by David Reutter

Private medical contractors have become popular among corrections officials eager to reduce the cost of providing health care to prisoners. As PLN continues to chronicle this phenomenon, we continue to find substantial evidence that for-profit companies fail to provide adequate medical care – including in county jails in Kentucky.

Nearly two-thirds of Kentucky’s jails have contracts with private medical providers Southern Health Partners (SHP) or Advanced Correctional Healthcare (ACH). SHP contracts with 30 jails in Kentucky and more than 170 facilities in 12 other states; ACH contracts with over 20 Kentucky jails plus more than 235 facilities in 16 other states.

For the most part, private medical providers are not subject to independent oversight.

“There is no inspection/investigation of the quality of medical care,” said Louisville attorney Greg Belzley, who has filed numerous lawsuits alleging that deficient health care has caused or contributed to deaths or near-deaths among prisoners in Kentucky jails.

“Doing the time is supposed to mean living in a jail with your liberty taken away, eating jail food, with unsavory characters. It doesn’t mean dying because your basic medical needs are ignored,” Belzley stated.

Yet that is exactly what happened to Kenneth Marcum, 50, ...

In an all-cash transaction that closed on April 6, 2017, private prison firm the GEO Group, Inc. acquired New Jersey-based Community Education Centers (CEC), a for-profit reentry and treatment provider. GEO plans to integrate CEC into its existing business operations.

The $360 million deal expands GEO’s annual revenue by approximately $250 million and brings the company’s bed count to around 99,000 worldwide. GEO operates facilities in the U.S., Australia, South Africa and the UK; it has more than 23,500 employees globally.

“This important transaction represents a compelling strategic fit for our company as it further positions GEO to meet the demand for increasingly diversified correctional, detention, and community reentry facilities and services across the United States,” said George C. Zoley, the company’s chairman and CEO.

He added that the purchase would allow GEO “to expand the delivery of enhanced in-prison rehabilitation including evidence-based treatment, integrated with post-release support services through our industry-leading ‘GEO Continuum of Care.’”

Despite the company’s claims, it successfully objected to a shareholder resolution filed by PLN managing editor Alex Friedmann that would have required GEO to spend just 5% of its net income on reentry and rehabilitative programs for prisoners, beyond what it is required to ...

by Lonnie Burton

On October 17, 2016, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court’s order granting summary judgment in favor of the warden and a private health care provider in a case where a prisoner suffered an asthma attack and later died. The prisoner’s estate alleged that his death occurred because the cell where he was housed did not have an emergency call button and the facility lacked a medical director, among other claims.

On May 26, 2010, prisoner Marvin T. McDonald was housed in a segregation unit at the Pinckneyville Correctional Center (PCC) in Illinois. At about 5:00 p.m. that day, he began to suffer an asthma attack. McDonald, however, did not receive any treatment until 12:15 a.m., in part because there were no emergency call buttons in the segregation cells, forcing his cellmate to bang on the door to get the guards’ attention.

Once in the health care unit – run by private contractor Wexford Health Sources – there was no on-call doctor. Although the unit was supposed to be overseen by a permanent medical director, that post had been vacant for over a year. After a nurse contacted a doctor by phone, the doctor ...

by David Reutter

As mass incarceration in the United States grew between 1990 and 2005, many lawmakers decided to ride the wave of “tough on crime” rhetoric by building new correctional facilities to house the increasing number of people being arrested, convicted and incarcerated. During that period, 544 detention centers were built in the U.S. – one every ten days for 15 years.

But a current trend to reduce incarceration levels rather than impose long sentences is causing the wave to recede, leaving fewer people to fill prison and jail beds which nonetheless continue to consume tax dollars for their debt service and maintenance costs.

Mississippi is a case in point. With its prison system bursting at the seams in the late 1990s, state officials often refused to accept prisoners from county jails, even when they were sentenced to prison terms. One sheriff went so far as to drive prisoners to a state facility and leave them handcuffed to the fence.

To address the problem, lawmakers offered local municipalities a deal: Build county-operated regional correctional facilities, and the state would promise to keep them at 80% capacity, paying $29.74 per prisoner per day. Local officials took out bonds and built ...

by Derek Gilna

In a July 2016 report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that 16 of the 18 immigrant detainees who died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody from 2012 to 2015 received substandard medical care, and that in 7 of those cases, inadequate care likely contributed to their deaths. According to HRW, two independent medical experts reached that conclusion after reviewing treatment notes, death reviews and other details of the medical care that was provided – or sometimes not provided.

“The records also show evidence of the misuse of isolation for people with mental disabilities, inadequate mental health evaluation and treatment, and broader medical care failure,” the report stated. Clara Long, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, added, “these death reviews show that system-wide problems remain, including a failure to prevent or fix substandard medical care that literally kills.”

Responding to similar complaints regarding ICE medical care in 2009, the Obama administration had promised improvements by providing more centralized oversight and better medical treatment. However, the HRW study indicates there have not been significant improvements since that time.

Even more troublesome was what the 18 deaths examined in the report say about medical care in ICE’s detention system. ...

by Christopher Zoukis

An infectious outbreak at an immigration detention facility in Pinal County, Arizona operated by CoreCivic (formerly known as CCA) resulted in over 20 people contracting measles.

The outbreak was discovered in May 2016 when one detainee and an employee at the Eloy Detention Center tested positive for measles. Within two weeks, 16 cases of the highly-contagious disease had been confirmed. By the time it was officially over in August 2016 – 21 days after the last reported infection – 22 people had become ill.

“Measles is ... highly contagious yet vaccine-preventable,” said Dr. Cara Christ, director of the Arizona Department of Health Services. “It is spread through the air and through coughing, sneezing, and contact with mucous or saliva from the nose, mouth, or throat of an infected person.”

Symptoms include fever, red and watery eyes, coughing and a runny nose, but patients may also develop a rash that begins at the hairline of the head and moves down the body. The rash can appear up to 21 days after exposure, according to Dr. Rebecca Sunenshine, medical director and disease control administrator for the Maricopa County Department of Public Health.

“A person with measles is considered to ...

by Derek Gilna

New Mexico District Court Judge Raymond Z. Ortiz ruled in August 2016 that Corizon Health, a for-profit medical services provider, must release its settlement agreements in lawsuits filed against the company by New Mexico prisoners.

Until last year, Corizon provided medical care at 10 state correctional facilities. ...

Private prisons cost the state of Oklahoma $92.7 million in 2015 alone, and almost $1 billion since 2004. With its prison system currently operating at 122 percent of capacity, the Oklahoma Board of Corrections (OBOC) will need even more private prison bed space, according to Joe M. Allbaugh, Director of the state’s Department of Corrections.

“Given the current prison population, I don’t see any long-term scenario where we won’t rely on private prisons,” he said.

However, an OBOC plan to spend more than $35 million over five years to lease a vacant 2,600-bed private prison raised the ire of state lawmakers, since the plan also included closing 15 regional work centers, shutting off a supply of cheap prisoner labor to local municipalities.

In May 2016, the OBOC unanimously approved leasing the North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayre, about 130 miles west of Oklahoma City. The facility is owned by Nashville, Tennessee-based CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and will be one of the most up-to-date state-operated prisons, offering more programs like education and vocational training.

“Part of our job is to reintegrate these men back into society by giving them the programming they need to find a ...

by Christopher Zoukis

In 2016, questions were raised in at least three states about the amount of taxpayer money flowing into the coffers of private, for-profit prison companies.

Take Colorado, for example. When lawmakers were considering an almost $26 billion state budget last year, they noticed it included a curious last-minute addition: $3 million for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now known as CoreCivic).

The Denver Post reported that the $3 million payment to CCA was drawn from money earmarked for the Department of Corrections that was set aside “in case the prison population increases faster than current forecasts.” According to Colorado budget writers, the payment was needed to keep the CCA-operated Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington, Colorado from closing its doors. If the prison shut down, the state would need to relocate the 400 prisoners who were housed at the facility as of April 2016.

While the Kit Carson prison has a capacity of about 1,450 beds, the fewer number of prisoners held at the facility meant it was not profitable for CCA. Yet even though the state Senate approved the $3 million payment to ensure the prison stayed open, CCA decided to close it anyway at the ...

by Derek Gilna

As public and legislative pressure builds to reduce the number of prisoners held in state and federal correctional facilities, the private prison industry has changed gears to offer rehabilitative and treatment services – a shift criticized in a February 2016 report titled “Incorrect Care: A Prison Profiteer Turns Care into Confinement.” The report, published by Grassroots Leadership, a non-profit organization, claims that this latest venture is part of the “treatment industrial complex” – a nod to the confluence of political, social and business interests known as the prison industrial complex.

As an increasing number of states have taken modest steps to rein in mass incarceration, the nation’s prison population leveled off in 2010 and has declined very slightly in recent years. As a result, private prison companies such as CoreCivic (formerly CCA) and the GEO Group have begun diversifying their business practices, including expanding into such areas as community corrections, reentry facilities and GPS monitoring for people on community supervision.

For example, CoreCivic has acquired Correctional Alternatives, Inc., Correctional Management, Inc. and Avalon Correctional Services – all community corrections providers, while in February 2017 the GEO Group announced its purchase of Community Education Centers (CEC), which operates ...