE needs to acquire detention space, it primarily uses Intergovernment Service Agreements (IGSAs) with local governments to reserve bed space for ICE detainees. 59% of ICE detainees are housed in IGSA facilities.
Alternatively, ICE may enter into an agreement with U.S. Marshals Services (USMS) to have a rider on the USMS contract with a local prison, jail or private detention facility allowing ICE ...
by Matt Clarke
Opposition by community leaders forced the president of the historically Black Tennessee State University (TSU) in Nashville to change her decision to join the board of directors of the private prison company CoreCivic.
News media reported that TSU President Glenda Glover had decided to join the board as a director with an over $200,000 annual salary. A CoreCivic news release quoted Glover as saying she wanted to help African-Americans and be “an inside voice that can help CoreCivic realize the full potential of its purpose of helping people prepare for the next step in their lives.”
“As the daughter of a civil rights leader, it is my belief that I would be in a better position to help the population that needs it most by speaking from the boardroom where decisions are made,” said Glover.
But the reaction from community leaders was swift and fiercely critical of her for agreeing to join the board of a company that profits off of mass incarceration and the disproportionate imprisonment of Black people.
“There can be no (rational) position for such a decision,” tweeted the Rev. Davie Tucker, Jr., leader of Nashville’s Beech Creek Missionary Baptist Church, who said the ...
by Ed Lyon
Kentucky in December 2020 reopened Otter Creek Correctional Center (OCCC), leasing it from CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), but staffing it with state employed Department of Corrections (DOC) staff. Its new name is the Southeast State Correctional Complex (SSCC) and it’s now a 621-bed prison, housing medium security males rather than the females it held as the OCCC.
Long-time readers of Prison Legal News are undoubtedly familiar with the scandal and corruption surrounding the for-profit private prison firm CCA. An in-depth article concerning CCA’s Otter Creek Correctional Center (OCCC) located in Wheelwright, Kentucky, appeared in PLN’s September 2011 issue.
That article laid bare OCCC’s inadequate medical care, lax oversight and unfettered abuse of prisoners and staff so brutal that one employee pulled a pistol in the warden’s office and shot herself dead. Kentucky and Hawaii finally removed their prisoners from that facility in 2012.
The prison’s reopening in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic was heralded as providing 270 jobs for Floyd County. The state legislature appropriated the needed funds to reopen and operate the prison for only a single fiscal year. Governor Andy Beshear stated the prison’s reopening occurred to ease the ...
by David M. Reutter
As Virginia was poised to consider a bill to end private prisons, the GEO Group entered the fray with donations to legislators and lobbyists. The bill met a quick and sudden death in senate committee.
Virginia has one private prison, Lawrenceville Correctional Center (LCC). The GEO Group is paid more than $2 million per month to manage the prison. LCC has been in the crosshairs of private prison critics.
“We’re incarcerating the people, and we have a responsibility for those inmates to do it right,” said state Senator Adam Ebbin, the Democrat who sponsored the bill that would prohibit the Virginia Department of Corrections from contracting with private prisons. “However, private prisons by contrast have a motive to make money, lowering their operating costs, hiring fewer employees and pay and train them less than state operated prisons.”
The GEO Group responded by touting its party line of being a well-oiled machine that runs efficiently. “If it ain’t broke, why are we trying to fix it?” asked Tyler Bishop, a GEO Group lobbyist. “Unlike government run facilities, contract facilities provide greater accountability because they are governed by detailed contracts and typically have on site, full time contract ...
by Juliette LaMarr
Washington Governor Jay Inslee in April 2021 signed House Bill 1090, which bans private, for-profit detention facilities in the state. According to the text of the bill, this includes “any facility in which persons are incarcerated or otherwise involuntarily confined for purposes including prior to trial or sentencing, fulfilling the terms of a sentence imposed by a court, or for other judicial or administrative processes or proceedings,” according to an April 14, 2021 story by the Tacoma-based immigrant rights group La Resistencia. Notably, the bill exempts some private facilities and cases of involuntary detention — such as in-patient treatment centers or public health quarantines.
Currently, there is only one private, for-profit detention camp in the state, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma. The facility is operated by the GEO Group on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As a result of the new law, it will close when the GEO Group’s contract comes to an end in 2025. Crucially, the law will also prevent any other private facilities from opening in the future.
There were a few major objections to the law — mainly from Republicans — about whether the government had the authority ...
by Margo Schlanger, University of Chicago Law Review Online, March 5, 2021
I. Introduction
Kamyar Samimi, a sixty-four-year-old legal permanent resident from Iran, died in U.S. immigration detention in December 2017. After more than four decades in the United States, he’d been confined at the Aurora Contract Detention Facility, a large immigration detention facility near Denver privately operated under a contract between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the GEO Group.
Samimi had taken methadone for twenty-five years, but facility medical staff cut him off and then, according to his family’s subsequent lawsuit, failed to treat his acute withdrawal despite his increasingly desperate pleas.2 His family alleges that it took just two weeks of neglect for him to die3 — the first of ten deaths of ICE detainees in fiscal year 2018.
The lawsuit against GEO is currently in discovery. It seeks damages for negligence and violation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which forbids disability discrimination in federal programs such as ICE detention. It alleges that GEO’s failure to accommodate Samimi’s disability — opioid use disorder — led to his inability to access mental health care, food, and water, and therefore violated the ...
by Matt Clarke
On November 12, 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that 18 U.S.C. §§ 111 and 1114, which criminalize assaulting federal officers, apply to private prison guards detaining federal prisoners. The court affirmed a federal prisoner’s conviction for punching a guard at a federally contracted privately operated prison.
Federal prisoner Derrick Grant was awaiting sentencing for an armed robbery conviction at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, a privately owned and operated prison, when he decided to punch the next guard he saw. He walked up to a female guard and punched her in the face, which caused bruising on her neck and jaw. He was charged with assaulting a designated person under § 111, eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 months’ imprisonment consecutive to his robbery term. With the assistance of Cincinnati attorney Anna M. Greve of Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, he appealed.
The Sixth Circuit noted that 18 U.S.C. §§ 111 and 1114 criminalize assaulting “any officer or employee of the United States … or any person assisting such an officer or employee in the performance of such duties.” It rejected Grant’s argument that the guard was not covered by § 111 ...
by Matt Clarke
On November 3, 2020, the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the nation, revealed that it had suffered a ransomware attack in August of that year that exposed sensitive personal information of employees, immigrant detainees and prisoners.
GEO said it was sending data-breach notification letters to all affected individuals, but the company was unaware of any fraud or misuse of the information.
GEO owns or operates 123 facilities with a total of around 93,000 beds and about 23,000 employees in the U.S., U.K. and South Africa.
In a ransomware attack, criminal hackers penetrate a computer system and encrypt vital data. The system’s user is then offered the encryption key in exchange for payment, generally using Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency.
The ransomware attack on GEO compromised data for prisoners at South Bay Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility in Florida, a Pennsylvania youth facility and a now-closed facility in California, as well as employee data on two corporate servers.
The data include medical treatment information, which is private under federal law, and information that could be used in identity theft such as name, date of birth, and Social Security number. GEO worked with law enforcement and ...
by Kevin Bliss
The Vermont Department of Corrections (DOC) and its medical health-care provider, Centurion Managed Care, have been under investigation by the Vermont Defender General’s Prisoners’ Rights Office (PRO) and the law firm of Downs Rachlin Martin after the death of Kenneth Johnson, a 60-year-old Black prisoner at Northern State Correctional Facility (NSCF).
A November 2020 report by Tristam Coffin of the Burlington-based law firm Downs Rachlin Martin, prepared at the request of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Smith, stated that Johnson repeatedly complained that he could not breathe but was nonetheless denied necessary medical attention, possibly due to his race. His findings closely mirrored a July 2020 report prepared by Matthew Valerio, defender general of the PRO.
Johnson had been admitted to the infirmary at NSCF in fall 2019, complaining of shortness of breath, hoarseness and difficulty swallowing. The preliminary diagnosis was possible chronic obstructive lung disease. He was placed on steroids and scheduled to see a specialist.
On December 6, 2019, Johnson started showing signs of respiratory distress. He began complaining that he could not breathe and was dizzy. He fell on his way to the bathroom and had to be escorted back to ...
by Kevin Bliss
Within the first six days of office President Biden signed the ‘‘First Step’’ executive order preventing the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) from renewing any of its contracts with private companies to run its prisons. Activists say the order was nothing more than a token gesture and should have included the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Biden campaigned on a platform promising to address problems in the corrections system. He said he intended to crack down on police and prosecutorial misconduct, reduce prison population and increase probation efforts, improve immigration conditions, and stop profiting off of prison privatization. He said he would ‘‘make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.
He had a ‘‘Day One’’ agenda of eliminating the Migrant Protection Protocols or ‘‘Remain in Mexico’’ policy, defining citizenship procedures to assist asylum seekers, and create a task force to reunite separated families. Once in office, he signed the United States Citizenship Act of 2021, largely making good on his promises. He signed orders ending the Muslim ban, fortifying protections for DREAMers, stopping construction on the border wall, and putting a ...
