Lawsuits: AL jailers let prisoners die from easily treatable illnesses to save money

Three lawsuits recently filed in federal court accuse the state of Alabama of denying prisoners with easily treatable illnesses or injuries proper medical care resulting in the prisoner’s death.

According to AL.com, the lawsuits have been filed over the deaths of three inmates, including a 19-year-old who died naked on a cell floor from gangrene.

The three suits allege the jailers in Madison County withhold the basic medical care in order to save money, believing that the insurance carried by the out-sourced medical contractor will cover any lawsuits filed against them.

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Civil rights attorney Hank Sherrod who filed all three lawsuits claims that the Madison County jailers are relying on the insurance coverage maintained by Advanced Correctional Healthcare to shield them from lawsuits, and to save money by not dealing with inmate medical problems..

“ACH’s business model, reflected in the agreement, succeeds by underbidding the competition and implementing severe cost control measures,” Sherrod said. “The necessary result of which is inmate suffering and liability claims (dealt with through liability insurance.)”

Jeff Rich, attorney for Madison County, would not comment on pending litigation, saying the three lawsuits are “being vigorously defended.”



Lawsuits: AL jailers let prisoners die from easily treatable illnesses to save money

Transferring Funds To Prisoners Is Big Business For Some Financial Companies – Consumerist

The Center for Public Integrity has released the first in a two-part series investigating how private financial companies have made millions from the families of prisoners.

Over a six-month investigation CPI found that prison bankers collected tens of millions of dollars every year from inmates’ families in fees for basic financial services. As a result, some families have gone without medical coverage, paying bills or even staying in contact with their imprisoned family members.

So how did this happen? According to CPI, these problems can be traced back several years to the point when private financial firms, like Florida-based JPay, began to dominate the market for prisoners’ finances.

While families once could spend as little as $3 to send a traditional money order to inmates and have the funds transferred to their prison accounts, now they must pay upwards of $8 per transfer to have transfers made in a timely manner.

Although families can opt to continue sending paper money orders through companies like JPay, CPI found that many have converted to costly electronic transaction after waiting weeks or even a month for the funds to be made available to their loved ones.

JPay, which provides money transfers to more than 70% of the inmates in U.S. prisons, is often the only option for families to send money. And some consumer advocates say it would appear the company has taken advantage of its position by charging exorbitant fees.

In 2013, JPay processed 7 million transactions for families of inmates and made more than $50 million in revenue.

Transferring Funds To Prisoners Is Big Business For Some Financial Companies – Consumerist

Inside the Private Prison Industry's Alarming Spread Across America | Alternet

An older article but a few interesting bits of information:

1] An example of back-door maneuvering by a politician:

"John Kavanagh was racing against the clock. His position as House Appropriations Chairman afforded him the opportunity to stuff whatever minor extra provisions he wanted into the budget before it went to a vote the following Monday, and he only had a few hours left to do it."
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"This came out of nowhere — I mean that,” Arizona House Minority Leader Chad Campbell told the Arizona Republic. “No one said a word about it. It wasn't in the Senate budget, it didn't come as a request from DOC. There's something really shady here.”

For Kavanagh, there was nothing shady about sweetening the deal with nearly a million extra dollars. On the contrary, he says, it was a moral imperative.

2] Just how powerful is the private prison lobby:

"Rep. John Kavanagh was trying to secure an extra $900,000 gift for the GEO Group, the billion-dollar private prison corporation whose state lobbyists came to him at the last second begging with upturned hats. The $45 million already earmarked for the maintenance of low- and medium-security facilities wasn’t enough, they said."
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The largest and richest prison firm, Corrections Corporation of America, has 22 lobbyists registered in Arizona; the GEO Group, the second largest, has seven.

3] But the most egregious, and I have posted about this before, factoid:

Arizona is one of four states (along with Virginia, Oklahoma and Louisiana) in which state governments are bound to contracts guaranteeing a 95%-100% occupancy in facilities leased by private prisons. Of the four, Arizona’s quotas are the most extreme: as part of the aforementioned “deal” in 2008, prison officials must keep a 100% occupancy rate in the two GEO Group facilities and another facility leased to the state by Management and Training Corporation, according to a 2013 report by In the Public Interest. Paradoxically, this may be costing the state more money: An August 2013 analysis from the Tucson Citizen shows that the “per-prisoner, per-day rates” for those particular facilities have increased by an average of 14% since 2008.

The $45 million allocated for the GEO Group in the state’s new budget not only suggests that lawmakers expect an increase in their prison population, but it also indicates that they have little intention of abandoning policies that casually criminalize its citizens. Since these are low- and medium-security facilities, they will likely be places to house petty drug offenders, who make up 20.5% of the state’s entire inmate population.
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While the total prison population in the country grew 16% between 2000 and 2011, the state private prison population grew 106%. Yet despite this astronomical growth, not a single independent study has ever corroborated the incarceration industry’s claim that its services save taxpayers’ money. So why has it grown so powerful?

Inside the Private Prison Industry's Alarming Spread Across America | Alternet

How US Private Prisons Are Making Millions by Jailing Migrants in Deplorable Conditions | Alternet

CARs thus act as a middle-arena that wouldn’t exist if the federal government simply conducted immigrant enforcement through the civil system, which is what used to happen. But in 2005, the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice jointly instituted a program called “Operation Streamline” that mandated migrants be prosecuted by the US government in addition to being processed for deportation. There’s little reason to criminally prosecute migrants in addition to processing them for deportation except to send a message.

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As states move for the first time in decades to address swollen prisoner populations, federal immigration detention centers are the new front in private prison corporations’ business strategy, and undocumented migrants their easy cash cows.

Around the country there are 13 Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons, which are managed by private companies contracted by the federal Bureau of Prisons to house a total of 25,000 prisoners convicted of living in the United States without proper documentation. In the pursuit of profits, private prison corporations have created utterly fetid and psychologically frying conditions within these CARs, making even the most squalid prisons for citizens look better by comparison. The vulnerability of an inmate population without recognized citizenship, combined with aggressive immigration policy and legal statutes allowing for-profit detention centers to operate with lax oversight, have created conditions under which carceral corporations can operate legal gulags with an endless supply of incoming prisoners.

Over the last four years, the American Civil Liberties Union investigated five CARs in Texas that together house a total of 14,000 inmates, and on Tuesday released its findings in the report Warehoused and Forgotten: Immigrants Trapped Our Shadow Private Prison System. Shockingly, they found that all of five CARs were serviced with contracts from the Bureau of Federal Prisons that include provisions requiring the CARs have a 10% “isolation cell” quota, which is double the rate at publicly federal managed prisons. With perverse incentives to send prisoners to solitary confinement—a measure the UN has condemned as torture—inmates have reportedly been thrown into isolated cells for complaining about food and medical care or pursuing legal grievances. The profit motive has rendered the CARs nearly absent all drug and medical treatment, along with opportunities for inmates’ self-development. In one facility in Raymondville, Texas, near the Mexican border, the center is so overcrowded that inmates live in cramped, vermin-infested Kevlar tents.

How US Private Prisons Are Making Millions by Jailing Migrants in Deplorable Conditions | Alternet

A Modern Day Slave Plantation Exists, and It's Thriving in the Heart of America - PolicyMic

"There seems to be an artificial sanitation that is disturbing to me," he said. The land is "beautiful, whitewashed, looks like a college campus." But underneath, "The bones are rottin'."

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It was 1972. Thousands of American troops were battling communist forces in Vietnam. Nixon had won re-election by a landslide, but Watergate would soon usher in his demise. Space travel and technology were advancing rapidly.

Change was brewing across America, but one place stood still, frozen in time: Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola. When Robert King arrived that year, he felt as though he'd stepped into the past.

Angola sits 50 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. It's the largest maximum-security facility in the United States and one of the country's most notorious prisons. In the book The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, the authors wrote, "Tough criminals allegedly broke down when they received a sentence to Angola. ... None of them wanted to be sent to a prison where 1 of every 10 inmates annually received stab wounds and which routinely seethed with black-white confrontations."

Angola's expanse covers a vast 28 square miles — larger than the size of Manhattan. Tucked away in a bend of the Mississippi River, it's surrounded by water and swamp on three sides. It's an isolated penal village — the nearest town 30 miles away — and it's the only penitentiary in the country where staff members live on site. Generation after generation grow up, live and die on Angola's land.

When King, now 71, arrived at Angola, his first impression of it was that it resembled a slave plantation, he said. And it used to be just that. Its name is derived from the home country of the slaves who used to work the land. Today, the comparison remains sadly accurate: Inmates are disproportionately black. They're forced into hard labor and monitored closely by armed white staff on horseback. There is a sex slave trade behind the bars and many black inmates are deprived of basic constitutional rights.

A Modern Day Slave Plantation Exists, and It's Thriving in the Heart of America - PolicyMic

States Guarantee High Prison Populations for Private Prison Industry’s Profits

Anyone who even tangentially follows the travesty that is America's criminal justice system knows that privately owned prison corporations are gaining a deeper foothold in our nation's prisons. The private prison industry lobbies politicians, donates to campaigns of pro-privatization candidates, supports the ongoing War on Drugs, and has helped to shape criminal justice policies like California's three-strikes law. High incarceration rates insure greater profits for the private prison industry.

A new report from In the Public Interest reveals that private prison companies, including two of the largest, the Corrections Corp. of America and Geo Group Inc., are forging deals with state and local governments that provide huge profits based on guaranteed high occupancy rates.

The report, titled "Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and 'Low-Crime Taxes' Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations," "documents the contracts exchanged between private prison companies and state and local governments that either guarantee prison occupancy rates (essentially creating inmate lockup quotas) or force taxpayers to pay for empty beds if the prison population decreases due to lower crime rates or other factors (essentially creating low-crime taxes)," AlterNet's April M. Short recently reported.

States Guarantee High Prison Populations for Private Prison Industry’s Profits

Pennsylvania prison guards accused of arranging fights between inmates | The Raw Story

A perfect example of the Zimbardo Prison Study (1973), in which Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment. Or specifically what Zimbardo called the "Lucifer Effect" in his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,,,

Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect,gets its title from the metamorphosis of Lucifer into Satan. According to Christian theology, Lucifer was once God's favorite angel until he challenged God's authority and was cast into Hell with all the other fallen angels. Thus, Zimbardo derives this title to explain how good people turn evil. Zimbardo's main assumption on why good people do awful things is due to situational influences and power given from authority.

The Lucifer Effect was written in response to his findings in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo believes that personality characteristics could play a role in how violent or submissive actions are manifested. In the book, Zimbardo says that humans cannot be defined as "good" or "evil" because we have the ability to act as both especially at the hand of the situation. According to Zimbardo, "Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in 'total situations' that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality."

This "incident" highlights a point made by Steve Hassan, the importance of understanding the Asch Conformity Study, the Milgram Experiment on Obedience to Authority Figures and the above mentioned Stanford Prison Experiment.

Pennsylvania prison guards accused of arranging fights between inmates | The Raw Story

Judge must serve 28 years

I have posted a couple of articles concerning privatized prisons and the inherent "evils" of such an idea. This piece of scum highlights said evils very well. Sad thing is, this occurred in the state I call home,,,

Judge Mark A. Ciavarella, 63, serves as an example of why the private prison industry can do more harm than good. Ciavarella worked alongside owners of private juvenile facilities to ensure that the prison remained occupied. The more prisoners equated to more profits for the owners of the prison.

As a result, Ciavarella would sentence offenders with small offenses to months and, at times, years behind bars. He once sentenced a teen to three months in jail for creating a MySpace page that mocked her school’s assistant principal. Ciavarella also sentenced another teen to 90 days in jail after a simple schoolyard fight.

But after a federal investigation, it was discovered that Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Michael Conahan, received more than $2.6 million from privately run youth centers owned by PA Child Care. In 2011, Ciavarella was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 28 years in prison. He was also forced to pay $1 million in restitution.

Judge must serve 28 years

New Hampshire House Votes To Prohibit Private Prisons | ThinkProgress

The move is an abrupt shift in New Hampshire, where just last year the legislature had considered a bill to send its entire male prison population to private prisons.

The problems with private prisons are too numerous to spell out in full, but here are a few highlights.

At its core, the entire private prison industry profits when people are imprisoned, meaning stricter drug and immigration laws produce larger profits. Private prison operators know this, and have spent more than $45 million on lobbying federal and state lawmakers over the past decade, including top Republicans influencing the immigration debate. Indeed, the CEO of one of the largest private prison groups, the Corrections Corporation of America, assured investors on a recent call that there would continue to be “strong demand” for prison cells, even after immigration reform. The industry stands to rake in $5.1 billion detaining immigrants alone.

New Hampshire House Votes To Prohibit Private Prisons | ThinkProgress

The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery? | Global Research

Reminds me of the movie Shawshank Redemption,,,

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.

[,,,] The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

[,,,]  Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.” At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.

[,,,]  In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.

The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery? | Global Research