by Ed Lyon
California governor Gavin Newsom entered office in early 2019 vowing to end the use of private prisons – including those in which federal immigration authorities detain asylum seekers – because for-profit prisons “lead to over-incarceration” and “do not reflect our values.” For many years, California sent prisoners to privately-run facilities in other states.
The state legislature responded with Assembly Bill 32, which passed, was signed by Newsom and went into effect in January 2020, banning California from entering into any new contracts with private prison companies and beginning a countdown to end all such contracts in the state by 2028.
Florida-based private prison operator GEO Group, Inc., the nation’s largest for-profit prison firm with $2.33 billion in 2018 gross revenue, signed new contracts in December 2019 – just before the law took effect – with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for two facilities the company operates in California.
GEO also signed a new contract the same month with the U.S. Marshals Service for its 512-bed El Centro Service Processing Center until 2028, in addition to a contract already in place to run the 725-bed Western Region Detention Facility in San Diego for the Marshals until 2027. ...
by Matt Clarke
Many prisoners transported by Prisoner Transportation Services of America, LLC (PTS) report being denied restroom breaks, food, liquids and essential prescription medications such as insulin, occasionally with fatal results. Others say they were physically or sexually abused by PTS staff. At least five prisoners have died while being transported by PTS since 2012.
The Nashville-based company contracts with law enforcement agencies throughout the country to transport prisoners between jurisdictions in trips that can take up to two weeks coast-to-coast as PTS vans zigzag between jails, sometimes backtracking in an attempt to maximize profit each trip.
One death occurred after a PTS transportation officer – the company’s version of a guard – assaulted a prisoner and ordered other prisoners to beat him, too. Two more prisoners died due to bleeding ulcers while transport guards ignored their pleas for medical attention. Two guards were charged with sexual assault and pleaded guilty, one of them to lesser charges.
Being subjected to a PTS extradition transport is the proverbial trip from hell, according to prisoners who have taken such journeys. It starts with a guard placing your legs in shackles, then your wrists are locked in handcuffs with a “black box” ...
by Scott Grammer
On September 18, 2018, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) filed suit in Arizona against Corizon Health, Inc. and Corizon LLC. The purpose of the litigation was “to correct Corizon’s nationwide unlawful employment policies and practices that discriminate on the basis of disability and to provide appropriate relief for Charging Parties Elizabeth McCrehin, Ann Pogue, Nicole Moore, Linda Magnelli, Barbara McCormick, and other similarly situated qualified aggrieved individuals who were adversely affected by Corizon’s unlawful actions,” according to the complaint.
The suit alleged that “[a]s a matter of policy or practice, Corizon would not approve modified job duties, allow more than twelve weeks of leave permitted by the FMLA [Family Medical Leave Act], allow extended leave past an unpaid 30-day medical leave, or allow employees to return to work without being fully healed.... Corizon has failed to provide reasonable accommodations to its employees with disabilities when the employee requests an accommodation or when Corizon is on notice that the employee needs an accommodation.”
Further, the company was accused of “harass[ing] qualified employees with disabilities because of their disabilities.... Corizon has engaged in harassment of some of its qualified employees with disabilities because of their need for reasonable ...
One company has become the biggest provider of jail health care. Sheriffs are worried: “If you’re the only dance in town, you can pretty much call your own shots.”
Story by Marsha McLeod, The Atlantic
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – In the span of 24 days in May 2017, two men died in Forsyth County’s jail. Both were fathers. Both were black. The first man, Deshawn Lamont Coley, had written request after request begging for his asthma inhaler – accurately predicting that his sporadic access to it was putting his life at risk. The second, Stephen Antwan Patterson, was found without a pulse about a week after he was booked with a blood-pressure reading that would likely have led any free person to the emergency room. The deaths came at an uncomfortable time for Forsyth County: Patterson died just four weeks before the Board of Commissioners sat down to decide whether to renew a contract with the private health-care company that had cared for the two men, then called Correct Care Solutions and now Wellpath, or sign with someone else.
What might have been a routine board meeting turned tense. “Correct Care Solutions makes the sheriff’s office look bad, makes ...
by Chad Marks
Walking 200 feet to the chow hall was excruciating, said 35-year-old Arizona prisoner Waylon Collingwood. Held at ASPC-Lewis, he had already been to the medical department several times in July 2019 to seek help for his symptoms, which also included vomiting and nausea, only to be wrongly diagnosed. A nurse thought Collingwood had pneumonia. She gave him a Z-pack – antibiotics commonly used for pink-eye and strep throat – and sent him back to his housing unit.
A month later Collingwood was at an outside hospital, finding out why walking to the chow hall had been so painful. He did not have pneumonia but rather Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The nurse, who worked for prison medical provider Corizon, had been wrong – leaving Collingwood with a heavy price to pay. He was also misdiagnosed by Corizon staff with Valley Fever and tuberculosis before going to the hospital.
MRSA had infected his lungs and the valves of his heart, and he needed open heart surgery to replace his tricuspid valve. His heart stopped beating the day after surgery, but a nurse at the Abrazo West Campus Hospital was able to save him. Collingwood learned that he would ...
by Scott Grammer
Robert J. “Bob” Dennis, CEO of Genesco, a Nashville shoe and boot retailer, was first appointed to the board of directors of CoreCivic, the private prison company formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, in February 2013. However, in May 2019 his time on the board was up, according to investors holding more than 49.9 million shares of CoreCivic stock, who voted to deny Dennis another term. He was required to tender his resignation.
The company told the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it believed Dennis’ failure to survive the retention vote “was due to his service as the Chief Executive Officer and director of a publicly traded company, his service on the Board and his service on the board of directors of one additional publicly traded company, which resulted in a concern among shareholders holding a significant number of shares of [CoreCivic’s] common stock.”
Dennis also serves on the board of directors of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), as well as the boards of United Way of Metropolitan Nashville, Leadership Nashville and Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management.
One news report suggested that investment firms Blackrock and Vanguard Group, which together hold almost ...
by Douglas Ankney
In November 2019, an employee of private food service provider Aramark Correctional Services at Indiana’s Correctional Industrial Facility in Pendleton was captured on surveillance video delivering a package and $300 in cash to a prisoner. Kevin Lake, 26, admitted to smuggling the contraband he had received from a woman at a Wendy’s restaurant, as well as passing money to other prisoners that he obtained through an app on his cell phone. He was charged with felony drug trafficking.
On September 20, 2019, Aurelia Diaz Brin, 54, an Aramark employee at the Whatcom County jail in Washington, was arrested and booked into the jail for allegedly smuggling drugs, including heroin and Suboxone, into the facility. The Sheriff’s Office said it was reviewing the company’s performance and would recommend that the county contract with a different food service vendor.
The arrests of Lake and Brin were among the latest in a series of embarrassing incidents involving Aramark, which is the 27th-largest employer among Fortune 500 companies, with $14 billion in 2018 revenue from food service contracts with prisons and jails, universities, sporting arenas and other venues. The firm has been the subject of protests from New ...
by Douglas Ankney
The New Mexico Court of Appeals held that third-party settlement agreements, resulting from medical care provided by Corizon Health under a contract with the state, are public documents subject to disclosure under the Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA).
In 2016, the New Mexico Foundation for Open ...
by David M. Reutter
On September 25, 2019, Pennsylvania’s Delaware County Council abolished its Board of Prison Inspectors (BPI) and replaced it with a Jail Oversight Board (JOB), after problems occurred at the privately operated Delaware County Prison, formerly known as the George W. Hill Correctional Facility. PLN has previously reported on problems at the jail. [See: PLN, Nov. 2018, p.36; Jan. 2016, p.57].
Over a five-week period in the summer of 2019, the facility erupted in new crises:
• On July 31, a prisoner committed suicide;
• On August 5, a sergeant was beaten with handcuffs and required hospitalization;
• On August 24, there were two separate overdoses by prisoners in the jail’s work release program;
• On August 26, several prisoners beat another prisoner with a plastic tray, then threw trays at a nurse and guard, who were trapped in the cellblock until backup arrived; and
• On September 4, there was a “full blown riot” at the facility that was quelled after a Community Emergency Response Team armed with pepper balls managed to subdue 26 prisoners.
“I’ve been there so long and I said, ‘It’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when,’ because ...
by Dale Chappell
A federal judge has granted class-action status in a federal lawsuit filed against GEO Group, alleging the private, for-profit company forced immigration detainees to work in order to avoid punishment.
The ruling by Judge Jesus G. Bernal of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California was a serious blow to the company's profits, says Northeastern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens. She estimated that the savings by using detainee labor accounted for about 25 percent of GEO's net profits, based on financial disclosures made by the company in public records.
The lawsuit was filed by Raul Novoa, an immigration detainee being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Adelanto, California. GEO has a contract to run the facility, one of more than a dozen such facilities it operates across the country.
Novoa claimed that he and the approximately 2,000 detainees at the facility were forced to work under the threat of punishment and deprivation of basic needs, such as adequate food, hygiene supplies, and clothing.
The lawsuit exposed emails from GEO employees saying that detainees are required to work to help maintain the facility, work that GEO employees are supposed ...
