by Casey Bastian
Very few criminal offenses in America allow for a sentence of death. Nevertheless, too many people are dying in jails and prisons while serving a sentence or simply waiting for the process to slowly grind its way to a resolution. Oftentimes people can’t make bail for even minor offenses and see their health quickly deteriorate. Hundreds have died from complications of what are normally routine medical issues like diabetes or blood clots due to lack of adequate medical care—and that was before COVID-19.
As this disease swept around the globe, the focus was on identifying and protecting “vulnerable populations,” including those in jails and prisons. COVID put the national spotlight on these populations and the need to prevent needless deaths in facilities where adequate health care is lacking in the best of times.
These preventative measures are urgently needed in America. No other single nation locks up more of its citizens. America has more than 3,000 jails housing over 745,200 prisoners; 480,000 are still presumed legally innocent. COVID has forced local and state governments to at least partly unwind the practice of mass incarceration. The release of thousands of people was an attempt to mitigate COVID’s devastating ...
by David M. Reutter
Citing Mississippi’s refusal to invest in prison facilities and staff, private medical vendor Centurion pulled out of its contract with the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) to provide medical and mental health care to prisoners. The move was hailed as a “significant victory” by Team Roc.
As PLN has reported, rappers Jay-Z and Yo Gotti created Team Roc, which is team of attorneys, to represent 227 prisoners held at the Mississippi State Prison at Parchman to sue MDOC and Centurion in the wake of seven prisoner deaths over 50 days. The deaths occurred after riots in January 2020 at Parchman and other prisons throughout the state. (See PLN, July 2020, p.1.)
In a July 7, 2020, letter to MDOC Commissioner Burl Cain, Centurion said, “We do not believe we can further improve the effectiveness of our level of care without additional investment from [MDOC] in correctional staffing and infrastructure along the lines of what we have already recommended.” The withdrawal of services became effective on October 5, 2020.
Team Roc attorney Marcy Croft said she hopes the letter gets the attention of Gov. Tate Reeves. “It’s time to invest in the health and well-being of ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Two audits released July 20, 2020 revealed a series of shortcomings by a food service contractor tasked with providing meals to juvenile detainees and in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County.
Florida-based contractor Trinity Services Group was paid $3.5 million to provide three meals a day to prisoners at the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center and Allegheny County Jail. The audits were conducted by the County Controller’s office and covered the period of June 2018 to June 2019. Controller Chelsea Wagner’s audits noted what she called “several instances of noncompliance” with contract provisions.
Much of the audit’s 34 pages focused on flawed record-keeping and Trinity either over-charging for meals or failing to reimburse the county for commissions as stipulated in the contract. The Shuman Center overcharged the county by $8,413, including more than $6,000 for food donated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The jail overbilled the county more than $1,600.
There are also discrepancies concerning meals from a program called Trinity Take-Out, which allows prisoners to order specialty items like cheeseburgers and chicken sandwiches at prices ranging from $12 to $20. Trinity’s contract with the county provides for the receipt of a 30% commission from Trinity Take-Out sales, but the ...
by Douglas Ankney
In late September 2020, private correctional healthcare contractor Wellpath paid $4.5 million to settled a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a mentally ill teen who died from dehydration while incarcerated in 2016 at the Benton County Jail in Kennewick, Washington.
The family’s attorney, Edwin Budge, said that Marc Moreno “literally died of thirst,” in the jail’s infirmary.
At the time, the infirmary was run by Correct Care Solutions (CCS), the corporate predecessor of Wellpath, both Tennessee-based firms. One of the country’s largest private healthcare providers to prisons and jails, Wellpath reported 2017 revenues of $1.3 billion.
Making the tragedy of the 18-year-old’s death even worse, he wasn’t supposed to be at the jail at all. His family had called the county’s Crisis Response Unit (“CRU”) on March 3, 2016, when Moreno was experiencing a mental health crisis. He had long suffered from “mental illness characterized as bipolar or schizophrenic,” according to Budge.
At CRU, a counselor observed him talking to angels and hitting himself in the face, unable to understand basic questions. The counselor called the Kennewick Police Department to transport Moreno to the hospital. Instead, arriving officers arrested Moreno on outstanding misdemeanor warrants ...
by Mark Wilson
Oregon prisoner Carl Spieler, 56, suffered for three months after he was admitted to the state penitentiary in Salem in May 2018, while prison medical staff, convinced he was malingering, dismissed his 62-pound weight loss, dangerously low blood pressure and other alarming symptoms of an untreated staph infection and ulcerative colitis.
After undergoing life-saving surgery that left him forced to use a colostomy bag for life, he filed suit on September 1, 2020, for $975,000 against the state Department of Corrections (DOC), its private contract healthcare provider, Correctional Health Partners (CHP), Drs. Reed Paulson and Karen Harris, as well as Nurse Practitioner (NP) Elizabeth Mills.
Spieler was convicted of attempted assault on two policemen after they arrived at his apartment complex in 2017 to arrest him on a felony warrant, and Spieler nearly struck both officers with his vehicle as he fled.
In June 2018, shortly after arriving at the state penitentiary, he began experiencing stomach pain, cramping, diarrhea and bloody stools. He weighed 178 pounds when NP Mills recommended a colonoscopy on July 5, 2018. CHP approved the procedure seven days later, but by July 20, 2018, it had not been conducted.
That was the date ...
by David M. Reutter
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that each interception of an attorney’s privileged telephone is a violation of the federal and Nevada Wiretap Acts. As such, the statute of limitations is triggered anew for each intercepted call.
The court’s October 27, 2020, opinion was issued in an appeal brought by criminal defense attorney Kathleen Bliss. Her July 12, 2020, lawsuit alleged violations of Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and Nevada Wiretap Act (collectively the Wiretap Act or the Act).
Bliss was given discovery in a client’s case on June 27, 2016. She did not review the discovery until late September, at which time she learned that CoreCivic recorded calls between her and her client on June 18 and 19, 2020, and gave them to the government. She continued communicating with her client in June and July.
Bliss “pushed’’ by telling the government and court about CoreCivic’s interceptions. Believing the interceptions would stop, Bliss resumed communicating with her client by phone. CoreCivic continued to record attorney calls until at least February 2019.
After Bliss filed her lawsuit on July 12, 2018, CoreCivic moved for summary judgment. It argued ...
A judge finds that CoreCivic played a role in the family separation crisis.
by Madison Pauley, Mother Jones, December 11, 2020
he mother who would end the Trump administration’s family separation policy arrived at the US-Mexico border in November 2017 with her 6-year-old daughter in tow. Ms. L, as she is called in court documents, told the US border guards at the San Ysidro, California, port of entry that she and her daughter had fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo and were seeking asylum. They passed an initial screening and for a few nights were sent to a facility that seemed, to Ms. L, like a motel. Then, according to a legal complaint, officers put her and her daughter in separate rooms. Through the wall, she could hear her daughter screaming. The girl was sent to a shelter in Chicago. Ms. L was transferred to Otay Mesa Detention Center, a for-profit immigration lockup outside San Diego run by CoreCivic, a private prison company.
Over the following months, the forced separation of migrant families would become one of the greatest scandals of Donald Trump’s presidency, as his appointees implemented a plan to separate parents from their children as a deterrent ...
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 ...
