From the Editor
by Paul Wright
For over 40 years now the private prison industry has peddled the lie that they can cage people for less money than the government does. They no longer really promise that any savings will go to taxpayers or the government and seem content to be pocketing huge amounts of cash from the federal government for caging immigrant detainees. The private prison medical industry, on the other hand, is a little more recent but their pitch has never really been about saving money so much as letting them provide medical care to prisoners while the government can focus on caging them.
The private medical companies, increasingly owned by private equity financial conglomerates, operate on the simple financial principle of getting as much money as possible out of the government and then providing as little medical care as possible. One of their selling points has been that they claim to indemnify the government in the event of litigation over inadequate medical care. As PLN has reported over the years, all of these companies routinely deny medical care to prisoners to profit off of their illness and subsequent pain and death. The litigation eventually catches up with them and they are duly being found liable for their denials of medical care.
The biggest development has been watching these medical companies run to bankruptcy court to shed their liabilities, judgements and debts and pocket their profits. We have reported the bankruptcies of Corizon, Wellpath and Armor in prior issues of PLN. This month’s cover story is on Armor and its trail of abuse, neglect and financial chicanery. Looking at the bankruptcies, the biggest losers are typically not litigants but the very governments they are supposed to indemnify and hospitals and medical providers they contracted with. Yet the government still continues hiring and contracting with these very same companies despite their histories of neglect, abuse and now bankruptcy.
The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the publisher of Prison Legal News, continues our fight against prison censorship around the country. As we note in this issue, a federal court in New Mexico recently granted a preliminary injunction ordering the state prison system to deliver our magazines and books. If you are a prisoner in New Mexico, let us know if you are receiving our materials. If you are not receiving them, you likely will not be able to read this.
It has come to our attention that some prisons and jails have not only banned books and magazines but are also putting Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News on their tablet systems without our permission. If PLN or CLN are on your prison tablet systems, please let us know so we can take the appropriate actions on our end.
HRDC has been suing prisons and jails for censorship of our materials for over 30 years now. In virtually all of the cases we have filed, we won and entered into consent decrees or the courts issued injunctions. We now find that many of these facilities are violating the consent decrees and injunctions that were previously entered and we are having to enforce them. Very rarely are we being given due process notice of the censorship by prison and jail officials. Instead, we rely on our readers and subscribers to tell us when our magazines are being censored, which allows us to take measures to ensure our materials are delivered.
Lastly, as this issue of PLN goes to press, around the United States there is scorching weather that serves as a reminder about the many prisons in this country, virtually all in the states of the former Confederacy, which do not have air conditioning as a matter of deliberate government policy designed to make the prisoners suffer. Each summer, the temperatures get hotter due to climate change yet the government does nothing in terms of making its prisons habitable and prisoners and staff alike die from heat exposure.
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