by Spencer Woodman, reprinted with permission from The Intercept

In June, officials at a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in rural Georgia sentenced an immigrant detainee to a month in solitary confinement to punish him for encouraging fellow detainees to stop working in protest of low wages at the facility. Three days after the detainee shouted “no work, no pay” in a facility kitchen, according to ICE records, “the detainee was found guilty of encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage and was sentenced to 30 days of disciplinary segregation.”

Immigrants confined in ICE facilities often work for only $1 per day, but the immigration agency’s guidelines state that all such work must be voluntary. Earlier this year, a federal judge cleared the way for a class-action lawsuit originally brought by nine ICE detainees alleging that ICE contractor the GEO Group had profited off forced labor in violation of federal anti-slavery laws.

In the case of the Georgia facility, ICE’s records obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request simply list “work stoppage” as the reason for using solitary confinement to punish the immigrant detainee, who is originally from Haiti.

In response to questions from The ...

by Joe Watson

An Internal Revenue Service audit of tax-free bonds used to develop an immigrant detention facility in New Mexico was closed once the bonds were converted to taxable status.

Otero County issued $62.3 million in tax-free revenue bonds in 2007 to finance the construction of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing center in Chaparral, New Mexico. The facility is operated by a private company, Utah-based Management & Training Corp.

Over the past several years, the IRS has been conducting similar audits at local jails that contract to house prisoners for the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) or ICE. Under the tax code, the federal government is considered a private party, and private parties do not qualify for tax-free status. USMS and ICE officials have signed contracts with jails nationwide to house detainees in state and local bond-financed facilities, leading to tax disputes between the bond issuers and the IRS. [See: PLN, Sept. 2015, p.18].

According to the Bond Buyer, a trade publication, “the tax code classifies a bond as a private activity bond (PAB) if more than 10% of the proceeds are used for a private party and more than 10% of debt service payments are made or ...

by Brian Dolinar, Truthout

The election of Donald Trump has already given an economic boost to those profiting from mass incarceration. The stock prices of the two biggest private prison builders – CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group – doubled after Trump took office.

Companies that charge for expensive phone calls from prisons and jails also won big after Trump’s victory. One of the president’s first appointments placed Ajit Pai at the helm of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who promptly rolled back the agency’s 2015 decision to regulate the prison phone industry. The companies hailed it as a victory.

Shortly after the FCC’s reversal, Securus, one of the largest prison phone companies, announced it was being sold to Platinum Equity, a large investment firm for a reported $1.5 billion. (To date the deal has not been finalized.) Tom Gores, Platinum’s founder and CEO, is an investment mogul who also owns the Detroit Pistons. In 2011, Gores purchased the basketball team with the stated intent of improving the struggling city.

In the United States’ current economy, prisons and basketball are growth industries. Both profit from the exploitation of black bodies, pulling in people from poor neighborhoods in major cities ...

by David Reutter

In a preliminary consent order, Sentinel Offender Services, a private probation company, agreed to stop its practice of drug testing probationers without court approval. The order was entered in a class-action case challenging Sentinel’s practices in a Georgia county that uses the company to manage its probation ...

by David Reutter

In 2005, at the urging of then-Governor Mitch Daniels, the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC) awarded a contract to privatize medical care for prisoners. The winning bidder, Prison Health Services, merged in 2011 with Correctional Medical Services to form Corizon Health, which later won renewal of a three-year, $300 million contract to provide medical, dental, vision, mental health and substance abuse treatment services to IDOC’s 28,000 prisoners.

In February 2017, however, state prison officials declined to renew Corizon’s contract, instead awarding it to Wexford Health Sources. Consequently, Corizon announced the following month that it planned to lay off almost 700 employees in 22 IDOC facilities. [See: PLN, Sept. 2017, p.32].

PLN has reported extensively on Corizon and the company’s business model, which appears to consist of delaying or denying medical care and reducing staffing costs to increase profits; in turn, that has resulted in numerous prisoner deaths and injuries. [See, e.g.: PLN, Oct. 2015, p.20; March 2014, p.1].

Yet the IDOC’s watchdog over Corizon’s contractual performance was a former Corizon employee.

Dr. Michael Mitcheff was working as an emergency room physician at two Indiana hospitals when, in 1994, he was investigated for buying illegal drugs. He ultimately ...

by Derek Gilna

The family of deceased prisoner Jimmy Richardson filed a federal lawsuit against the Schenectady County Jail in New York in April 2017, alleging that the facility and its medical contractor, Correctional Medical Care, wrongfully withheld medication that could have prevented his death.

The complaint alleges that the defendants knew Richardson, 53, suffered from heart disease, but initially denied him his prescription medication when he was booked into the jail, resulting in his death on January 17, 2016.

“While [Richardson] was obviously not the healthiest person, he had been successfully managing his medical conditions for several years. It was not until the defendants denied him his medication for several weeks ... that [he] died,” the complaint states. It also alleges that jail medical records purporting to show Richardson received medication were falsified.

Richardson had submitted various sick call requests, stating, “I am Hurting so Bad I need Help!” Jail records indicate that he did not receive any pain medication other than Tylenol until shortly before he died, when the lawsuit claims that he received excessive doses of morphine. The suit also alleges that on the eve of his death, Richardson sought medical care but instead was threatened with ...

Privatizing more prisons will not save Louisiana money now or in the long run, according to the state’s Public Safety and Corrections Secretary, Jimmy LeBlanc. LeBlanc is opposed to House Concurrent Resolution 30, proposed by state Rep. Jack McFarland, which would require the prison system to report by the end of 2017 whether turning over the management of five additional prisons to for-profit companies would result in cost savings.

Much of the assumed savings would come from paying guards and other staff lower wages, LeBlanc said, which would make it harder to recruit and retain good employees. The state already struggles to retain staff due to low wages; the starting salary for a Louisiana prison guard is $24,300 per year. A privately-operated prison would likely reduce wages even more, he noted.

News of more privatization unnerved staff at some facilities. “It doesn’t help with the morale of the prison system,” LeBlanc said in a May 17, 2017 statement. Prison guards already have the highest turnover rate among state employees.

Private companies operate two Louisiana state prisons: the Allen Correctional Center, run by GEO Group, and the Winn Correctional Center, managed by LaSalle Corrections. McFarland’s bill would add another five for-profit ...

The GEO Group -- one of the nation's largest private prison firms, which is frequently the subject of scandal arising from repeated human rights violations at its for-profit facilities – has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought against the company in 2015 by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). ...

by Derek Gilna

In December 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), a watchdog agency within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), issued an audit of the federal Bureau of Prisons’ contract with private prisoner company CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, to operate the Adams County Correctional Center.

That 2,232-bed facility, located in Natchez, Mississippi, gained notoriety in May 2012 following a major riot that left one prison employee dead. [See: PLN, June 2014, p.48]. A post-riot report recommended changes, which the OIG’s 2016 audit found still hadn’t been completed. Further, according to the audit, CoreCivic had not been held accountable by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The Inspector General wrote it was “deeply concerned” that the Adams facility remained “plagued by the same significant deficiencies” that had sparked the deadly riot.

The audit directly echoed the findings of a multi-part investigation released earlier this year by The Nation, in partnership with the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute, which uncovered serious problems at the Adams facility and 10 other privately-operated federal prisons used to incarcerate non-citizens convicted of crimes. The investigation found that CoreCivic had failed for years to correct inadequacies in the provision ...

by David Reutter

In prison after prison across the state, over a period of two years, Florida state Representative David Richardson found that toilet paper, toothbrushes, toothpaste, pillows, sheets, shirts and soap were often withheld from prisoners, especially those in solitary confinement. Further, food had been denied as a form of punishment and medical conditions went untreated.

Richardson, a retired forensic auditor, has used his legislative authority to enter state prisons unannounced to view conditions without the “dog and pony show” typically provided to official guests. He presented his findings to his colleagues in the state House in April 2017 and urged them to require more accountability over Florida’s private prison contracts, offering a level of scrutiny not often seen on the floor of a legislative chamber.

“All nine contracts that I had audited had the numbers fudged,” Richardson declared moments before the House voted 89-26 for its draft of the 2017-2018 fiscal year budget.

Part of the problem, Richardson said, is that the agency in charge of monitoring private prison contracts – the Department of Management Services (DMS) – had no experience in corrections, making it susceptible to being “hoodwinked” by for-profit prison companies.

“I want one agency accountable, and ...