by Ed Lyon

Regular readers of Prison Legal News are well aware of the abysmal reputations that private, for-profit prisons have earned. Apparently word travels and people on the outside eventually listen and pay attention to such matters, as the citizens of Lancaster, Pennsylvania demonstrated when they decided to say no to GEO Group.

For over a decade, post-release reentry programs in Lancaster County have been provided by a group of nonprofit organizations. Recidivism rates were low, and parolees received job and housing assistance through the Community Action Partnership and Reentry Management Organization. The YWCA offered support groups and counseling for prisoners who were sexually assaulted while incarcerated. Compass Mark worked with the children left behind whenever a parent was arrested, until he or she was released. 

All of these services were funded via a month-to-month allocation by the county with a total annual expenditure of around $100,000.

In 2018, county commissioners Josh Parsons and Dennis Stuckey decided to put an end to the ad hoc manner of contracting for and funding the successful work by nonprofits in these areas. The county wanted to cap parolee housing costs at $1,000 for the 90-day program period and begin helping ...

by Matt Clarke

A lawsuit over the 2015 death of Adams County, Colorado jail detainee Tyler Tabor was secretly settled for $3.9 million in August 2018. The settlement only became public after court documents were filed complaining that Corizon Health had met only $1 million of its $3.7 million settlement obligation, with the company citing a “cash flow problem.”

Tabor, 25, was booked into the Adams County jail on two misdemeanor warrants on May 14, 2015. He told jail officials that he was addicted to opiates, and quickly began to suffer from withdrawal, including frequent vomiting. Corizon employees treated him with Gatorade and various medications, which were ineffective because he could not keep them down. 

Over the next three days, Tabor became critically dehydrated, collapsed and died on May 17, 2015. Guards and nurses observed him as he had difficulty standing or walking, and fell and had to be assisted with a wheelchair. He also showed other symptoms of extreme medical distress yet the nurses refused to use a saline IV, which would have saved his life. [See: PLN, Jan. 2018, p.38; Sept. 2017, p.32; Nov. 2016, p.63].

With the assistance of attorney David Lane, the Tabor family ...

by David M. Reutter

A class-action lawsuit accuses the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) of confiscating prisoners’ “lawfully purchased property without compensation” so the department and its vendor, JPay, could realize profit through a new contract. 

The suit concerns prisoners’ loss of music files accessible only via their MP3 and MP4 players, in order to allow a new tablet program to go into effect.

In 2011, the FDOC entered into a contract with Access Corrections that let prisoners purchase music players and digital songs. The players cost $99.95 for 4MB storage capacity or $119.95 for an 8MB player. The songs cost $1.70 each, and prisoners were required to buy them in lots of five. The contract with Access ended in April 2017, netting the FDOC around $1.4 million in commissions from 6.7 million digital song purchases.

A “widely-distributed advertisement” promised prisoners who bought the MP3 and MP4 players that, “Once music is purchased, you’ll always own it!” They were told they could buy as many songs as they wanted and store them on a “cloud-based library” by deleting or adding songs to their player by connecting to a kiosk.

Then, in April 2017, the FDOC terminated its contract with ...

by Derek Gilna

A federal civil rights complaint brought by the estate of deceased Monroe County, New York pre-trial detainee Pedro Sanchez, Jr. has survived a motion to dismiss filed by the county jail’s medical provider, Correct Care Solutions (now known as Wellpath), and several of the company’s medical staff, according to a December 2018 ruling. The district court’s rejection of the defendants’ motion means that discovery can continue preparatory to a jury trial.

According to the court’s order, Sanchez was admitted to the Monroe County Jail around January 20, 2015, where he remained until he was taken to a hospital in an unresponsive state less than two weeks later. 

“On the morning of February 1, 2015, at or about 7:30 AM,” the court wrote, “Mr. Sanchez was assaulted by two inmates at the Monroe County Jail who repeatedly punched him, including in the abdominal region ... [and] he was discharged back to the jail at or around 12:00 PM with his arm in a sling.

“On February 2, 2015, Mr. Sanchez died after bleeding internally from a lacerated spleen,” the court continued. “In the twenty-seven (27) hours preceding his death, and with increasing frequency in the hours leading ...

by Scott Grammer

On August 13, 2018, Great Britain’s HMP Birmingham, operated by G4S (previously Group 4 Securicor), a private security company, had to be taken over on an emergency basis by the Ministry of Justice. An inspection of the prison found that prisoners were drinking, using drugs and committing acts of violence at will, and that the facility was crawling with roaches amid blood and vomit. The government took control from G4S, which had been awarded a 15-year contract to run the prison in 2011.

Britain’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, said the facility had experienced “dramatic deterioration” since the previous year’s inspection, and that the government should launch an investigation into conditions at HMP Birmingham, formerly known as Winson Green, the most violent prison in England.

In December 2016, HMP Birmingham was the site of a 12-hour riot involving as many as 600 of its 1,450 prisoners. Staff at the facility locked themselves into secure areas to avoid being assaulted; during an inspection, there was an arson attack on a staff car park that was supposed to be secure. Clarke said there had been an “abject failure” by the private prison operator.

Rory Stewart, Minister for ...

by Steve Horn

The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the parent organization of Prison Legal News, has filed lawsuits in Texas and Vermont arguing that the GEO Group – one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison companies – is a de facto public agency that should be required to comply with public records requests.

Filed in the 225^th Judicial District in Bexar County, the Texas case – Human Rights Defense Center v. The GEO Group, Case No. 2018CI16343 – resulted from a request submitted by HRDC that asked for records pertaining to complaints, claims, verdicts and settlements involving GEO facilities in that state.

However, nearly nine months after the request was filed, and after HRDC submitted a follow-up inquiry regarding the status of its request, GEO Group had not responded. Consequently, HRDC filed suit on August 27, 2018.

In its complaint, HRDC argued that GEO Group is a “[g]overnmental body” under Section 552.003(1)(A)(xii) of the Texas Government Code, and thus should fall under the purview of the Texas Public Information Act. That statute defines a “governmental body” as – among other things – “the part, section, or portion of an organization, corporation, commission, committee, institution, or agency ...

The prison phone industry, which provides telecom services for prisons, jails and other detention facilities, has a long and sordid history of exploiting prisoners and their families by charging exorbitant phone rates and fees. [See: PLN, Dec. 2013, p.1; April 2011, p.1]. Over the past decade the industry has steadily consolidated, with two companies supplying the majority of prison phone services: Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link (GTL). 

On April 2, 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that a proposed merger between Securus and the nation’s fourth-largest prison telecom, Inmate Calling Solutions, LLC (also known as ICSolutions or ICS), which would have resulted in further consolidation and thus even less competition, had been withdrawn by the firms. 

FCC staff had recommended to the agency’s chairman, Ajit Pai, that the merger be denied. Pai wrote in a terse statement that the FCC’s staff “concluded that this deal poses significant competitive concerns and would not be in the public interest.”

The parent organization of Prison Legal News, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), which co-founded the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice in 2011 to advocate for reforms in the prison telecom industry – including lower phone rates, the ...

by Scott Grammer

Frank Lara was the Assistant Director of the Correctional Programs Division for the federal Bureau of Prisons when, on January 24, 2018, he sent a memo to all Chief Executive Officers of the BOP. The memo required them to “submit eligible inmates ... for transfer consideration to private contract facilities.” 

The prisoners to be moved to the private prisons had to be male, non-U.S. citizens with good health and low security classifications, with 90 months or less left on their sentences. More specific criteria were included for prisoners to be sent to one specific prison: the Rivers Correctional Institution in North Carolina, owned and operated by GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison companies.

Shortly before Lara’s memo was issued, the BOP warned facility administrators that there would soon be a 12 to 14 percent reduction in federal prison staffing levels, meaning a projected loss of some 5,000 to 6,000 jobs. But Lara didn’t have to worry about his own job. By August 2018 he had retired from his position and gone to work for GEO Group; he is now the company’s Director of Operations, according to his Linkedin.com profile.

Prior to issuing the ...

by Chad Marks

“They don’t care who dies, how they die or what they do to you.”

That’s what former Kansas prisoner Sarah Loretta Cook said about Corizon Health, the state’s prison medical care provider. With expected increases in the Kansas prison population over the next five years, Corizon’s contract with the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) is projected to balloon from $70 million to $83 million annually. But the company’s track record in Kansas has not been stellar.

One prisoner developed a brain fungus resulting in the 27-year-old’s death. As for Cook, she had to have much of her colon removed after she did not receive her prescribed medication for months. She has now filed a lawsuit – one of more than 48 naming Corizon and the Kansas DOC involving medical care.

During fiscal years 2016 and 2017, state officials slapped Corizon with $3.4 million in penalties for failure to maintain its contracted staffing levels. The company was penalized another $2.8 million for the same problem in 2018, along with an additional $534,880 fine for not meeting other performance standards.

Since it was first awarded the DOC contract in 2014, Corizon’s performance has been audited annually by the University ...

by Kevin W. Bliss

The Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) has expanded the use of private contractors in the state’s prison system. With an annual budget of about $2.4 billion, the FDOC is increasingly shifting the burden of those costs to prisoners and their families through privatization.

Revenue from canteen (commissary) sales alone increased $4 million after the FDOC switched to a new vendor, Trinity Services Group. Net revenue payable to the state has reached $35 million a year due to the monopoly nature of the FDOC’s canteen services. Trinity has one of the largest revenue-generating contracts in the state’s prison system. 

Critics have claimed on several occasions that the FDOC was guilty of price-gouging. Jackie Azis, a staff attorney for the ACLU, said, “That’s not surprising at all to hear, and that’s something I’ve heard throughout my career.”

For example, a case of 54 Tampax at Walmart costs $5.86, while the same number of Tampax at the Lowell CI women’s prison costs $21.71. At the same Walmart, 12 ramen soups cost $1.94. In FDOC canteens, at $.65 per ramen soup packet, 12 would cost $7.80. 

Even within the prison system there are price disparities between the same ...