On May 20, 2012, violence erupted at a 2,567-bed private prison near Natchez, Mississippi which is operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The Adams County Corrections Center (ACCC) houses low-security adult male illegal immigrants who have entered the country illegally after having previously been deported. Although this is a criminal offense, all of the prisoners will eventually be returned to their home countries.

The hours-long disturbance began on May 20, 2012 at 2:40 p.m. local time and centered on the inner compound and housing units of the prison. Prisoners were seen armed with makeshift weapons like broom handles and trash can lids. They built a bonfire in the prison compound, but none of them attempt to escape.

According to Adams County Sheriff Chuck Mayfield, the disturbance involved a power struggle between two different factions of prisoners. He said that 200 to 300 prisoners were involved in the incident and that the prison's Special Operations Response Team (SORT) and SORTs from other CCA-run prisons in the area responded to the disturbance, deploying chemical agents and firearms to quell the unrest while sheriff's deputies and the Mississippi highway Patrol surrounded the prison.

During the course of the disturbance, a half ...

The St. Louis Lawyer's Group is helping the family of a man who died five days after arriving at the St. Louis Justice Center sue the jail's private medical services provider, Corizon. The suit alleges denial of medical care to a seriously ill prisoner resulting in his death.

Courtland Lucas was a 31-year-old man with a history of drug and traffic offenses when he was arrested for parole violation. Because he was complaining of chest pains, he was taken to the St. Alexius Hospital where doctors gave him insulin and set out a plan for checking his blood sugar level. Then he was incarcerated in the St. Louis Justice Center where a jail doctor ordered a similar plan.

Lucas had a history of serious heart disease. His medical records showed several heart valve replacements and a hospitalization for swelling and an irregular heartbeat. He was also diabetic with high blood pressure and a pacemaker.

Unfortunately, jail medical staff didn't take his complaints very seriously. From his medical records, it appears that blood sugar level checks were missed and blood sugar levels as high as 325 were not treated with insulin. When Lucas began complaining of hallucinations, he was ignored and ...

A New Mexico legislative committee is perplexed by the state's $2-million giveaway to GEO Group, since the Florida-based private-prison company has cut staff at one prison but continues to charge New Mexico's Corrections Department (NMCD) as if it's still employing the same number of staff.

A June 2012 report from the state's Legislative Finance Committee (LFC), in partnership with the Pew Center on the States, uncovered the fiscal waste among deeply systemic issues within NMCD, including poor parole planning and problems with "unproven” programs that are meant to lower recidivism rates—all amid projections that New Mexico's prison population will exceed capacity within the next decade.

"The NMCD has potential to reduce costs and improve public safety," said the report, which was prepared by the committee's nine-person program evaluation team. "However, the NMCD currently suffers from gaps in program oversight, ineffective use of resources, and patterns of inefficient spending."

In March 2012, an amended contract between NMCD and Lea County for the operation of the state prison in Hobbs, N.M., reduced prison staff by 32 full-time employees (FTE). But GEO Group, the for-profit company that runs the Hobbs prison—and has been forced to pay fines to NMCD totaling more than $1 ...

The Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Ocilla, Georgia is an example of everything that is wrong with small-town private-prison development. It's a story of local government officials seeking to make their community profit off the misery of others, only to end up in misery themselves.

ICDC had half its current number of 1,200 beds and a history of defaulting on bonds when, in 2007, Terry O'Brien, a real estate developer and newly-minted private prison entrepreneur talked local government officials into backing $55 million in bonds to double the jail's size. O'Brien founded a property consulting firm in 2002 and expanded into the private jail business when he incorporated Municipal Corrections LLC in Las Vegas in 2004. The sole purpose of Municipal Corrections was to own the IDCD which it purchased from a trustee in 2004.

At first, the jail was a success. Housing overflow prisoners from the Atlanta jail system, there was even pressure to expand. That's what led to issuing the 2007 bonds. But additional prisoners from Atlanta and promised federal and immigration prisoners failed to materialize, leaving the newly-expanded jail half full and unable to pay its bills.

County taxpayers began complaining about the jail's $1.6 million ...

In return for, well... nothing, the sun-kissed small town of Eloy, Arizona, is getting paid by the federal government.

Already home to an immigrant detention facility about an hour southeast of Phoenix, Eloy recently became the beneficiary of nearly a half-million dollars for simply managing the contract of another prison for undocumented immigrants—albeit a prison that's 920 miles from Eloy in Dilley, Texas.

Eloy's good fortune is the result of what private-prison critics say is a shady deal between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest for-profit prison operator in America.

Last fall, when Texas and Arizona received an influx of tens of thousands of Central American immigrants—mostly children and their parents—ICE built a new detention facility in Dilley. ICE, however, didn't have the manpower to run the prison itself, so it enlisted a private company to do it for them.

But rather than have an open bid for the Dilley contract, ICE simply handed the job to CCA by modifying its existing contract with the town of Eloy, whose immigrant prison is also operated by CCA.

Somehow, Eloy is supposed to be accountable for a facility that houses up to 2,400 people ...

GEO, the world's largest private prison company, has been cited by the United states Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Inspector General (OIG) for overcharging the Bureau of Prisons for contract services, abusing prisoners with inadequate medical care, and wrongfully disciplining other prisoners at their  Reeves County Detention Facility I/II at  Pecos, Texas. The DOJ report stated that despite a history of prisoner rioting in 2008 and 2009 in protest of poor medical care and inmate deaths in solitary confinement, GEO continued to offer poor medical care, short-staffing, and unevenly-applied discipline.

The BOP entered into a contract with GEO in 2007 to operate a non-citizen, low-security detention facility and provide both management services  for 2400 prisoners atone of the country's largest private prisons.  That contract provided for minimal levels of staffing, which if not met by GEO, should have resulted in lower payments by the BOP.  Inexplicably, the BOP agreed to waive the minimal staff levels mandated by the contract, to give GEO some "flexibility and discretion" to manage the prison. Prison experts also agree, however, that short-staffing puts both prisoners and staff in potential danger.

That's exactly what happened in 2008 and 2009. Jesus Manuel Galindo, an epileptic who ...

The business model of Advanced Correctional Healthcare, Inc. (ACH) includes “severe cost control measures” and reliance on the company’s insurance provider to cover liability verdicts that result from inadequate medical care, according to lawsuits filed by the estates of three pretrial detainees who died of easily treatable maladies at Alabama’s ...

The Louisiana federal district court overseeing the consent decree related to conditions at the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) has denied a motion by the City of New Orleans to nullify a contract to provide prisoner health care at the facility. The motion was the latest skirmish between city officials and Sheriff Marlin Gusman.

As previously reported in PLN, the court approved a consent judgment on October 21, 2013 to address the “stark, sometimes shocking deficiencies in OPP’s medical and mental health care system.” [See: PLN, June 2014, p.44]. To meet his obligations under the consent decree, Gusman entered into a five-year, $83 million contract with Nashville, Tennessee-based Correct Care Solutions (CCS), a for-profit company.

The city argued in its motion that the contract’s “exorbitant price tag” was “financially crippling.” While city officials had expressed significant concerns about the “overall cost, per diem price offering, and annual expenditure inflation rates” during the vetting process, they had never argued prior to the motion to terminate the CCS contract that Gusman lacked the authority to enter into it.

“Moving forward, not backward, is the only acceptable path to the Court,” the district court stated in its May 29, 2015 order denying the ...

In the summer of 2014, a surge of tens of thousands of immigrant refugees from Central America brought unprecedented attention to the incarceration of families and unaccompanied children in so-called residential centers – many run by for-profit prison companies – as they sought asylum in the United States.

Human rights advocates warned of the harmful effects detention has on immigrant children, while lawmakers complained they were denied access to the facilities and immigrant detention was a financial burden on taxpayers.

Everyone on Wall Street, meanwhile, agreed that locking up immigrant families was a boon for private prison firms like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, which received lucrative contracts to run the detention centers. CCA, for example, received a no-bid, four-year contract worth $1 billion to operate its South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Even better for the company, it will be paid as if the 2,400-bed facility is at 100% capacity no matter how many immigrants are housed there. At full capacity, CCA is paid $285 per day per resident at Dilley.

In August 2014, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened a purportedly “family friendly” detention center in Karnes County, Texas, about an hour southeast ...

by Bob Libal, Holly Kirby and Cristina Parker

In July 2016, executives from private prison companies Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group (GEO) held investor calls to report on second quarter earnings and to discuss their financial outlook going forward.

The calls demonstrated that policy reforms that reduce incarceration and immigrant detention are bad for private prison firms, and that criminal justice reform measures – including reductions in California’s prison population – are a threat to future profits. Both CCA and GEO officials also reported expansion of their interests in alternative areas of the correctional market, including reentry services, GPS monitoring and community corrections.

Family Detention Drives Profits

The investor calls revealed to shareholders of both companies what many in Texas already knew: Two massive lockups for refugee mothers and their children in South Texas have been key to record profitability for private prison companies since 2014. CCA’s Dilley detention camp and GEO Group’s Karnes County lockup have been lucrative sources of revenue for the companies, which have reported gains in every quarter since the facilities opened.

But continued record revenue from family detention is not guaranteed. The federal government’s policy of detaining immigrant families faces two ...