On October 9, 2024, Turn Key Health Clinics ended its contract to provide healthcare at the Oklahoma County Jail in Oklahoma City. The firm gave notice 30 days earlier, after winning just a one-year $7.4 million extension to the contract it has held since 2018; Turn Key wanted a longer deal, and when it didn’t get one, it terminated its contract and left.

In doing so, the contractor accused jailers of maintaining insufficient guard staff to provide security and escorts for detainees needing medical attention. “We can’t provide the quality of care we expect from our team if we can’t access patients in need,” declared company spokesperson Kenna Griffin.

After the Oklahoma County Justice Authority (OCJA) took over jail operations from then-Sheriff P.D. Taylor in 2020, there were 39 detainee deaths through September 2023, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Mar. 2024, p.1.] OCJA board members then couldn’t agree to renew Turn Key’s contract when it expired in June 2024, leaving the company working on a month-to-month basis until the one-year extension was signed in September 2024. But within hours, Turn Key made its dissatisfaction with that agreement known and gave notice it was leaving.

OCJA has since hired 62 former ...

by Sam Rutherford

The New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) has long outsourced its constitutional obligation to provide prisoners adequate medical care to private, for-profit corporations with little incentive to do so. Before November 2019, a $41 million annual contract was held by Centurion Correctional Healthcare of New Mexico, LLC, which lost a battle to withhold documentation of legal settlements when PLN’s publisher prevailed in a suit for the records on September 16, 2024, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Dec. 2024, p.19.]

Quickly growing since its 2011 founding, Centurion and related companies contract with local, state and federal governments in 15 states at 325 lockups. When Centurion took over healthcare for NMCD in June 2016, predecessor Corizon Health had been sued by state prisoners more than 150 times during its nine-year tenure. Another 24 suits were filed during Centurion’s first year, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Nov. 2018, p.60.]

As PLN also reported, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), nonprofit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News, filed a request pursuant to the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act in August 2020 that Centurion disclose all complaints and settlement agreements for cases in which the company paid ...

This month’s PLN cover story covers documents pried loose from Centurion Correctional Healthcare of N.M., LLC, which held the contract to provide medical care for the state Corrections Department (NMCD) in 2020, when a request was filed under the state Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA), NM Stat § 14-2-1 (2023), by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), nonprofit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News (CLN).

HRDC sent IPRA requests in August 2020 to both NMCD and Centurion for documents related to litigation over prisoner healthcare that cost $1,000 or more to resolve. NMCD in turn asked Centurion whether it wanted to respond or send the documents to the state it could forward them. Importantly, Centurion replied that it had received the IPRA request and would respond.

But Centurion ignored HRDC’s request; it later claimed that it’s not a “public body” under IPRA so not obligated to respond. Meanwhile, NMCD notified HRDC on August 19, 2020, that it had no records responsive to the request and that it had not gotten any from Centurion. With that, the state considered the request closed.

HRDC then filed suit in the state’s First Judicial District Court for Santa Fe County in ...

by David M. Reutter

On November 11, 2024, private prison and jail healthcare contractor Wellpath LLC filed for bankruptcy protection from debtors collectively owed $544 million, casting doubt on its ability to continue in business, much less pay settlements and verdicts owed in suits for poor medical care filed by prisoners, detainees or their estates.

One of the many cases still pending against the firm was filed by the family of a Virginia detainee who died of “salt wasting” after being denied medication necessary to control the disorder by officials at Henry County Adult Detention Center (HCADC), where Wellpath held the healthcare contract. Deborah Sue Damron, a firm nurse responsible for Brad Steven Hensley’s care, was not only named a defendant in the civil case but also criminally charged after his death with involuntary manslaughter.

Hensley, 42, was born with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which caused him to suffer from “salt wasting” when his body failed to produce cortisol needed to regulate blood pressure and blood sugar, among other things. Hensley’s condition was treated with twice daily doses of prescribed Prednisone and Fludrocortisone, which was noted at booking into HCADC on August 22, 2022. It was further noted that Hensley had ...

In June 2024, after Oklahoma failed to meet a $3 million pay hike demanded by The GEO Group, Inc., the private prison operator gave notice to terminate its contract to run Lawton Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility (LCRF), the state’s last private prison—giving the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) just three months to find another home for 2,375 prisoners. Unsurprisingly, the state Board of Corrections (BOC), which provides oversight for DOC, then approved a one-year extension for GEO Group to continue running the prison.

Three prisoners died at LCRF in 2023: Matthew Treat, 36, suffered a fatal fentanyl overdose on March 21; Loren Dean Tucker was fatally stabbed by fellow prisoners on May 6, four days after turning 31; and Raymond Bailey, 45, was found dead in a trash can on October 26, gagged, hogtied and stabbed multiple times. After getting rid of 10 guards, GEO Group blamed them for a laundry list of contractual failures which contributed to the deaths: prisoners who were allowed to roam unsupervised and not locked in their cells; mandatory security checks that were skipped; and records that were falsified in all three deaths—a crime under state law, though none of the former employees was referred ...

In a suit filed on September 30, 2024, attorney Daniel Horwitz accused four judges in the federal court for the Middle District of Tennessee of violating his First Amendment rights with a gag order that was issued in a case he was litigating against private prison giant CoreCivic. As PLN reported, the Court’s July 2022 order silenced Horwitz’s criticism of the company and even required him to delete related tweets from his social media account on Twitter, now known as X. [See: PLN, Feb. 2023, p.42.]

CoreCivic settled that case, along with four others Horwitz had pending against the firm, leading the judges in each to dismiss his appeal to the gag order as moot. That left only a lawsuit to continue his challenge to the Court’s local rule, under which the order was issued. “Mr. Horwitz needs to know the extent to which Rule 83.04 restricts his speech about his litigation in the Middle District because he continues to litigate in this Court, and he continues to do so against CoreCivic—a party that has already invoked Rule 83.04 to silence Mr. Horwitz’s speech and has demonstrated that it will do so again each time Mr. Horwitz asserts his right ...

On September 30, 2024, Utah-based Management & Training Corp. (MTC) ended its contract to operate the Giles W. Dalby Correctional Facility in Garza County, Texas. The lockup is owned by the county, which confirmed that most of some 170 employees were out of work.

MTC operated Dalby to hold federal detainees for U.S. Marshals until a ban issued in 2021 by the administration of Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D). Garza County officials quickly brought the lockup in line with Texas Jail Commission (TJC) standards as MTC inked contracts to hold overflow from jails in Harris County and Tarrant County.

But after a failed inspection, TJC issued Dalby a notice of non-compliance on December 18, 2023. The problems were corrected, Garza County Judge Lee Norman said. However, no one notified Tarrant County, whose blindsided Commissioners voted to end their contract on February 6, 2024. Harris County also pulled out its detainees and sent them to other lockups; one, Louisiana’s Natchitoches Parish Correctional Center, inked a new contract with private jail operator LaSalle Corrections for a five-year term beginning November 1, 2024—the same day that Harris County detainees were due to arrive. It was unclear where other overflow detainees went, but ...

Under the terms of a settlement announced in the bankruptcy of former prison medical contractor Corizon Health on July 17, 2024, the firm’s creditors will receive almost 39% more than the amount they originally negotiated. However, that brings the total settlement to just $75 million, far too little to satisfy hundreds of creditors—including several hundred prisoners and their estates owed settlement payouts from medical negligence and wrongful death suits.

As PLN reported, Corizon Health re-­incorporated in Texas as two firms in 2023, keeping $200 million in contracts for prison and jail medical care in one company called YesCare. At the same time, nearly $1.2 billion in liabilities—including unpaid prisoner lawsuit payouts—got dumped into another firm called Tehum Care Services. The latter then filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying what was owed, completing a shady-­yet-­legal maneuver known as the “Texas Two Step.” [See: PLN, Aug. 2023, p.35.]

The original settlement would have paid creditors just $54 million, including $8.5 million to resolve prisoner claims for an average of just $5,000 each. But that deal fell apart in April 2024, when Judge Christopher M. Lopez of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas chastised lawyers at both tables for ...

by David M. Reutter

On September 30, 2024, the federal court for the District of Oregon sanctioned private prison and jail medical contractor Wellpath, LLC for destroying evidence in a suit filed over a detainee death at the Josephine County Jail (JCJ). It was the second time in just over a year that the firm was hit with sanctions in an Oregon jail death case. More sanctions were issued for discovery violations in earlier suits—three in 2020 in Washington, Michigan and Arkansas plus another in 2022 in California, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2023, p.69.]

The two suits filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon claimed that Wellpath was deliberately indifferent to the needs of pretrial detainees, resulting in their deaths. Rocky Stewart was found dead in his Coos County Jail cell on December 2, 2017, only one day after booking. Janelle Marie Butterfield committed suicide at JCJ on July 27, 2018, after 40 days of incarceration.

In both cases, attorneys representing Plaintiffs notified Wellpath shortly after the deaths to “preserve all evidence and information” related to the cases. The district court eventually found that Wellpath’s retention policy for electronically stored information (ESI), which it ...

by Douglas Ankney

As PLN readers know, medical care in America’s prisons and jails is horrific even by the low standard courts have set to determine what is constitutionally sufficient. In yet another case, the State of Maryland and Wexford Health Sources, the privately contracted medical provider for its Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS), agreed on April 3, 2024, to pay prisoner Nathaniel Appleby-­El $200,000 for denied medical care that left him blind in his right eye.

On May 23, 2016, while Appleby-­El was awaiting transfer from Patuxent Correctional Institution in Jessup, he suddenly went blind in his right eye. He was promised treatment, but he did not see an eye doctor before his transfer two days later to Branch Correctional Institution (BCI) in Cumberland. During intake there, Appleby-­El reported to Wexford Registered Nurse Dawn Hawk what he believed was a detached retina. Hawk dismissed the concern and explained standard “sick call procedures” to him. Beginning on May 26, 2016, Appleby-­El submitted four sick-­call requests over the next two weeks, each time calling his condition a medical emergency requiring an ophthalmologist. Eventually, he ran into Registered Nurse James Hunt and complained about his unanswered medical requests. Hunt ...