On March 1, 2016, the Private Corrections Institute (PCI), a non-profit citizen watchdog organization, announced its 2015 awardees for individual activism, organizational advocacy and excellence in news reporting related to the private prison industry. PCI opposes the privatization of correctional services, including the operation of prisons, jails and other detention facilities by for-profit companies such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and The GEO Group, both of which trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

PCI’s 2015 award for excellence in news reporting on the private prison industry went to Jerry Mitchell, a reporter with The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, for multiple articles regarding conditions, violence and abuses at for-profit prisons in Mississippi. He also covered the indictments filed against former MS DOC Commissioner Christopher Epps, who took bribes from private prison firms and their consultants. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Jerry previously broke stories that resulted in the prosecution of Civil Rights era murders; he has received numerous other honors and was a Pulitzer finalist.

“This award belongs to the staff of The Clarion-Ledger and especially my boss, Assistant Managing Editor Debbie Skipper, who worked not only with our staff, but with freelancers as well, in producing ...

After four prisoners committed suicide in the Salinas branch of the Monterey County, California jail system within a five-year period, a class-action lawsuit was filed in 2013 against both the jail and California Forensic Medical Group, alleging substandard intake procedures, medical care and mental health treatment.

Shortly after an injunction ...

Recent decades have seen the rise of not only private, for-profit prisons but also the privatization of other aspects of corrections systems, most notably the provision of medical care. As with prison privatization, the only people who have benefited are the owners of and investors in the companies. Everyone else – prisoners, taxpayers and the government itself – has received short shrift with little to show for privatization except empty, unrealized promises of cost savings.

The prison medical industry is dominated by a few large corporations such as Corizon, Centurion and Wexford Health Sources, which are the core oligopoly companies. There are smaller players, too, though most will likely eventually be bought out by one of the larger ones. These smaller firms typically operate at the regional and local levels, and rarely make national news or headlines. Their business model is the same: to provide as few services as possible while billing the government as much as possible. This month’s cover story examines the California Forensic Medical Group, one of those small regional companies whose body count and track record of inadequate care, negligence, incompetence and greed puts it in the running with the larger corporations in the prison medical ...

On October 24, 2014, a Montana state jury found Missoula County liable in the wrongful death of a jail prisoner and assessed an award of $565,500 against the county. The county agreed not to appeal and to pay within two weeks. A private health care provider settled confidentially prior to ...

A private medical vendor’s discontinuation of a pre-trial detainee’s psychotropic medication in the middle of a double-homicide trial was being called government misconduct that merited dismissal of the charges.

Michael John Pierce, 39, suffers from schizophrenia. He was charged in the murders of two people in their Quilcene, Washington residence in 2009. Pierce, who has heard voices since age 8 and has been diagnosed with a host of severe mental illnesses on the schizophrenic spectrum, was convicted in 2010 of the murders.

His conviction was reversed based upon a violation of his right to an attorney, and prosecutorial misconduct. When it was uncovered that a seated juror may have been a witness after revealing she saw someone matching Pierce’s description near the murder scene, the second trial was halted.

The case was moved from Jefferson County to Kitsap County to assure a fair trial. Upon arrival at the Kitsap County Jail (KCJ) on February 21, 2014, Jefferson County corrections officials hand delivered Pierce’s medications, which included two anti-psychotic and several non-psychotropic medications.

He then went into the care of KCJ’s medical contractor, Conmed. It had a “bridge” policy that allowed continuation of psychotropic medications for 14 days and other medications ...

The City of San Francisco negotiated a new contract with its food vendor, Aramark Correction Services, to provide a “heart-healthy menu” for prisoners at the San Francisco County Jail (SFCJ). The new fare, hopefully, will diminish the need for prisoners to prepare meals from the snack food laden jail commissary.

Aramark has been providing meals for those incarcerated at SFCJ since 1996. The new five-year contract is worth $19.7 million. On average, 5,743 meals are served at SFCJ daily, which amounts to about 3.8 meals per prisoner daily. Some prisoners receive “double rations” for performing clean-up or maintenance tasks.

Under the new contract, each meal will cost an average $1.56 or $3.3 million annually for prisoners. Staff meals, by contrast, cost $3.24 each on average, totaling $622,388 annually.

The new menu is aimed at following San Francisco’s penchant for healthy foods and locally grown foods. “We implemented a healthy-heart menu to help combat some of the inmate obesity issues that we’ve been seeing due to an overly caloric meal combined with a sedentary lifestyle,” said Bree Mawhorter, chief financial officer of the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Office (SFCSO).

Jail officials and prisoners agree that “jail food sucks.” Prisoners call the ...

Former employees of Houston-based Turning Point, Inc., a private, for-profit company which contracted with Texas to provide substance abuse treatment in its state jail system, are revealing how supervisors pressured them to falsify Addiction Severity Index (ADI) scores to downplay mental illness issues and exaggerate alcohol and substance abuse.

Melissa Cantu was a therapist for over a decade before taking a job as a substance abuse counselor for a Turning Point rehabilitation program at the Dominguez State Jail. Stress from the "abusive workplace" she discovered there caused her to experience insomnia and break out in hives before she finally decided to quit the job only months after she was hired.

Cantu had been pressured to have the ASI scores of prisoners show that they were strong substance abusers without serious mental health issues. She was told to not to score the psychiatric component of the ASI greater than "one," the lowest score on the test, indicating that no mental health treatment was necessary. This meant that prisoners with serious psychiatric issues would be denied mental health treatment and placed into a substance abuse treatment program instead.

"Some clearly had anxiety, possible schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder," Cantu said. "But if they ...

By James McNair, Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting

This article was produced by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a new, nonprofit newsroom from 89.3 WFPL News and Louisville Public Media. Read more at kycir.org.

ELIZABETHTOWN -- Getting busted with a small amount of fake marijuana led to a more expensive lesson in criminal justice than Timothy Lee Cook could have imagined.

Cook, 54, agreed to a plea deal in Hardin County District Court last summer that kept him out of jail, but cost him $186 in fines and court fees. He couldn’t afford it himself. Bedeviled by mental disorders, he hasn’t held a job for more than 20 years. His 74-year-old mother put up the money.

Now Cook is tasting the cost of probation. Every month for two years, he has to pay a $25 monitoring fee to a company that serves as a privatized probation agency. Had he been arrested in one of the many Kentucky counties that monitor misdemeanor offenders themselves, the service wouldn’t have cost him a dime. And if Cook’s probation company had based its fee on his ability to pay, as district judges are supposed to ensure, his monitoring would be free or ...

Mike Ludwig, Truthout

Would you still use email if every message had a word limit and was automatically declared to be the property of your email provider?

What if every email cost $1 to send and the receiver could not answer back by simply hitting "reply?"

"Calling the electronic messaging offered to incarcerated people and their families 'email' would be an insult to email."

That's what it can be like to send an electronic message to a friend or loved one in jail or prison. For-profit companies like Corrlinks and JPay have already capitalized on the opportunity to offer painfully expensive "email" services to people incarcerated in some federal and state prisons. And prison phone companies, which have gouged prisoners and their families so deeply that federal regulators stepped in and capped rates for phone calls, are now offering their own services billed as "email for prisoners."

But prison watchdogs say these services are not like email at all.

"Calling the electronic messaging offered to incarcerated people and their families 'email' would be an insult to email," said Stephen Raher, author of a recent report on electronic messaging services for Prison Policy Initiative.

New technologies for communicating with ...

There are many arguments against the privatization of prisons, jails and other detention facilities. Over the years, Prison Legal News has published numerous articles detailing the problems with having a for-profit company fulfill the essential governmental function of incarceration – including higher levels of violence, higher average recidivism rates, lack of public accountability and, in some cases, outright corruption and fraud.

Such reporting has revealed common factors in the private prison industry that have contributed to deficiencies at for-profit prisons, such as inadequate staffing, inexperienced and low-paid guards, high staff turnover rates and inadequate medical care.

For private prison companies, their business model of cutting costs in order to generate profit unsurprisingly results in occasional lawsuits – “occasional” because engaging in litigation is a daunting task filled with procedural hurdles and complexities that are beyond the ability of the average prisoner, as most lack even a high school education. And in cases where a prisoner is rendered incapacitated or dies, a legal action seeking to hold a private prison firm accountable only results if there are family members willing to seek justice on the prisoner’s behalf.

However, when confronted with a lawsuit that reaches the point of an impending trial ...