by David M. Reutter
Jails face a monumental task in the provision of medical care. Those who’ve just been arrested are often experiencing withdrawal from drugs or alcohol. Other pre-existing medical conditions are routine and routinely severe. Then there are the mentally ill, who land in jail because communities lack resources to treat their conditions—even though jails and guards also lack training and expertise to provide adequate care. Into the breach step privately contracted providers, promising to fill the need. But their results belie that promise, demonstrating only that profit comes before service.
How else to explain the marketing materials distributed to prospective customers by jail healthcare contractor Turn Key Health Clinics LLC? In those, the firm bragged that after taking over healthcare at Oklahoma’s Tulsa County Jail in 2016, emergency transfers to hospitals fell by an eyepopping 77% in just a few months. The number of days detainees spent hospitalized also cratered by 35%. Did they suddenly get healthier? Or were they simply denied care?
The answer seems obvious, yet jails continue to turn to private providers like Turn Key. For one, it comes with a staff of credentialed personnel already employed, so sheriffs don’t have to vet and ...

by Paul Wright
On August 20, 2024, the free speech rights of all Americans suffered a devastating loss. Bruce Johnson, 74, was a long-time partner at the Seattle law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine. He spent his entire, nearly half century career as a lawyer there. Over the course of his career Bruce became one of the preeminent specialists and defenders of the First Amendment and the free speech rights of publishers and media around the country. He was widely recognized as the nation’s most knowledgeable lawyer when it came to commercial speech and anti SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws. More on that later.
Bruce represented media clients across the country and they included the biggest print and broadcasting companies, including 60 Minutes, the Seattle Times, Boston Globe, New York Times and many, many others. Those were the big ones and with his passing the cases he litigated on behalf of those clients will likely be the ones that he is remembered by.
One of Bruce’s smaller pro bono media clients, for almost 30 years, was Prison Legal News which later became the Human Rights Defense Center. Prisoners and the publishers who seek to communicate with them and ...

When Brittany Wright, 30, got out of a Washington prison in June 2023, she was confident that it would be easier than her last release 10 years earlier. Back then, she had found it almost impossible to find a job or a place to live. But when she stepped out of prison a decade later, Brittany had to wait just a single day before reporting to work at Kiewit, a Seattle construction and engineering firm. By January 2024, Wright was banking $31 an hour on a light rail expansion project for Sound Transit.
Credit for the difference goes to Trades Related Apprenticeship Coaching (TRAC), a 16-­week state program designed to reduce recidivism by ensuring prisoners getting out have a job. Research conducted by the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative has pegged the unemployment rate for the formerly incarcerated at a sky-­high 27%, and those lucky enough to find work earn about half the salary of their non-­incarcerated peers—even less if the releasee is a minority.
TRAC teaches entry-­level skills needed to become a trade union apprentice. The union then helps the former prisoner find work after completing roughly 6,000 hours of paid on-­the-­job training. The boost to earning potential is huge: ...

by Paul Wright
America is going on its fourth decade of experimenting with private, for profit health services for prisoners. Regardless of the company and the location the outcomes are all the same: a lot of misery, pain and death imposed by a business model of ruthless capitalism where success is defined as getting as much money out of the government and then providing as little actual care as possible.
PLN has been reporting on the private prison medical industry since we started publishing in 1990 and the industry has slowly grown over the decades with the attendant tales of corruption, death and misery. With the exception of the Virginia Department of Corrections, no prison system has retaken its medical health care system once they privatize it. Instead, we see a revolving door of murderous, corporate health care providers driven by greed and avarice, replacing the prior corporate provider until they too are replaced. The staff often do not change, it is only their employer that changes.
It is hard to believe that Prison Legal News has been publishing for almost 35 years now. One of the bad things about being around as long as we have is that many ...

When Texas prisoner Larry Donnell Gibbs filed suit in federal court in 2021 against officials with the state Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), he paid the filing fee and did not ask to proceed in forma pauperis (IFP). As a pro se plaintiff, though, Gibbs had no outside counsel to ensure his complaint was served on some Defendants no longer employed at the Estelle Unit. So Gibbs eventually moved for IFP status, which would entitle him to have U.S. Marshals effect service under Fed.R.Civ.P. 4(c)(3). When that motion was denied by the federal court for the Eastern District of Texas, he appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. On February 6, 2024, that Court found the lower court’s decision “arbitrary or erroneous.”
Gibbs, 37, alleged that after being repeatedly stabbed by another prisoner in March 2020, two guards—identified as Jackson and Moton—left him to bleed for 45 minutes before rendering assistance. Further, after he filed grievances about this allegedly “negligent response” to his stabbing, three other guards—Jared Oneal, John L. Ruffin and Joe Thomas—twice used or authorized excessive force against him, he said. Those beatings caused “bleeding in his brain which led to a seizure” and ...

On February 13, 2024, a judge in Florida’s Duval County amended state prisoner Terrence Graham’s sentence, paving the way for the 37-­year-­old’s release later that same month. Sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) in 2006 for crimes committed when he was 16 and 17—one an armed burglary, the other a home invasion robbery—the Jacksonville native didn’t know then that his case would make legal history with a precedent-­setting decision from the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS).
His sentence was extremely harsh: His attorney asked for five years, while prosecutors wanted 30. The judge sided with them and handed down the maximum. Bryan S. Gowdy, Graham’s lawyer on appeal, was so shocked when he got the case—a juvenile given LWOP for a non-­homicide crime—that he took it all the way to SCOTUS, arguing that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. He was supported by numerous amicus briefs saying that kids are different, and they can change. In its May 2010 decision in Graham v. Florida, the high Court agreed, ending LWOP for juveniles not convicted of homicide, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Dec. 2010, p. 42.]
But the decision did not provide immediate ...

On July 10, 2024, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) released the final environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed new lockup to be constructed in Kentucky, moving the project closer to construction than it has ever been in more than 20 years since it was first proposed.
A pet project of Rep. Hal Rogers (R) from Kentucky’s Fifth U.S. Congressional District, the prison was tabled in June 2019 after activist groups sued on behalf of 1,408 future prisoners who would allegedly be incarcerated atop “a toxic strip mine site”—until BOP revived the plan in December 2022, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2023, p.33.]
Shifting federal government priorities have also affected the project, making strange political bedfellows of former Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) and Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) after both called for defunding the project in budget proposals—which Rogers was able to thwart. Though the EIS showed that construction will disrupt streams, wetlands and wildlife habitat around the 500-­acre site near Roxanna, it nevertheless called the former coal-­mining site the least affected location in Letcher County.
Opponents say the most troubling consequence is storm water runoff that not only threatens to pollute drinking water but also ...

On March 28, 2024, Texas’ Second District Court of Appeals (COA2D) overturned Crystal Mason’s illegal voting conviction, ruling that the state failed to present any evidence of criminal intent by the Black grandmother from Fort Worth to vote illegally in the 2016 election.
Mason’s crime was casting a ballot while on a three-­year period of supervised release from federal prison. Having completed her five-­year prison term for tax evasion, she believed that she was eligible. Though her name was absent from voter rolls, she was allowed to cast a provisional ballot—one of 4,000 cast in Tarrant County that year—which was later discarded. She was then charged with voting illegally and convicted. COA2D affirmed that conviction, but the state Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) found the applicable statute had been misconstrued and remanded the case, leading to Judge Wade Birdwell’s decision to vacate Mason’s conviction. See: Mason v. State, 687 S.W.3d 772 (Tex. App. 2024).
Texas election policing efforts have been led by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has faced his own criminal charges for felony securities fraud, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Feb. 2021, p.56.] Mason’s case focused media attention on Paxton’s “crackdown,” which voting rights advocates blamed for ...

On August 7, 2024, the head of Missouri’s Department of Corrections (DOC) was held in contempt by a state court judge for refusing to release Howard Roberts, 82, after the prisoner’s conviction was overturned. State Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) had ordered Roberts kept behind bars at South Central Correctional Center in Licking. But in his contempt order, Senior Circuit Judge David C. Jones gave DOC Acting Director Trevor Foley until August 14, 2024, to release the prisoner or face fines of $1,000 per day.
Roberts was convicted of financial exploitation of an older or disabled person in 2016. Because the property at issue was worth $50,000 or more, he was found guilty of a felony and given a 20-­year sentence. During a hearing in November 2023, attorney Jonathan Sternberg argued that Roberts received ineffective assistance of counsel during his 2018 trial. In June 2024, Judge Jones agreed that Roberts’ trial attorney failed to have records and testimony introduced which could have convinced the jury that he was operating a legitimate business with the funds he had received, and that he was innocent. Despite this, Bailey instructed DOC to keep Roberts incarcerated. The dustup marked the third time this year ...

The former Deputy Warden of Ohio’s Warren Correctional Institution was sentenced on March 20, 2024, to probation not exceeding five years, after pleading guilty to theft in office. Robert Welch, 57, admitted stealing over $19,000 in pay for overtime he never worked at the lockup.
Welch fraudulently punched in for more than 350 hours of overtime work with the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DRC) over a 10-­month period beginning in April 2022. DRC investigators later learned from Sinclair Community College that the deputy warden spent some of those hours teaching classes as an adjunct instructor. The school didn’t say what he taught, but presumably it wasn’t a class in ethics.
He resigned from DRC in April 2023 after nearly 23 years, according to the agency’s communications head, JoEllen Smith. At the time Welch earned $53.01 an hour, she said. His October 2023 indictment listed three felony counts, but charges for grand theft and tampering with records were dropped as part of his plea deal.
According to that, Welch agreed to repay the money he defrauded the state. He made out well in the deal; the charge to which he pleaded guilty carried a maximum penalty of 36 months ...

It’s hard to tell who is slimier, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) guard who allegedly beat a prisoner into a coma or prison officials who then attempted to dismiss the prisoner’s legal claim because he was still comatose when the deadline to file a grievance passed. Given that, it’s no surprise defendants also let a settlement conference deadline pass that was set by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas for June 11, 2024.
The prisoner, Candelario Hernandez, was confined at the Stevenson Unit on November 4, 2019, when he sought medical attention for an arm injury. Guard Aaron Kloesel was on duty at the medical unit and refused Hernandez entry, closing the door on him. But Hernandez blocked the door open with his foot, insisting that he was entitled to be seen by medical staff. Kloesel allegedly became enraged, grabbed Hernandez and threw him to the ground, smashing his head on the concrete floor; he then knelt on the prisoner’s neck and handcuffed him, even as Hernandez went into a seizure from the traumatic injury.
Hernandez lost consciousness before being airlifted to a hospital. There he remained comatose for several weeks. When he finally ...

On April 2, 2024, the U.S. Dept. of Justice sued the Utah Department of Corrections (DOC) for allegedly violating the rights of a transgender prisoner under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126 §12101 et seq. The filing came just weeks after the Disability Rights Section of DOJ’s Office of Civil Rights issued a letter to DOC Executive Director Brian Redd on March 12, 2024, conveying the findings of its investigation into ADA violations alleged by the unidentified prisoner, who claimed DOC subjected her to discrimination and denied her equal access to healthcare due to her gender dysphoria disability.
A serious medical condition, gender dysphoria can result in “serious adverse mental health outcomes” if left untreated—outcomes that include self-­mutilation and attempted suicide. Due to the lack of adequate medical care, the prisoner had attempted self-­surgery to remove her testicles in May 2023. DOJ alleged that she had repeatedly requested treatment for her medical condition but received no gender dysphoria care for over 15 months, contrary to DOC’s own policy. When she was finally provided hormone therapy, prison officials “failed to take basic, necessary steps to ensure that the treatment was provided safely and effectively,” DOJ found.
Unlike ...

by Douglas Ankney
In a maddeningly byzantine decision on February 21, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed a claim by Massachusetts prisoner Jwainus Perry that his due process rights were violated by state Department of Correction (DOC) officials, who held him in solitary confinement for almost two years in a Special Management Unit (SMU) at the notorious Souza-­Baronowski Correctional Center between 2010 and 2012 “without affording him either notice of the factual basis for that confinement or an opportunity for rebuttal.”
Perry filed his claim in April 2014, after which the federal court for the District of Massachusetts granted Defendants summary judgment. A panel of the First Circuit affirmed that decision in 2018, agreeing that they were entitled to qualified immunity (QI) because the law was not clearly established, at the time of the alleged violation, that prolonged SMU confinement was a deprivation of a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause. Four years later, the full Court sitting en banc vacated that decision and granted Perry’s motion for rehearing—only to reach the same conclusion again another two years after that.
Attempting this time to provide a framework for determining when confinement in segregation ...

Georgia State University announced on March 21, 2024, that it was pulling the plug on its eight-­year-­old Prison Education Program (PEP), in which 60 prisoners at two state prisons and one federal lockup were working toward college associate degrees.
PEP alumni include nine men at Walker State Prison who earned associate degrees in May 2023, GSU’s first class to graduate behind bars. Three more incarcerated students graduated in December 2023 at Phillips State Prison. Another 19 prisoners at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta enrolled in PEP classes in September 2023.
The university claims to have a “teachout plan” to help all 60 remaining prisoner students finish their degrees, potentially involving a takeover of the program by the University of West Georgia. Details remain unclear, however.
Ironically, it was expansion of Pell Grant availability to all incarcerated students nationwide that GSU blamed for the shutdown. Offering federal financial aid for low-­income students, Pell Grants became available to prisoners in July 2023 after a ban lasting nearly 30 years, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, May 2022, p.44.] GSU said that the “complex requirements” and “administrative demands” of obtaining Pell Grant approvals were too burdensome.
But Ruth Delaney, who provides technical assistance for ...

Quietly, the Second Senate of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court made history on June 20, 2023, in a ruling that found laws capping compensation that prisoners receive for work in two German states violate the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, the country’s constitution. The Court held that the portions of the Bavarian Prison Act and the Prison Act of North-­Rhine Westphalia setting prisoner remuneration for work while incarcerated in those states are incompatible with the “social reintegration” of prisoners, which prison programs are required to seek under the Basic Law.
Two unnamed German prisoners confined in Bavaria and North-­Rhine Westphalia filed suit in their respective state courts challenging the amount they were compensated for their work while confined. One worked in the prison print shop and the other as a cable cutter. In both states, penal codes set prisoner compensation at just 9% of Germany’s “basic wage,” which is calculated from the average wage of all German citizens under the pension insurance scheme, similar to Social Security in the U.S. That amounts to a daily wage of about €12.00 ($13.10 USD), or €1.50 ($1.65 USD) hourly. Both prisoners’ cases were dismissed by the state courts as unfounded and ...

by Douglas Ankney
In an amended complaint filed in federal court for the Western District of Virginia on January 19, 2024, the former warden of Marion Correctional Treatment Center (MCTC) was added to the list of Defendants being sued by the surviving sister of an intellectually disabled prisoner fatally beaten by guards.
The filing by Kymberly Hobbs came three months after a grand jury refused to indict MCTC guards Joshua Caleb Jackson, William Zachary Montgomery, Samuel Dale Osbourne, Gregory Scott Plummer and Sgt. Anthony Raymond Kelly for killing her brother, Charles James Givens, 52, on February 5, 2022.
Givens was incarcerated for fatally shooting home health nurse Misty Leann Garrett, 22, in 2010. Due to his intellectual disability—he had the mental capacity of a child aged 7 or 8, the result of a childhood tumble down the stairs—he was housed at MCTC with other “prisoners with mental-­health issues and/or limited intellectual development,” the complaint continued. He also suffered from Crohn’s disease, one of the “complex medical reasons” that the complaint faults for Givens’ soiling himself.
But Defendant MCTC guards said that he “defecated on himself intentionally,” Hobbs’ complaint recalled; and because of Givens’ “inability to promptly decipher and follow [their] ...

On July 31, 2024, a former guard at Alabama’s Walker County Jail agreed to plead guilty to federal charges filed after a detainee was left naked on his cell floor for two weeks and froze to death in the winter of 2023—in a concrete bunker known as the “freezer” because guards manipulated fans to vent cold air from outside. A second guard then entered a plea agreement the following month in the death of the detainee, Tony Mitchell.
Mitchell, 33, died of hypothermia on January 26, 2023, after arriving at a hospital with a body temperature of just 72 degrees Fahrenheit. In the first plea agreement filed in federal court for the Northern District of Alabama, former guard Joshua Conner Jones confessed to one count of conspiracy to deprive Mitchell’s civil rights. Fellow guard Karen Kim Elsie Kelly agreed to plead guilty to the same charge on August 13, 2024.
When he was arrested on January 12, 2023, Mitchell—who had a history of drug addiction—had painted his face black. A cousin had reported that he was rambling about portals to heaven and hell in his home, and deputies performing a welfare check said that he fired a handgun at them ...

A lawsuit filed in Georgia’s Fulton County on May 1, 2024, blames poor conditions at the county jail for an assault by fellow detainees on Michael Horton, in which he was stabbed 13 times. As PLN reported, the jail recorded 10 detainee deaths in 2023, which Sheriff Pat Labatt blamed on “dangerous overcrowding” and “crumbling walls” in the lockup; at least one of those deaths was attributed to a bedbug infestation that forced Labatt to transfer some 600 detainees—but not before one of them, detainee LaShawn Thompson, 35, was “eaten alive.” His death cost the county a $4 million settlement in August 2023, the same month that former Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) called the jail “disgusting” during a brief visit to be booked on state charges related to his alleged interference in the 2020 election. [See: PLN, Feb. 2024, p.12.]
Horton was booked into the jail in March 2023 on charges of assault and possession of a weapon by a felon. Before he posted a $5,000 bond and was released two months later, he was the victim of the stabbing attack—one of 922 assaults recorded in the first 10 months of the year, including 337 fights and 293 stabbings, ...