According to documents produced by the Mississippi Department of Corrections pursuant to a public records request, a semi-automatic pistol and other contraband was found at the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility in Woodville on September 13, 2013. The prison is operated by Management & Training Corporation (MTC), a for-profit company.

According to emails from MTC officials, an anonymous phone call to the facility indicated that contraband was going to be “thrown over the fence on the south end of the prison which house [sic] Long Term Segregation offenders and there was to be a gun in the package.” The fence line was “walked twice” before a package with contraband was located, which contained three cell phones and tobacco but no firearm.

Based on the anonymous call, staff located a broken cell window in G Pod. A search of the cell resulted in the discovery of a semi-automatic Model MP .25 pistol in the possession of a prisoner. Other contraband found in the cell included tobacco, a cell phone charger and a “6 in. sharpened weapon made of the cell light fixture.”

There was no indication how the firearm ended up inside the segregation cell. The gun was found in the cell ...

A U.S. District Court in Florida has held that the denial of a prisoner’s access to a contraceptive pill to prevent pregnancy, based on a jail employee’s religious beliefs, states a cause of action.

The plaintiff in the case, identified only as R.W., was raped on January 27, 2007 by an unknown assailant. After she reported the crime to the Tampa Police Department, R.W. was taken to a Rape Crisis Center. There she was given two anti-conception pills following an examination. The first, at the doctor’s directions, was taken immediately; the second was to be taken twelve hours later.

A police officer then returned R.W. to the scene of the crime. During the investigation, it was discovered that she had an outstanding arrest warrant for failure to appear and failure to pay restitution. She was arrested and taken to the Hillsborough County Jail.

R.W. remained in jail overnight and the next morning advised Michele Spinelli, an employee with Armor Correctional Health Services, the jail’s private medical contractor, about the rape and her need to take the prescribed anti-conception pill to ensure she did not become pregnant. In response, “Spinelli told the Plaintiff that Spinelli would not give her the pill ...

On August 16, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter, sitting by designation, unsealed a number of court documents related to a contempt motion seeking sanctions against Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit prison company, for violating a settlement agreement in a lawsuit that alleged high levels of violence at the CCA-operated Idaho Correctional Center (ICC).

The unsealed documents revealed that current and former CCA employees had submitted sworn affidavits confirming CCA’s earlier acknowledgement that officials at ICC had falsified staffing records. The affidavits further indicated the understaffing may have far surpassed the company’s admission that ICC falsified almost 4,800 staff hours reported to state prison officials.

The district court had previously unsealed other documents related to the contempt motion on August 6, but the most recent unsealed records shed additional and unflattering light on CCA’s conduct relative to staffing discrepancies at ICC.

The underlying class-action lawsuit, litigated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), alleged excessive levels of violence at ICC that were in large part due to understaffing. In fact, a study conducted by Idaho prison officials in 2008 found that ICC had “four times more prisoner-on-prisoner assaults than Idaho’s other seven publicly-operated prisons ...

by Matt Clarke

Against the backdrop of the recent hunger strike involving thousands of prisoners in California, the death last year of an Illinois jail prisoner who died after refusing to eat or drink is especially poignant.

Lyvita Gomes, 52, died in January 2012 following a 15-day hunger strike that began after the mentally ill woman was arrested and incarcerated at the Lake County Jail near Chicago.

Funeral home workers cleaning out a hotel room where Lyvita had lived found stacks of unopened mail. In one stack was the jury summons that initiated the series of events that led to her death. Ironically, Lyvita was not a U.S. citizen and thus ineligible to serve on a jury.

Born in India, Lyvita received a U.S. visa in 2004 and moved to Atlanta to work at the headquarters of Delta Airlines. The airline laid her off in 2007 and she relocated to Illinois using her still-valid visa to obtain a driver’s license.

It was her driver’s license that put Lyvita into the pool of potential jurors in Lake County. She received a summons to report for jury duty on July 5, 2011; the summons indicated that non-citizens were exempt but had to ...

The Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Ocilla, Georgia has been sold at auction after the facility’s owner, Municipal Corrections LLC, was forced into bankruptcy court by bondholders.

A 2007 agreement between Irwin County and Municipal Corrections demonstrates the risks that government agencies assume when they issue bonds to invest in prisons and jails. The agreement allowed the county to house up to 30 of its own prisoners at ICDC at no charge, excluding medical costs. In return, the county – which also hoped to create more jobs – issued $55 million in tax-exempt lease revenue bonds to pay off other bonds and finance a 512-bed expansion at ICDC, bringing the facility’s total capacity to 1,201.

The bonds were to be paid with revenue received from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Marshals Service, for holding detainees at ICDC. However, the facility failed to house enough prisoners to generate sufficient income to make the bond payments – a problem that has plagued a number of other detention centers built by cities and counties hoping to cash in on for-profit incarceration. [See previous article, “Declining prison populations leave towns with empty jails, debt”].

Consequently, in January 2012 an Irwin ...

Several years ago, while working at our local Books to Prisoners, I met a volunteer who was formerly a mental health counselor in the local jail in Champaign County, Illinois. This was just after there had been three jail suicides within a six-month period in 2004. She recalled a time when she worked with the "Crisis Team," a nationally-recognized mental health program which for 20 years prevented any suicides at the jail. In response to the three suicides, Sheriff Dan Walsh outsourced mental health services to Health Professionals Ltd. (HPL), a private company based in Peoria, Illinois. Yet this has not stopped suicides and other deaths at the jail.

There is a current debate in Champaign County, where the twin cities of Champaign-Urbana are home to the University of Illinois, about whether to allocate millions of dollars toward a new jail. Sheriff Walsh has frequently cited the large percentage of those with mental illness (as much as 20 percent of the daily population) and argued for the need to expand the jail's mental health facilities. More than just bricks and mortar, this issue demands that we look into quality of services provided by the private company HPL. We have something ...

The language of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is succinct: “[N]o qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by any such entity.” 42 U.S.C. § 12132.

In Pennsylvania DOC v. Yeskey, 524 U.S. 206 (1998) [PLN, Sept. 1998, p.1], the Supreme Court held that the ADA applies to people in prison. Title II of the ADA defines “public entity” to include “any department, agency, special purpose district, or other instrumentality of a State or States or local government.” 42 U.S.C. § 12131(1)(B). In Yeskey, Justice Scalia wrote, “The text of the ADA provides no basis for distinguishing these programs, services, and activities from those provided by public entities that are not prisons.” Thus, Title II of the ADA extends to prisoners.

DOJ Investigates Pennsylvania Prison

On May 31, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a findings letter that detailed the results of an investigation into the use of solitary confinement on prisoners with serious mental illnesses at the State Correctional Institution at Cresson in Cambria ...

Two lawsuits filed in March 2013 seek compensatory and punitive damages against former prison physician Mark E. Walden, GEO Group, Corizon, wardens Erasmo Bravo and Timothy Hatch, and health administrator Sherry Phillips. The suits allege that numerous prisoners were fondled or received intrusive rectal exams by Dr. Walden, a Corizon employee, at the GEO Group-operated Guadalupe County Correctional Facility in Santa Rosa and New Mexico Detention Facility in Clayton.

Suspicions arose due to a substantial increase in unnecessary, prolonged rectal exams, including some conducted without gloves, and Walden’s refusal to have a nurse or other third party present during the exams. In one case, a prisoner with a knee injury received a rectal exam; in another, a prisoner claimed that Walden penetrated his anus using his entire hand.

A third lawsuit was filed against Dr. Walden, GEO Group, Corizon and various prison officials on July 12, 2013, alleging that Walden had “sexually abused at least 25 victims” by performing unnecessary rectal exams or fondling them. The suits remain pending. See: F.M. v. Walden, U.S.D.C. (D. NM), Case No. 1:13-cv-00264-ACT-RHS; R.J. v. The GEO Group, U.S.D.C. (D. NM), Case No. 1:13-cv-00265-ACT-RHS; H.R. v. The GEO Group, U.S.D.C. (D. NM), Case No. ...

On September 14, 2012, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court’s class certification and summary judgment orders in a jail conditions case involving the Marion County Correctional Center (MCCC) in Indianapolis, Indiana, also known as the Marion County Jail II, operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

In 2008, MCCC prisoners were subjected to overcrowded living conditions in which upwards of 150 prisoners were forced to share a single toilet and sink; deprived of food and water for extended periods of time; housed in trash, mold and insect-infested living conditions; and required to reveal confidential medical information in the presence of other prisoners.

MCCC prisoners Alan Kress and Randy Carr filed suit in April 2008 alleging inadequate medical care and inhumane living conditions. The federal district court granted their motion for class certification and named them as class representatives, but dismissed several claims that failed to satisfy class certification requirements. The court subsequently granted CCA’s motion for summary judgment on the remaining claims and dismissed the case in 2011. [See: PLN, May 2012, p.46].

On appeal, the Seventh Circuit first upheld the district court’s finding that the plaintiffs had failed to satisfy the class certification typicality requirement ...

In May, 2003, Prison Health Services (PHS) agreed to pay the family of Candace “Candy” Brown $450,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging inadequate medical care that resulted in Brown’s death.

Brown was arrested in 2000 and taken to New York’s Monroe County Jail. Shortly thereafter, she suffered from heroin withdrawal ...