A lesson in why privatized prison health care is the wrong answer

by David M. Reutter

On Friday, January 18, 2022, three days before sentencing in a pay-to-play bribery and corruption scandal involving health care at the city jail in Norfolk, Virginia, attorneys for disgraced former sheriff Bob McCabe filed ...

by Paul Wright

This month’s cover story on Wellpath treads a familiar road for PLN readers of how profit-driven medical care has resulted in a huge expense for taxpayers and extremely low quality health care for hundreds of thousands of prisoners around the country. The fundamental flaw is a business ...

by Kevin Bliss

On January 6, 2022, Ryan Shapiro, the 44-year-old founder of prison financial services firm JPay, was charged in federal court in Boston with conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Also named in the criminal complaint was Shapiro’s friend and neighbor in Florida, hedge fund manager Kris Bortnovsky, 40. ...

Government Continues Showing Cruel Indifference to Prisoners’ Lives

by Jo Ellen Nott

Entering the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, those incarcerated in U.S. prisons remain sitting ducks for the ever-mutating virus, due to their poor access to health care and their inability to socially distance in particular. So the ...

Plans to de-privatize prisoner healthcare

by Ashleigh Dye

On December 11, 2021, the Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC) announced that the state Supreme Court had denied an Emergency Motion to Stay and Petition for Review filed by Armor Correctional Health, the private contractor whose termination DOC announced the previous July. ...

The situation at Rikers is bad, but at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a maximum-security facility more than 200 miles north of New York City, it’s worse.

by Victoria Law

Conditions in New York City jails have reached a boiling point, prompting day-long hearings, national media attention, and renewed calls for ...

by David M. Reutter

On March 17, 2021, a federal district court in Tennessee awarded a $500,000 default judgment, plus another $60,863.75 in attorney’s fees, to a woman who alleged in a lawsuit that her probation officer sexually assaulted her.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern ...

In an opinion reached on December 1, 2021, Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) in its suit seeking records from Armor Correctional Health Services, the contracted healthcare provider at the Palm Beach County jail.

HRDC, the nonprofit that publishes PLN ...

Just in Time for the ‘Omicron Winter’

by David M. Reutter

On November 10, 2021, one day before first detection of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, a federal district court in Hawaii approved a settlement in a lawsuit filed over the response to the pandemic by ...

We looked at all fifty state departments of corrections to figure out which companies hold the contracts to provide money-transfer services and what the fees are to use these services.

by Stephen Raher and Tiana Herring, Prison Policy Initiative

As people in prison are increasingly expected to pay for everyday costs (food, ...

Wisconsin DOC Ordered to Provide the Surgery, Too

by Matt Clarke and Chuck Sharman

In a federal court filing on January 31, 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) indicated that a transgender prisoner in Texas could be cleared for gender conforming surgery (GCS) as early as March 2022. If ...

by Matt Clarke

When actor Peter Robbins died by suicide in California on January 18, 2022, the news saddened fans of Charlie Brown, whose voice he provided for animated Peanuts specials in the 1960s. But Robbins, 65, also struggled with mental illness behind bars, spending four years in a San ...

On November 18, 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reinstated a suit filed by a former Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) guard alleging three other guards raped her at the Stiles Unit near Beaumont.

The former guard, Tiffany Carver, filed a 42 U.S.C. § ...

by David M. Reutter

On October 12, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a district court’s judgment in favor of Michigan prisoners who sought a kosher meal with meat and dairy on the Jewish Sabbath and four important Jewish holidays, as well as cheesecake on ...

On October 29, 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it had reached an agreement with the Michigan Department of Corrections (DOC) that resolves an investigation begun nearly two years earlier into denial of religious exercise to some prisoners.

DOJ began its investigation on December 10, 2019, pursuant to ...

On September 8, 2021, a former guard with the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) was sentenced to 33 months in prison and two years of supervised release for “conspiring to assault youthful offender inmates at the South Florida Reception Center,” according to a press release by the federal Department of ...

State’s “scorched-earth” strategy runs up $3 million legal tab

by Matt Clarke

A bench trial opened at a federal court in Louisiana on January 10, 2022, with dramatic testimony from a former state prisoner, who said he witnessed guards at the David Wade Correctional Center (DWCC) order a mentally ill ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

On December 27, 2021, four years after calling Alabama’s treatment of mentally ill prisoners “horrendously inadequate”—due largely to chronic understaffing—a federal judge issued a new mandate to the state Department of Corrections (DOC), saying in effect: “Start hiring.”

That was a key takeaway from a massive ...

by Jacob Barrett

On October 21, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a complaint filed by the estate of a mentally ill and intellectually disabled prisoner who committed suicide while held by the Utah Department of Corrections (DOC).

The deceased, Brock Tucker, ...

On March 26, 2021, a federal district court in Georgia awarded a $40,251 default judgment in a lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution by a Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Officer. The damages were mainly due to the time spent in jail by the pro se plaintiff.

The order by the U.S. District Court ...

by David M. Reutter

Under a settlement agreement reached on August 23, 2021, officials at the Prince George’s County Jail in Maryland agreed to a raft of safety protocols overseen for at least four months by an independent monitor in order to protect detainees and prisoners from COVID-19.

The agreement ...

by Matt Clarke

A recent ruling by a California courtunderlines the importance for a prisoner to zealously guard his prison record, even after a challenge seems moot, for the impact it may yet hold in the future.

The decision on September 3, 2021, by the state Court of Appeal, held ...

Two Sheriff’s deputies in Alameda County, California, were sentenced to prison on August 18, 2021, after pleading guilty to charges that they orchestrated a disgusting fight at the county jail, directing detainees to throw urine and fecal matter on one another.

The deputies, Justin Linn and Erik McDermott, were assigned ...

by David M. Reutter

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held on August 25, 2021, that a district court erred in dismissing a state prisoner’s pro se lawsuit by failing to make a finding that the plaintiff willfully abused the judicial process or otherwise conducted the litigation ...

On October 19, 2021, auditors for Dallas County, Texas, reported to commissioners that lax oversight allowed an employee in the county Sheriff’s Department (DCSD) to use hundreds of damaged debit-release cards to draw almost $700,000 from a trust fund for prisoners at the county jail—leaving the account $85,000 in the ...

As of December 1, 2021, just 99 Oregon employees—0.25% of the state’s 40,000 workers, had been fired for violating a mandate that they must be vaccinated against COVID-19. It was unclear how many of those were fired from the state Department of Corrections (DOC), though six weeks earlier just 4% ...

by David M. Reutter

On August 26, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit agreed with a district court that an Ohio state prisoner must be transported to a medical center for neurological imaging that may bolster his challenge to his capital murder conviction.

The prisoner, Raymond ...

Follows a half-million state prisoners released in 2008

by Matt Clarke

From 2016 through 2019, the last years for which reliable data are available, about 10.5 million arrests were made in the U.S. annually. Averaged over a decade, that’s less than one arrest for every three people. But a new ...

by Jacob Barrett

On December 6, 2021, the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon denied a motion to compel arbitration by Stored Value Cards in a case filed by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN, on behalf of a released detainee whose cash was ...

by Matt Clarke

On September 22, 2021, in a case with enormous impact on the way jails may treat pretrial detainees, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit decided that jail official do not need to have subjective knowledge of a serious risk to a detainee, and so ...

Corizon Employee Charged with Falsifying Records

by Jayson Hawkins and Keith Sanders

On February 1, 2022, a 41-year-old Black man being held on a trespassing charge was found unresponsive in his cell at the jail in Arlington County, Virginia. His death later that day, which is still under investigation, came ...

by Harold Hempstead

On November 9, 2021, a federal judge ordered a former guard to pay $638,250 to a prisoner whose beating by fellow prisoners the guard orchestrated at the Newton County Jail in Covington, Georgia, in 2019. It was not clear, though, how the prisoner would collect from the ...

by Matt Clarke

On January 12, 2022, a federal judge advanced a former Arizona state prisoner one step closer to collecting fees for his own pro se legal work in a suit against the former Director of the state Department of Corrections (DOC), Charles Ryan, who had been required by ...

by David M. Reutter

A federal district court in Indiana awarded $21,525 to a prisoner on May 30, 2021, after granting partial summary judgment in a civil rights action he filed alleging battery by a guard at the state’s Pendleton Correctional Facility.

The lawsuit was filed pro se in U.S. ...

by Douglas Ankney

On September 22, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a pro se prisoner’s 42 U.S.C. § 1983 complaint, after determining he had presented a plausible claim that retroactive application of amended guidelines to his parole hearings violated ...

by J.D. Schmidt

On December 13, 2021, a group of 49 current and former prisoners sued the York County Prison (YCP) in Pennsylvania, along with a contractor hired to train its guards, Corrections Special Applications Unit (C-SAU), as well as the firm’s founder and “Senior Team Leader,” Joseph Garcia, alleging ...

On September 22, 2021, Seth Peters, the first person appointed to the newly created position of Ombudsman for Public Health Standards Compliance and COVID-19 Mitigation for the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC), was fired after a Boston radio station asked whether he was the same Seth Peters involved in a ...

Alabama: In Mobile on January 21, 2022, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Alabama announced that an 18-month federal prison sentence for bribery had been handed down by a federal court to Lakerdra Shanta Snowden, 31, a former guard at the Escambia County Detention Center (ECDC) in ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

On June 30, 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected a district court’s finding that a New York prisoner’s knee injury did not qualify as a disability due to its short-term nature.

The prisoner, Davonte Hamilton, suffered a dislocated knee and ...