Aleshia Napier was 18 years old in 2006 when she hung herself with a bed sheet at the Broward Correctional Institution in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after being placed in solitary confinement despite her diagnosis of clinical depression and bipolar disorder.

The attorney hired by the young woman’s devastated family, Randall Berg, Jr., the executive director of the Florida Justice Institute, points to two culprits for ignoring the medical and mental health needs of Napier: the private prison health-care companies PHS Correctional Healthcare and MHM Services.

Napier’s family settled with the companies for $500,000, but Berg said this case is part of a larger trend.

“My main concern is the profit motive taking precedence over patient care,” said Berg, who has taken out more than ten lawsuits against private health care companies. “The second one is that once the government entity contracts with the private provider, the government entity doesn’t provide any oversight.”

The outsourcing of health care in prisons to private companies is just one multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around incarceration in the U.S. With that expansion has come mounting evidence of injury or death from improper medical care, or under-qualified or understaffed medical teams at prisons. ...

The Florida legislature did an end-run around a veto by the Governor by eliminating funding for the state’s prison medical oversight agency, thereby causing it to disband.
With Florida turning to private companies to provide prisoner healthcare services, there is concern that medical care will decline and potentially subject the state to litigation absent adequate oversight.

The Florida Correctional Medical Authority (CMA) was created in July 1986 in response to a class-action lawsuit. Brought in 1972, Costello v. Wainwright, U.S.D.C. (M.D. Fla.), Case No. 72-109-Civ-J-S, challenged conditions in Florida’s prison system. The federal district court maintained jurisdiction over the state’s prison medical services until 1993, when the state committed to using CMA to oversee healthcare in its prisons. [See: PLN, Aug. 1993, p.14].

The legislature’s decision to slash the CMA’s $796,151 budget came after Governor Rick Scott vetoed a bill to close the agency. At the time, Scott said the CMA was a “valuable layer of oversight,” and its elimination “could cause public health and safety risks.”

When CMA closed its doors on August 18, 2011 after being de-funded by state lawmakers, supporters of the agency spoke out about the potential repercussions.

“The recent elimination of the CMA does not ...

Prison officials tend to frown on public records requests. In fact, employees at a Florida facility operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) were so ruffled by a citizen’s request for records that they called the cops.

Joel Chandler, 47, has made himself the self-appointed leading advocate for Florida’s Sunshine ...

On April 27, 2011, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law House Bill 2154, which resulted in the privatization of medical care for prisoners in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC). The move comes three years after ADC’s food services were privatized. The Republican-dominated state government favors privatization as a means to cut costs and help reduce a large budget deficit.

The idea of privatizing the ADC’s health care system seemed dead in January 2011, but HB 2154 moved quickly through the legislature to the governor’s desk as an emergency measure. In a May 9, 2011 email, ADC Director Charles Ryan described the privatization debate as “a long and tedious issue for ADC and Health Services employees,” and urged prison medical staff to comply with the law and assist in the privatization transition.

The ADC began developing a plan to contract for medical services for the state’s 34,000 prisoners in July 2011. Understandably, ADC health care employees, who faced around 750 job losses due to privatization, were not happy.

Previous legislation introduced in 2009 (HB 2010) required that privatization of the ADC’s health care services not exceed the department’s cost for providing medical care to prisoners. HB 2154 removed that ...

by David M. Reutter

Was Ohio’s attempt to sell off and privatize five of its state prisons in 2011 a race to the bottom? That’s the question raised and analyzed in a report titled Cells for Sale: Understanding Prison Costs & Savings, released by Policy Matters Ohio in April 2011.

Ohio is ten years into its prison privatization experiment, which state officials laud as having saved taxpayers more than $45 million over that time period. However, an in-depth examination of the calculations used for those seemingly robust savings found them “not only riddled with errors, oversights and omissions of significant data, but also potentially tainted by controversial accounting assumptions that many experts consider deeply flawed,” according to Policy Matters Ohio.

The calculations used to determine savings from prison privatization came under scrutiny after Governor John Kasich proposed in March 2011 to sell five of the state’s prisons to private companies for $200 million. The idea gained momentum with the need to close the state’s $8 billion budget gap.

At the time Ohio already had two privately-operated state prisons, the Lake Erie Correctional Institution (LECI) and the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility, both run by Management and Training Corporation (MTC). State ...

by David M. Reutter

An Indiana federal district court certified a class and allowed claims to proceed that challenged unsafe conditions, lack of medical privacy and an alleged incentive scheme that rewarded staff for providing less medical care to prisoners at the Marion County Jail #2 (MCJ) in Indianapolis. Four months later, however, the court granted summary judgment to the defendants, dismissing the class-action suit.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) operates MCJ under a contract with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. A lawsuit, filed in 2008, alleged violations of state and federal law in areas such as conditions of confinement, mail policies, availability and handling of grievances, medical care, and privacy of medical information at the jail. The district court dismissed the claims related to grievances for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.

In a July 2, 2010 ruling, the court entered an order on the defendants’ affirmative defense that the plaintiffs had failed to exhaust their administrative remedies before filing suit. At a hearing on that matter it became evident there was no reliable system in place for recording the details associated with the filing and resolution of prisoner complaints at MCJ.

As to some of the individual plaintiffs, the ...

by Matt Clarke and Alex Friedmann

In 2006, Prison Legal News published a cover story, Guards Rape of Prisoners Rampant, No Solution in Sight, that presented a compilation of news reports concerning the rape and sexual abuse of prisoners by prison and jail staff, police officers and other law enforcement officials. [See: PLN, Aug. 2006, p.1].

Three years later PLN ran another cover article, titled Sexual Abuse by Prison and Jail Staff Proves Persistent, Pandemic, which described dozens of reports involving prisoner rape and sexual assault in correctional facilities across the U.S. [See: PLN, May 2009, p.1].

Despite the enactment of the optimistically-named Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) by Congress, the criminalization of sex acts between prisoners and those who guard them, and the adoption of “zero tolerance” policies by many prison and jail systems, the situation has not greatly improved. This is partly because reducing prisoner rape and sexual abuse is simply not a priority for corrections officials. Indeed, rape and sexual assault are integral elements of American prison and jail management. How else to explain the prevalence, tolerance and acceptance if not encouragement of the practice?
Unfortunately, “rape camps” is a term only used to describe prisons in ...

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has held that an order withdrawing approval of a class action settlement does not qualify as a “final order” subject to appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. The appellate ruling declared that such an order “simply presses the reset button, vacates any prior final decision, and marks the case for renewed litigation.”

This case has a “long and complex” history that began in 1995, with two classes certified. The first class covered all prisoners who are presently, or will be, confined at New Mexico’s Bernalillo County Detention Center (BCDC). A sub-class included “persons with mental and/or developmental disabilities who are now, or in the future will be, detained at BCDC.” It was alleged that the conditions at BCDC were unconstitutional due in large part to overcrowding. [See: PLN, March 2003, p.38; Sept. 1999, p.18].

The parties reached a settlement in 1997. The settlement agreement was modified due to the opening of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in 2003. By their terms, the two new settlements, reached in 2005, governed conditions only at MDC. The county had signed an Inter-Governmental Agreement with the federal government that allowed federal detainees to be housed at BCDC, which ...

PLN’s February 2012 cover story described how the Florida legislature tried to privatize almost thirty state prisons, work camps and work release centers in 2011 by slipping proviso language into the state’s budget appropriations bill. That wholesale attempt at prison privatization was widely perceived as benefiting Boca Raton, Florida-based GEO Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison firm.

The backdoor proviso attempt failed, however, after the Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA), which at the time represented Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) employees, filed suit challenging the prison privatization plan enacted as part of the budget bill. A circuit court judge ruled in the PBA’s favor in September 2011, finding the proviso language was “illegal without authority in violation of law.” The legislature’s appeal of that decision remains pending.

PLN’s February cover story concluded with the Republican-dominated Florida Senate considering two bills introduced in January 2012 – SB 2036 and SB 2038 – that would accomplish the same goal as the proviso language; i.e., privatizing 27 correctional facilities in South Florida, known as Region IV, that house approximately 16,000 state prisoners.

SB 2038 required the privatization of almost all FDOC Region IV facilities, with “actual cost savings to the state of at ...

A Tennessee federal court awarded $13,000 to Samuel Key for civil rights violations resulting from his false imprisonment.

The case began in 1987, when Key was convicted and sentenced to prison in Georgia. During that time, a phony escape charge was made against Key. He was paroled in 1994. Thereafter, ...