by Erin Rosa

One of the country’s largest immigration jailers and private prison companies spent $420,000 lobbying the Justice Department and federal lawmakers during the first three months of 2017, more than half of what they spent last year for lobbying services. The company has also nearly doubled the number of lobbyists working on its behalf.

According to Congressional disclosure reports released last week, the Geo Group, a Florida-based company that operates 74 correctional centers in the United States, spent the $420,000 on six different lobbying outfits, one of which employs two former aides of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The company gave $60,000 to national law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP to lobby Congress on issues relating to the 2018 national budget and homeland security expenditures, according to the records. The same firm employs David Stewart and Ryan Robichaux, former Sessions aides who are now working for the Geo Group.

In contrast, during the first three months of last year, disclosure reports show the Geo Group spent $110,000 on lobbying, and for the entirety of 2016 the company spent $830,000. At the end of 2016, the company had seven lobbyists working for them. Now, that number is thirteen.

With ...

by Rosalind Adams, BuzzFeed

TULSA, Oklahoma — By the time police arrived at the psychiatric hospital, one of the adolescent units was out of control. The new manager had been attacked, a handful of its teenage patients had barricaded themselves in a small room, and others were fighting with staff.

The officers called for backup, and three more police cars pulled up to Shadow Mountain Behavioral Health, which primarily treats young people. A “code green” blared over the intercom system, alerting employees across the hospital to the violence.

When a staff member unlocked the room the patients had shut themselves in, police pepper-sprayed the kids inside.

In the tumult, one staff member reported being stabbed in the forehead with a pencil. Outside, a patient scaled the 10-foot fence and, as employees watched in horror, began slicing his wrists with a piece of glass, three employees recently recalled. Running to reach him, another worker stepped in a hole and injured his ankle.

“It was crazy, mass chaos,” said an employee who saw the scene unfold.

Shadow Mountain is owned by America’s largest psychiatric hospital chain, Universal Health Services. A recent BuzzFeed News investigation raised grave questions ...

by David Reutter

Privatization has been all the rage in Florida’s prison system for some time. By 2003, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC), had contracts with private companies to operate its canteen, food service, and telephone operations. By then it also had several privately run prisons in its system.

PLN has chronicled incidents over the years to show that privatization is the fruit of political clout and often involve kickbacks that result in corruption. [See: PLN, Jan. 2006, p. 20; Mar. 2011, p. 1]. The problem is not confined to Florida, as the citizens of Mississippi learned after their corrections commissioner was recently indicted. [See: PLN, Oct. 2015, p. 42].

Gov. Rick Scott campaigned on cutting the FDOC’s budget, and one of his first acts in office was to pen contracts to privatize the entire prison system and its medical care. Due to a statutory provision, the move to privatize prisons was blocked by a court and failed in the next legislative session. The move to privatize prisoner medical care, however, moved forward.

Anyone who makes even a cursory investigation into prison privatization can easily conclude that it is tainted with corruption and poor-services from profit-mongering companies ...

by Derek Gilna

Ten years after the federal government passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which applied to Bureau of Prison (BOP) facilities, the Justice Department by rule has finally extended those same protections to the undocumented in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities.  PREA was passed by Congress after numerous studies determined that federal prisoners in the BOP system were often victims of sexual assault.

Although immigrant rights organizations lauded the move, as a positive one, they were quick to point out that it will not immediately affect those individuals confined in private facilities contracting with ICE to house immigration detainees. DHS and ICE hold approximately 34,000 detainees on an average day. Additionally, Juvenile rights advocates are also concerned about the risk of sexual abuse faced by the increasing number of unaccompanied children illegally entering the U.S. in recent months.

Most experts agree that sexual abuse is underreported by at least half in the BOP system, which generally houses American citizens and adult undocumented individuals convicted of crimes.  However, such individuals have various constitutional protections available to them and access to a grievance process and legal assistance, as well as telephone and restricted ...

by David Reutter

Private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) recently made a statement to Mother Jones magazine in response to the discovery of reporter who had been employed at one of its prisons in Louisiana. The operation was uncovered when a reporter was arrested after being spotted outside the perimeter of Winn Correctional Facility.

Winn Parish Sheriff Cranford Jordan’s office was called at approximately 9:30pm on March 13, 2015, by guards at the CCA-operated prison. The guards had spotted someone on prison grounds via a light from a cellphone. The person left in a rental car when guards tried to stop him.

The car was tracked to Mother Jones senior producer James West. Monica Bauerlein, co-editor of Mother Jones, issued the following statement, “James West was stopped by police while doing newsgathering in a public place and arrested when he refused to show the contents of his camera.” Jordan said West did not carry media credentials and had a camera-equipped drone with him.

Then, on March 17, a guard resigned his position at the prison after being a no-show for two days. The guard, who had been employed at the prison since December, was Shane Bauer, a senior ...

by Lonnie Burton

Ohio Governor John Kasich believes in privatization of some government functions as both a way to save the state money and improve the services that residents receive. So in 2011 he submitted a budget plan asking the legislature for authorization to sell as many as five state prisons to for-profit companies. But following the first sale, a series of embarrassing reports revealed numerous problems under private management.

The first – and thus far only – prison to be sold, the 1,798-bed Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Conneaut, was transferred to the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now known as CoreCivic) in 2012. CCA paid the state almost $73 million for the facility, and in exchange received a 20-year contract to house Ohio state prisoners along with a 90% bed guarantee provision. [See: PLN, Aug. 2015, p.42].

According to Neil Larusch, a Conneaut City Councilman who toured Lake Erie shortly after it was sold, the prison’s population quickly grew by 300 prisoners, requiring double bunking. He also noted that CCA hired the bare minimum of guards, resulting in a toxic mix of violence, drugs and squalid living conditions. Some prisoners, for example, were left without running water, requiring ...

by Lonnie Burton

On May 20, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated lawsuits filed by two federal prisoners who had sued the government and two prison contractors for failing to protect them from “valley fever,” an infectious disease, at a privately-run federal prison.

The Taft Correctional Institution is located in Kern County in central California. Although Taft is owned by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), its day-to-day operations are contracted out to a private prison company. Until 2007, Taft was run by the GEO Group, and since that time it has been operated by Management and Training Corp. (MTC). Taft was built in the San Joaquin Valley, where the soil is infested by coccidioidomycosis, commonly known as “cocci” – a fungus that when inhaled can cause a flu-like illness or pneumonia and is sometimes fatal.

In 2003, the number of prisoners at Taft infected with valley fever reached epidemic levels. The warden admitted there were “more cases of diagnosed valley fever at Taft than in all other federal prisons combined.”

In response to the outbreak, the BOP and the Centers for Disease Control initially developed a plan that included prevention protocols, but then quickly ...

by Derek Gilna

Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election early on the morning of November 9, 2016. Before that day was over, the stock prices for private prison companies GEO Group (GEO) and CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America) had significantly surged in value.

Opponents to prison privatization correctly pointed out that President-elect Trump had made no secret of his intention to start deporting “two or three million criminal aliens,” which apparently led to Wall Street’s reaction the day after he was elected, since over 60% of immigrant detainees are held in privately-operated facilities. Additionally, during his campaign Trump had made a comment in favor of private prisons, saying they seemed to “work a lot better.”

Given the inherent volatility of the stock market, it remains to be seen if these newly-inflated share values will be sustained – though the stock prices for both GEO and CoreCivic currently remain much higher than they were pre-election.

CoreCivic’s stock jumped from $14.19 per share to $20.31 per share the day after the election, and as of late March was trading at around $32 per share. GEO Group’s stock went from $23.88 per share on November ...

The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the parent organization of Prison Legal News, has joined a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s practice of holding young, immigrant children in prison-like facilities for indefinite periods of time.

In an amicus brief submitted to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on March 10, 2017, HRDC called the practice of locking up undocumented children brought across the U.S. border by family members “inherently harmful to the growth, development, and physical and mental health of children and adolescents, and ... permissible only as a last resort.”

The brief was filed in connection with Flores v. United States, a lawsuit challenging the government’s practice of locking up families that try to illegally cross the border into the United States, specifically women and children. HRDC is urging the appellate court, based in California, to rule in favor of the plaintiffs and order federal officials to immediately release undocumented children from detention centers.

According to the brief, which was joined by several other organizations, “the harms caused by detention of immigration children are not theoretical or speculative. Individual children who are currently being detained, and who will be directly affected by this ...

On February 15, 2017, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), PLN’s parent organization, condemned CoreCivic, the nation’s largest for-profit prison operator – formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America – for rejecting a shareholder resolution seeking independent audits of the company’s detention facilities.

CoreCivic’s objection to the audits was despite a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) that found the company’s federal prisons had higher average rates of prisoner-on-prisoner assaults, sexual assaults on staff, fights and suicide attempts in comparison with other privately-operated federal prisons. [See: PLN, Oct. 2016, p.22]. Since the report was released, CoreCivic has faced multiple shareholder lawsuits.

Following the OIG report, the U.S. Department of Justice announced plans to phase out the Bureau of Prisons’ use of for-profit prisons. On August 18, 2016, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates wrote in a memo that for-profit prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and ... they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.” [See: PLN, Sept. 2016, p.28].

The call for independent audits of CoreCivic facilities was included in a ...