by Leah Carter, James Benedict, Madison Hogan and Paige Ferguson

On paper, Indiana has a strict cap on campaign contributions from corporations. But in practice, it’s easy for businesses to turn on the flow of money and get around the spending limits.

Contributions from executives, political action committees and subsidiary companies allow corporations to increase their impact well beyond the statutory limits.

GEO Group, Inc., the Boca Raton, Florida-based private prison firm, is a good exemplar of the issues surrounding the regulation and reporting of corporate campaign contributions in Indiana.

The company, which is the largest private prison operator in the world, has contracts to run two Indiana Department of Correction facilities (a total of more than 4,000 beds in New Castle and Plainfield) and was pushing to open an immigration detention center in Gary until the city council rejected the idea in May 2016.

GEO began contributing to top state officials, including former Governor Mitch Daniels and House Speaker Brian Bosma, in 2004. It received its first Indiana contract the following year, and as its business here grew, its campaign contributions increased as well. From 2011 to 2015 (the most recent full year of data), GEO and its various ...

President Donald Trump has restored consumer confidence in private prisons—but they were never in danger of failing to begin with.

by Rick Paulas

For the country's largest private prison corporation, the last six months at the stock market have been wilder than the prison fight scene in Face/Off.

Last year, on August 17th, stock prices in CoreCivic—previously known as the Corrections Corporation of America—were steady at 27.22 a share. The next day, after former president Barack Obama's attorney general issued a memo directing the Department of Justice to phase out its use of private prisons, stocks plummeted 10 points. When Donald Trump won the presidency, stocks jumped six points and continued an upward trajectory, topping out at 35.03 on February 24th, the day after new Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the 2016 directive.

Consumers' new confidence in private prisons' finances shouldn't come as a surprise: Trump has broadly hinted since his candidacy that he intends to use plenty of prison space with promises to bring back "law and order" and also deport three million people—who would first need to be detained. Though crime rates have largely declined since 1992, Americans' concern about crime and violence rose 14 percent between 2014 ...

At midnight on January 31, 2017, a welcome change came to the District of Columbia’s jail system with the expiration of the District’s 20-year contract with CoreCivic – formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America – to operate the Correctional Treatment Facility (CTF), which houses around 600 minimum- and medium-security prisoners, female prisoners and juveniles adjudicated as adults.

The facility returned to public control, prompting celebration from criminal justice reform advocates who had waged a three-year campaign to oust CoreCivic from D.C. Jeremy Mohler, a member of the ReThink Justice DC Coalition, wrote that the organization had won a previous anti-privatization victory when it successfully campaigned to stop the District’s jail system from contracting with troubled for-profit medical provider Corizon. [See: PLN, Oct. 2015, p.20].

A 2015 report by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs found that juveniles at the CTF were subjected to “excessive” solitary confinement. It also found that CoreCivic was charging 31% more than the national average for correctional management.

Beyond the District of Columbia, CoreCivic has long been known nationwide for its record of violence, sexual assaults, escapes, riots and inadequate medical care in its facilities. 

Sources: www.washingtonpost.com, www.corizonhealth.com

book review by Matt Clarke

Incarceration Nations by Baz Dreisinger (Other Press, 2016). 325 pages, $19.00 (hardcover).

When John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Baz Dreisinger began her two-year pilgrimage to prisons around the world, she probably told herself she was seeking the best practices in each penal system to help her understand what might be done to reform the mass-incarceration-driven justice system that prevails in the United States. It certainly seemed to come as a surprise when she concluded that reform may not be the answer at all – reform is too insufficient a concept, and wholesale replacement should be the goal.

That was not the only surprise Dreisinger confronted in her stirring hybrid of memoir and scholarly treatise, which never fails to portray the essential humanity of prisoners, victims and ordinary citizens in exquisite prose. Despite her expertise as a founder of John Jay’s Prison-to-College Pipeline program, which brings college classes into New York prisons and the formerly incarcerated into John Jay as students, Dreisinger was unprepared for the national philosophy of forgiveness and re-acceptance into the community practiced in Rwanda. A greater surprise: such compassion is even extended to the tens of thousands who took part ...

by Derek Gilna

In July 2016, just before trial, Sentinel Offender Services, a private probation company, agreed to pay a $200,000 settlement to LaSaundria J. Walker for illegally keeping her in jail after she completed her term of probation. Sentinel also agreed to pay Hills McGee $75,000 to settle a lawsuit after he was jailed for two weeks for failing to pay community supervision fees.

Those settlements were in addition to a jury award of $50,000 in compensatory damages and $125,000 in attorney’s fees to Kathleen Hucks, another Sentinel client, for false arrest and imprisonment. [See: PLN, Feb. 2017, p.48]. More than a dozen people have sued the company in both Richmond and Columbia counties in Georgia, plus a dozen more in other jurisdictions, accusing Sentinel of committing numerous civil rights violations.

Augusta attorney Jack Long has led efforts to prevent Sentinel and other private probation firms from profiting from improper business practices – which typically include imposing numerous fees on probationers, then having them jailed when they are unable to pay. The subject of an article published by the American Bar Association in 2014, Long, as well as other attorneys, have argued that Sentinel is not interested in ...

by Joe Watson

For three years, elected officials in Niagara County, New York refused to give the families of Tommie Lee Jones and Daniel Pantera the satisfaction of terminating the county jail’s contract with for-profit healthcare provider Armor Correctional Health Services.

Instead Armor left on its own terms, refusing a new deal with the county when local officials denied the Florida-based company’s demands for more money and negotiated a new contract with a different for-profit medical provider.

“There is no firing. They don’t want it anymore,” said Niagara County Attorney Claude A. Joerg, referring to the jail’s healthcare contract. “It’s not a response to the report from the state.”

The report to which Joerg referred was released in 2014 by New York’s Commission of Correction and blamed the December 2012 deaths of Jones, 51, and Pantera, 46 – both just two weeks after Armor entered into a three-year contract with the county – on Dr. Steven C. Gasiewicz, the company’s medical director at the Niagara County Jail. The report found the pair of deaths were due to “grossly inadequate medical and mental health care,” and recommended that the county consider severing its relationship with Armor.

Pantera, who reportedly suffered from ...

In March 2017, Special Master David R. Cohen filed a request with the U.S. District Court in Kansas, seeking to enlarge his investigation into whether the Leavenworth Detention Center (LDC) and the private contractor that operates the facility, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, which recently rebranded as CoreCivic), had improperly recorded privileged attorney-client meetings and shared those recordings with federal prosecutors. Having determined that the recordings were in fact made and shared, Cohen now wants to determine whether that practice was commonplace.

His review had already found 227 phone call recordings and at least 30 videos of attorney-client meetings in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City. Around 700 attorney visits may have been recorded without the parties’ knowledge – violating a fundamental protection for criminal defendants established by the Sixth Amendment.

Cohen, a federal law clerk, was appointed by U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson, who issued an order in August 2016 directing LDC and CCA officials to immediately stop recording private attorney-client meetings and phone calls. The order came after a hearing confirmed that CCA had made recordings of confidential conversations between prisoners and their lawyers, and gave some of them to prosecutors in response to grand jury ...

by Derek Gilna

In June 2016, In the Public Interest (ITPI), a non-partisan public policy group, published a report titled “How Private Prison Companies Increase Recidivism,” based upon the fact that for-profit prisons rely upon incarceration to generate revenue – thus they have no incentive to provide rehabilitative programs that reduce recidivism. In a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, this is a recipe for disaster.

According to a study by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), “50% of incarcerated people return to prison within three years of being released.” The ITPI report noted that “Academic research has found that incarcerating people in prisons operated by private companies, which have business models dependent on incarceration, increases the likelihood of those people recidivating.”

The report further said that while governmental agencies, which do need not to generate profit, typically operate prisons with the goals of rehabilitating prisoners and protecting public safety, private prisons are beholden to stockholders who expect to receive a return on their investment.

“Often,” ITPI wrote, “achieving the profit comes at a cost to prisoners, those who work inside the prisons, and the broader public.”

Private prison companies sell their services to government agencies on ...

by David Reutter

With the advent of privatized prisoner health care in Florida, a spike in deaths has hit levels not seen in 10 years. Yet, privatization remains popular with Gov. Rick Scott, the former CEO of a healthcare conglomerate that bilked the government out of millions.

When campaigning to become governor, Scott promised to cut prison costs by privatizing the prison system. Despite opposition from guard unions, Scott won the election. He, however, lost a quest to privatize the entire prison system because such a move required legislative action. [See: PLN, Feb. 2012, p.1].

The court ruling ending prison privatization left open the option of privatizing the prison health care system. Scott too that option, and in 2012 the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) signed contracts with two companies totaling about $1.3 billion. Both companies are familiar to PLN readers for their history of putting profit before any semblance of real care [See: PLN, June 2013, p.24].

Corizon Health won a $1.2 billion, five year contract to care for prisoners in about 44 prisons. Wexford Health Services received a $240 million contract over the same period for overseeing care at nine south Florida prisons. FDOC and Corizon ...

by Greg Dober 

In Alameda County, California, Corizon Correctional Healthcare is facing questions regarding campaign contributions to County Sheriff Greg Ahern.  While investigating two inmate deaths at Santa Rita jail, in Alameda County, television station, KTVU-2 uncovered public documents, which shows Ahern accepting $110,000 in campaign contributions during 2006-2013 from Corizon.   The Corizon contract with Alameda County, worth $237 million, is the counties largest contract and Corizon was Ahern’s largest campaign donor.

Corizon contributed to Ahern’s campaign fund despite the sheriff running unopposed in his reelection bids. Ahern defended the contribution by indicating that he used the money to fund a golf tournament to raise money for the sheriff’s deputy’s health and welfare fund.   Corizon wasn’t alone in funding the sheriff’s unopposed campaign bids.  Aramark, the food service provider at the jail, donated in excess of $11,500 from 2008-2009. In addition, two companies bidding for video services at the jail also donated a total of $20,000 to Ahern’s campaigns.

After the three-year contract expiration in 2011, the company was awarded consecutive one-year no- bid renewals at the recommendation of Ahern.  In a no-bid contract renewal, Ahern has continually recommended Corizon since 2011 despite the company’s performance problems at the ...