New Jersey has embarked on a grand experiment – shifting state prisoners from expensive state prisons into less expensive, privately-run halfway houses. The state prison system bas less than 25,000 beds while the around two dozen halfway houses in the New Jersey system house about 3,500 state prisoners and parolees. But the system is not without problems--5,100 prisoners have escaped from the halfway houses since 2005 and former employees and prisoners report that drug and alcohol use, crime and violence are rampant in some halfway houses.
Community Education Centers
The largest private influence in the halfway house system is Community Education Centers (CEC), a West Caldwell, New Jersey company that manages private jails, prisons and halfway houses throughout the United States. It operates six large facilities which account for 1,900 of the state's 3,500 halfway house beds. CEC also runs the 900-bed Albert M. "Bo" Robinson Assessment and Treatment Center (Bo), which acts as both a halfway house and an intake center for state prisoners transitioning into the halfway house system. Prisoners who are deemed low risk at Bo are transferred to other halfway houses, including those run by other private entities.
CEC is enmeshed in New Jersey politics. New ...
A doctor has been associated with the medical maltreatment of multiple jail prisoners across several states during close to two decades of practice. Some of the prisoners died. Yet Dr. Stephen Austin Cullinan of Peoria, Illinois still retains his medical license.
On August 14, 2012, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (DFPR) fined Cullinan for failing to properly treat a Macoupin County jail prisoner's fractured ankle, which ultimately resulted in loss of the leg.
In the summer of 2007, a seizure caused jail prisoner Jason Waggener to break his ankle and suffer a head wound. He was taken to an emergency room where the attending physician recommended that Waggener be seen by an orthopedist. Instead, Cullinan--who was employed by the Peoria-based Health Professionals, Limited (HPL)--a private provider of prisoner health care at over 100 Midwest jails, returned him to the jail.
During the next few days, Waggener became delusional. He removed his splint and walked about until he incurred a compound fracture that result d in the amputation of his leg.
Waggener filed a lawsuit against the county and Cullinan. In February 2011, the lawsuit was settled by Cullinan paying Waggener $130,000 and Macoupin County paying him $337,000. ...
On October 24, 2012, a Texas federal jury awarded $2.25 million to the survivors of a federal prisoner who died while in the custody of a private prison due to prison officials' failure to provide him with previously-prescribed anti-seizure medication.
Mario Garcia was a 42-year-old federal prisoner When he was ...
On February 17, 2012, a Pennsylvania jury awarded a former prisoner 8400,000 in a suit over medical negligence resulting in serious injury to him.
Derrick Jones was a Pennsylvania state prisoner incarcerated at SCI Albion on March 12, 2006, when he fell in his cell and was seriously injured. Five days ...
After years of high rates of escapes, poor supervision and rumors of sweetheart deals between politicians and private companies, the curtain is finally being pulled back on New Jersey's halfway houses.
A New York Times investigation last year concluded that nepotism and poor regulation have allowed Education and Health Centers of America (ECHA) and the Kintock Group–the two purportedly nonprofit groups that run most of New Jersey's halfway houses–to rake in millions of dollars and further their own money-making schemes and political agendas at the expense of taxpayers, victims of violent crimes, and offenders trying to successfully transition back into society.
In December 2012, the Times reported that Kintock had paid its founder, David D. Fawkner–a former probation and parole officer who started the company in 1985–about $7 million in salary and benefits over the past decade, while his daughter, brother-in-law and son-in-law were paid more than $2.5 million altogether during the same period.
Kintock, which is based in Pennsylvania but has most of its operations–including five halfway houses–in New Jersey, had $39 million in revenues in 2010, according to the company's most recent disclosure forms to the Internal Revenue Service.
In recent years, Fawkner's annual salary has been as ...
Since the for-profit California Forensic Medical Group (CFMC) took over healthcare at the Santa Cruz County Jail last year, the medical staff has been forcing police to take more injured suspects to the hospital before they get booked, likely because the potential liability would hurt CFMC's bottom line
"If the (jail) staff is at all wary," says Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark, "they turn us right around."
Unfortunately, it might have taken a jailed heroin addict's death on Nov. 20, 2012 to persuade CFMC to extend the practice to prisoners withdrawing from drug abuse.
On Thanksgiving morning, the family of Brant Monnett, 47, was notified by the jail that the Santa Cruz tattoo artist was found unresponsive in a detoxification cell, given CPR and declared dead two nights prior. The county coroner's office had not yet determined the cause of his death by the time local media reported the story.
Monnett, who had family in nearby Redding, Calif., and a daughter in Oregon, was the third person to die in the Santa Cruz jail since August and the second since the medical staff was privatized in September. Yet, jail Lt. Shea Johnson said that care for prisoners has improved ...
Five of eight prisoner deaths since 2011 at the Metro Corrections jail in Louisville, Ky., are currently under investigation, all of them involving allegations against private healthcare contractor Corizon Inc. that it provides inadequate treatment to maintain its revenues.
Investigations into two of those deaths last year–of prisoners Samantha George and Savannah Sparks–led to the resignations of six Corizon employees in December 2012, after Metro said they "may" have contributed to the deaths. Jail officials and Louisville police, however, are continuing to investigate.
Meanwhile, as Corizon faces lawsuits from prisoners and their families throughout Kentucky and many of the other 28 states where the company has jail contracts, Metro and its director, Mark Bolton, are considering how they could conscionably renew Corizon's $5.5 million contract. Bolton said in February he believes that Tennessee-based Corizon waited too long to have one of its doctors treat George and Sparks.
"The more we looked into it, the more disturbed I was getting as to some of the service delivery gaps in the healthcare of those individuals," Bolton told the Nashville Tennessean.
George reportedly died Aug. 8, 2012 of complications from a severe form of diabetes, compounded by heart disease and, Bolton argued, a ...
By the time Jan Brewer replaced Janet Napolitano as Arizona's governor in 2009, it had been 22 years since the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) built the first prison in the United States designed exclusively for permanent lockdown, a prison that–with cruel irony–became the prototype for Supermax prisons across the country.
Even before Brewer assumed the governorship and brought Charles Ryan out of retirement to run ADC, Arizona's prisons and jails were known to be ruthless and inhumane. Local demagogues like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and state Sen. Russell Pearce had long been exploiting the degradation, neglect and abuse of prisoners, accepting campaign contributions from private prison corporations, and conspiring with special interests to profit off mass-incarceration.
And yet, by tapping Tea Party extremism and kowtowing to prison profiteers, Brewer and Ryan have taken a prison system already infamous for its draconian practices and unfettered incompetence made it deadlier and even more vindictive and profit-driven than reform advocates feared possible.
Today, as Brewer approaches the end of her term, the number of Arizona prisoners incarcerated in private facilities continues to increase, even while the overall prison population has declined in recent years.
ADC, which operated under a $1.1 billion-budget ...
FIN has gained access to a confidential report by Tim Higgins, the Investigation and Intelligence Coordinator for the Idaho Department of Corrections (DOC) regarding rampant prisoner-on-prison violence at the Idaho Correctional Center (ICC), a Boise prison operated by Corrections Corporation of America. The report blamed the extraordinarily high level of violence at ICC--which has four incidents of violence forever one in the entire rest of the prison system--on CCA's failure to suppress gang activity or investigate and prosecute incidences of prison violence.
The report dealt with 105 incidents of violence which occurred at ICC between January 1, 2008 and August 5, 2008, for which Incident/Exercise Notification Report forms were completed. Higgins reviewed those forms and the rest of the investigation files. He also interviewed the prisoners involved in the violence and reviewed what kind of corrective measures had been taken.
The report revealed a pattern of gang-driven violence which fell into four categories: simple battery (34 incidents), aggravated battery (18 incidents), extortion for rent (15 incidents), and extortion to force prisoners to assault other prisoners (5 incidents).
Generally, extortion for rent involved weaker prisoners, mainly sex offenders, being beaten and all their consumable commissary being taken. Victims were normally told ...
Hurricane Sandy and a lack of preparation or training for unusual weather helped prisoners at the notorious Logan Hall halfway house to run rampant, including a mass escape of fifteen prisoners.
Although designated a "halfway house," Logan Hall, which is operated by Community Education Centers (CEC), a private corporation based in New Jersey, is designed and run more like a jail. Prisoners are locked into small rooms and the facility is surrounded by tall fences topped with razor wire. The doors and gates are electrically-operated. When the power failed as a result of Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012, they all clicked open.
The opened doors allowed dozens of the 547 Logan Hall residents to get into the hallways. Once there, they destroyed furniture and vending machines, tore signs with messages such as "Stop Lying" and "Admit When You Are Wrong" off the walls and threatened the guards and female residents.
The CEC workers on duty were unable to organize an effective response to the mayhem. The workers are poorly paid, trained and equipped. None of them knew how to start the backup generator. None even had a flashlight.
One supervisor confronted a group of male residents wearing improvised face ...
