As of 2016, CoreCivic—formerly Corrections Corp. of America—contracted with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to operate five facilities. In August of that year, a report by the Inspector General for the Dept. of Justice found the company’s prisons “had more inmate violence (by 35%), inmate-on-inmate assaults (by 64%), sexual assaults by inmates on staff (by 750%), and suicide attempts and self-mutilations (by 37.5%) than did prisons run by the Bureau itself.” The Deputy Attorney General subsequently issued a memo stating such poor performance justified reducing the use of private, for-profit prisons. CoreCivic’s stock “plummeted,” and shareholders filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.

During that litigation the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee entered a protective order that allowed the parties to designate discovery materials as “confidential” and file them under seal. Hundreds of documents and pleadings were sealed before the case settled in November 2021—for a massive $56 million, as PLN reported [See: PLN, October 2021, p.52]—with CoreCivic claiming confidentiality for records ranging from its “use of subcontractors” to its “staffing policies and the financial incentives for making certain staffing decisions.”

In November 2023, The Nashville Banner, a local newspaper, …

Alabama: On Sunday, June 15, 2025, state Department of Corrections (DOC) guard Airika Dorsey was arrested for allegedly smuggling food to a prisoner at St. Clair Correctional Facility, according to WABM in Birmingham. The DOC confirmed that Dorsey was caught in the act and subsequently booked into the St. Clair County Jail in Pell City. She faces third-degree charges of promoting prison contraband. Dorsey immediately resigned from her post and bonded out of jail. The DOC said that its investigation was ongoing, and further charges could be filed.

Alabama: James C. Burden, a Barbour County Jail guard, was arrested on May 30, 2025, and charged with two counts of promoting prison contraband. Burden worked as a jailer at the same Clayton lockup where he was being held on a $5,500 bond, according to WRBL in nearby Columbus, Georgia. No other details were available, but in a post to his Facebook page, Sheriff Tyrone Smith warned that contraband smuggling “is not and never will be tolerated and there will be consequences!”

Alabama: WAFF in Huntsville reported that former Morgan County jailer Kimberly Woodruff was accused of using jail trustees to pass notes and a vape pen to …

In 2020, the Arizona chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and two state prisoners filed a federal class-action suit, challenging the state’s use of privately-operated prisons on a variety of constitutional grounds. The district court dismissed the case for failure to state a claim in January 2022. Plaintiffs appealed, but a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the decision on May 21, 2024, rejecting each of the Plaintiffs’ claims.

After first determining that the NAACP had organizational standing to sue, the appellate court summarized the arguments raised in the complaint: “That private prisons are inferior to state-run prisons because they are motivated by profit, leading them to cut costs and resulting in diminished safety and security as well as reduced programing and services.” The profit motive also provided a financial incentive “to keep prisoners incarcerated longer … by manipulating disciplinary proceedings.” 

Around 20% of Arizona state prisoners are held in privatized facilities, but the appellate Court found that the Plaintiffs had not “plausibly alleged” that incarceration in private prisons violates their due process rights. Serving time in for-profit facilities did not constitute an “atypical …

Under a limited writ of mandamus issued by the Supreme Court of Ohio on October 17, 2024, the Columbiana County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) must obtain records from the private contractor operating the county jail and disclose them pursuant to a public records request. Sheriff Brian McLaughlin had argued that the records were in the custody of Correctional Solutions Group (CSG), which as a private firm is not subject to such a request. But the high Court called foul on that feint and ordered him to get the records and disclose them to the requester, now-state prisoner Terry Brown, or else certify within 21 days that no responsive records exist.

In August 2023, Brown submitted two public records requests to the CCSO, in care of Sheriff McLaughlin. His first request listed 10 items seeking “[e]mployees’ names and positions held while working at the Columbiana County Jail during the time period of January 1, 2017, through July 1, 2018.” Brown’s second request listed another 15 items pertaining to current “[p]olicy information on Inmate Intake/Booking and Retention of records,” to include the “booking of inmates showing signs of intoxication, impairment, injury, or psychological problems.” In both requests, Brown also sought “related …

Before Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) took office, his “border czar” Tom Homan worked as a consultant for GEO Group, Inc., one of the largest operators of immigrant detention facilities in the country. 

The revelation, as the Washington Post reported, raises questions about the influence that private sector companies could wield as the administration rolls out its crackdown on immigration. According to the report, Homan received more than $5,000—although his pay could have been much higher—for work conducted in connection with GEO Care, a division of the company that monitors releases and offers rehabilitation services for prisoners. 

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to deport up to 20 million people from the country—nearly double the estimated population of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Since his inauguration, Trump has expressed dissatisfaction with the rate of arrests and deportations conducted by federal immigration authorities. 

In an effort to ramp up deportations, the administration set an aggressive new goal in May 2025 of 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests per day. To keep up that pace of detentions, federal authorities have turned to already overcrowded federal prisons and local jails to imprison people …

On January 14, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that a former Illinois prisoner’s deliberate indifference claim against a healthcare provider contracted by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) could proceed to trial, though dismissal of an identical claim against four other staffers was upheld. The lower court had determined that prisoner Clarence Lewis impermissibly split his claims against Wexford Health Sources’ Dr. Dina Paul between his suit and another filed with other plaintiffs also challenging treatment for their Hepatitis-C. But the appellate Court said that Dr. Paul waited too long to raise the objection, thereby waiving the defense. The Court further held that failure to recruit counsel for Lewis’ claims against the other Wexford staffers was not shown to be error.

Lewis sued the five providers, alleging that they were deliberately indifferent to his serious medical needs while he was imprisoned at Hill Correctional Center from 2013 to 2018. Lewis accused Dr. Kul B. Sood, Nurse Lara Vollmer and Dr. Catalino Bautista of misdiagnosing him and mistreating him for diabetes and COPD when what he really suffered was a bowel disorder. Lewis further alleged that Bautista delayed the colonoscopy procedure which discovered …

In a case with enormous implications for Oklahoma jail detainees, the state Supreme Court ruled on March 11, 2025, that a jail’s subcontracted medical providers are “employees” for the purposes of the Oklahoma Governmental Tort Claims Act (GTCA), O.S.Supp.2014, §152(7)(b)(7), and are therefore immune from liability.

That ruling ended an attempt by the Estate of Brenda Jean Sanders to hold officials liable for her death at the Creek County Jail in November 2016. The suit that Sanders’ Estate filed was initially dismissed by a state trial court which found that the jail’s contracted medical provider, Turn Key Health Clinics, LLC, was immune under GTCA. The state Court of Civil Appeals, Division II, reversed that decision, and Defendants appealed. The state Supreme Court then vacated the appellate ruling.

First, the Court found that the trial court’s dismissal was not a final appealable order because the Estate could have amended its complaint, though it did not do so. That made the appeal untimely. The governing state statute, 12 O.S. §2012(G), provides an exception for untimely appeals only “in cases of excusable neglect,” the Supreme Court noted, “but no exception expressly exists in §2012(G) for an interlocutory order ripening into …

When government agencies—including corrections departments—enter contracts with private companies, they typically go through a competitive bidding process, beginning with a Request for Proposals (RFP). This ensures that taxpayers have access to information used to award government contracts, providing a level of fiscal responsibility. However, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (DOC), under the leadership of Burl Cain, has entered into four no-bid emergency contracts since 2020 worth nearly $300 million—all with the same healthcare contractor, VitalCore Health Strategies.

In July 2020, after the DOC’s former contractor, Centurion Health, opted to terminate its contract to provide healthcare services to the state’s prison population, Cain declared an emergency under the Public Procurement Review Board’s rules and regulations. That then allowed him to sign a no-bid, $56 million contract with VitalCore on August 12, 2020.

By the time that contract expired in October 2021, it might be assumed that the emergency had ended and the competitive bidding process would resume. It didn’t. Another one-year emergency contract was issued to VitalCore, again bypassing the competitive bidding process. That contract was valued at $66 million, based on its per diem rate of $8.90 for each of the DOC’s 20,300 prisoners.

When that …

uring a hearing on April 9, 2025, Florida lawmakers pieced together an elaborate money trail from the former owner of prison and jail medical giant Centurion Health, which pumped $10 million into an ultimately successful effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to tank a 2024 ballot initiative legalizing marijuana use and possession.

Centene Corp. was Centurion’s owner from 2018 to 2023, overlapping the period from 2016 to 2021 when it was accused of overbilling Florida for providing managed care services under the state Medicaid program. Centene also owned Centurion Health which had a contract worth $1.639 billion to provide health care to Florida state prisoners. To settle the overbilling charges, Centene agreed in September 2024 to a $67,048,611 payment—$10 million of which Shevaun Harris, Secretary of the state Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), directed the company to pay directly to Hope Florida Foundation, a nonprofit run by DeSantis’ wife, Casey DeSantis.

The foundation’s stated mission is to help low-income Floridians meet medical expenses. But Hope Florida then wrote two $5 million checks the following month to political action committees allied with the Governor’s effort to beat …

In October 2024, Wellpath—a private for-profit contractor that provides medical care in prisons and jails—was ordered to pay a $1.5 million settlement it entered in a lawsuit alleging that one of the company’s nurses performed “unnecessary and inappropriate” vaginal exams on detainees at South Carolina’s Berkeley County Detention Center between June 2017 and 2018.

The suit, filed in state court on behalf of eight former detainees, raised claims of negligence and medical malpractice. It also noted that the nurse, Alexander Lluvera, had remained employed despite jail officials having knowledge of his alleged sexual misconduct.

In agreeing to settle in July 2024, Wellpath said that it would remit the $1.5 million payment in two installments; however, it missed making the first $750,000 payment on October 1, 2024, leading Circuit Court Judge Jennifer McCoy to issue a settlement enforcement order on October 29, 2024, giving the firm 15 days to pay the entire amount. See: Clark v. Berkeley Cty. Sheriff’s Off., S.C. 9th Jud. Cir. (Berkeley Cty.), Case No. 2019-CP-08-01391

As PLN reported, Wellpath declared bankruptcy in December 2024 and announced a settlement had been reached with its creditors in April 2025. [See: PLN, May 2025, …