by Ed Lyon
Corizon Health, headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, is the nation’s largest private prison and jail healthcare provider. The company has, for many years, been mentioned in Prison Legal News – usually in connection with misconduct by Corizon employees, grossly inadequate medical care and lawsuits resulting in verdicts and ...
by Ed Lyon
On March 31, 2018, two female detainees at a jail in Contra Costa County, California decided to play a dangerous game and began a flirtation with male guard Patrick Morseman. Early that day, the women passed a note to Morseman, 26, that he understood to be ...
by Ed Lyon
It is estimated that around 20 percent of prisoners have a serious mental health condition, and due to the criminalization of mental illness in the United States, the mentally ill are more likely to end up behind bars than in a psychiatric facility.
The tiny city of ...
by Ed Lyon
From February 2015 to January 2016, Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York (PLS) made a series of records requests to the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). The requests were made under the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), and included prisoner behavior ...
by Ed Lyon
Each year, throughout the duration of summer months, there are empathy-invoking news stories about children and pets left in unattended vehicles, sometimes resulting in deaths due to the scorching heat. A New Mexico federal jury recently held that prisoners should not be left in unattended transport ...
by Ed Lyon
Ion scanners were initially installed in prisons in the early 1990s to detect controlled substances on visitors, whose hands and clothes are typically swabbed for testing. But visitors and prison staff who filed lawsuits – in states including New York, Massachusetts and Maryland – claimed they were ...
by Ed Lyon
Rodney Ballard served as commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Corrections (DOC) from March 2016 to May 2017. He then abruptly left that job with a $100,000-plus annual salary for the private sector, and was replaced by deputy commissioner Jim Erwin. Erwin began his career with ...
by Ed Lyon
On April 3, 2019, the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a civil rights case concerning the death of a jail detainee.
Almus Taylor, 38, was arrested by Alabama State Troopers for drunk driving on November 16, 2013, after wrecking ...
by Ed Lyon
In mid-August 2015, diabetic Nebraska prisoner Aron Lee Boyd-Nicholson was washing clothes in his cell when he began experiencing classic heart attack symptoms – including chest pain, dizziness and weakness – before he collapsed. Nurse Carolyn Moore tested his blood-sugar levels, then instructed him to return ...
by Ed Lyon
Gage County, Nebraska, pretrial detainee Chad Gesin hanged himself in a jail cell in 2013, shortly after being booked for domestic assault and third-degree assault. Five days later, he died.
Gesin had been placed in a sobering cell until his intoxication level subsided.
During the booking process, ...
