A federal judge ruled Friday that the Wisconsin Department of Corrections must make changes to its inmate prescription system at Taycheedah Correctional Institution and hire licensed practical nurses to hand out drugs there, all within two months.  Reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Chief U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa’s order came in response to an American Civil Liberties Union motion for an injunction forcing the state to make changes.   The action is part of a federal class-action lawsuit the ACLU filed in 2006 on behalf of inmates at the state’s largest women’s prison.   The ACLU contends the state is violating the rights of Taycheedah prisoners by having guards without medical training dispense drugs to inmates, routinely resulting in the wrong medications or wrong dosages being given to inmates.

The state admits there are problems but says it is working to fix them. It argued that it has a plan to hire nursing assistants to hand out drugs and that the ACLU’s timetable was unreasonable.   Randa disagreed, writing that “matters of administrative convenience must ultimately give way when constitutional rights are in jeopardy.”  Randa ordered the state to draw up a plan to hire licensed practical nurses for Taycheedah within a week and have them in place in 60 days. In the issue of computerizing the prescription system, Randa gave the state two months to take “interim steps” to improve drug distribution accuracy …

Department of Corrections spokesman John Dipko said he did not know how many nurses would be hired or how much it would cost … Dipko said agency officials had not determined whether they will appeal the order, but even if they do, they will comply with the order in the meantime.

Larry Dupuis, legal director for the ACLU of Wisconsin, said, “Judge Randa has taken a huge step toward alleviating the needless pain and suffering caused by Taycheedah’s failed medication system.”

vericatrajkova Female Inmates, Inmate Health, Inmate Lawsuits, Wisconsin

Tired of paying out tens of millions of dollars in civil rights litigation, Washington D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles is demanding the D.C. Council rework a law that keeps the jail from releasing its prisoners in the middle of the night.  The DC Examiner reports:

D.C. passed a law in 2003 forbidding the jail from releasing inmates after 10 p.m. and before 7 a.m. after neighbors in the gentrifying Hill East community voiced anxieties about having ex-prisoners roaming their streets in the middle of the night.  Nickles told The Examiner that the law has cost the city millions in civil rights lawsuits. When a judge orders an inmate freed, the paperwork takes a while to catch up. Under current law, inmates spend another night in jail if the paperwork isn’t finished by 10 p.m., he said.  “The fact that [a neighbor] may be inconvenienced is not a reason to have a free man or woman go back to jail, be strip-searched and spend another night locked up,” the attorney general said. “The Constitution isn’t convenient.”  In a letter to council Chairman Vince Gray, Nickles said that if the council doesn’t repeal the law by March 4, he will declare it unconstitutional and order jail officials to ignore it.

Not everyone agrees.

“It’s not in the inmates’ interest to be released out of the back door at two in the morning in a jail jumpsuit,” said Phil Mendelson, D-at large, chairman of the council’s Judiciary Committee.   Others have more immediate concerns.  “Sorry, I don’t want people wandering the neighborhood here,” said Neil Glick, an advisory neighborhood commissioner who lives near the jail.

However,

In 2005, the city agreed to pay $11 million to settle a class-action suit brought by prisoners who alleged that the cutoff violated their civil rights. Another class-action suit is pending, and Nickles said the city is exposed to even more damages.

vericatrajkova Inmate Lawsuits, Washington DC

Broome County NY Jail officials have quietly adjusted the way they handle disputes between inmates, now that a former inmate has sued Sheriff David Harder and three jail employees who he says failed to help him during a fight with another inmate. Report from the Binghampton Press & Sun-Bulletin.

However, Harder says he doesn’t believe Broome needs to change its rules about saving video records of jail incidents. He said the cost of extra storage equipment could be prohibitive and still might not have helped resolve the incident that spurred former inmate Richard E. Sipe Jr., 28, to sue for $250,000. “We have machines set up to record the stuff that goes on in there,” Harder said. “But the lawsuit didn’t happen until several months later. The officers looked at the tape (soon after the incident), and said, ‘It’s only a bloody nose.’ How long are you going to have me save this stuff?” …

County officials said last week that a video of the incident was not retained. They later amended that to say a copy might have been made, but no one has been able to find it. State law does not require counties to retain jail videotapes, though it does require paper records to be kept for specified periods … Broome’s jail video system currently over-writes its recordings after about 30 days, unless a staffer elects to save a copy of an incident, officials have said …

Deputy County Attorney Aaron Marcus said Broome likely will release some or all of the records soon [in relation to media FOI requests]. He has said that jail employees should have retained a copy of the tape when they learned that Sipe claimed to have been assaulted, and asked for medical attention. Sipe says in court papers that he tried within three days of the incident to file charges against Mable.The county acknowledges that Sipe received attention from jail medical staff on multiple days after the incident. But it has not been able to say if he was seen because of the Mable incident.

vericatrajkova Inmate Grievances, Inmate Lawsuits, NY Broome County, New York, Video Use

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ refusal to allow a Christian ministry access to send Bibles, books about Jesus Christ and other religious materials to inmates has sparked a federal lawsuit, according to a story at Beliefnet.com.

Wingspread Christian Ministries, headquartered in Prairie Grove, Ark., and operated by Illinois-based Evangelists for Christ Inc., filed the lawsuit Wednesday (Feb. 11) in U.S. District Court in Muskogee.   Prison restrictions on prisoners’ correspondence violate the First and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and Oklahoma’s Religious Freedom Act, the 12-page lawsuit petition claims.  “Restricting Wingspread’s freedom of speech and religion is not only harmful to our constitutional rights, it is also very harmful to those within prison walls in need of spiritual sustenance,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville, Va.-based civil liberties organization, which represents the plaintiffs … Wingspread sends similar religious materials to prisoners in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, New York and Texas but “has not encountered restrictions upon and impediments to its ministry similar to those encountered in Oklahoma,” the lawsuit states.

According to the suit, Oklahoma prison regulations mandate that “all orders for publications will be made directly to the publisher of the material or to a legitimate bookstore.”  The regulation does not allow a ministry to send Bibles or other religious materials; only a publisher, bookstore or book dealer may do so, according to the plaintiffs.

vericatrajkova Inmate Lawsuits, Oklahoma, Religious Issues

The Washington State Public Records Act of 1972 says its terms should be liberally applied to all citizens, but [State] Sen. Mike Carrel thinks the law may be too liberal, according to the Seattle P-I.

Carrell said it “isn’t appropriate” to allow certain individuals unlimited access to public records, comparing what has been deemed excessive public record gathering to overfishing a sea of information. The ones doing the overfishing, he said, are those serving time in correctional facilities in Washington state.   The Attorney General’s Office says about a half-dozen inmates are abusing the Public Records Act to threaten correctional staffers and overwhelm the system as a means to harass those responsible for keeping them behind bars.

Carrell is the prime sponsor of a Senate Bill 5130, which would allow agencies to ask a court to enjoin public records requests made by prisoners in state correctional facilities in order to put a stop to what critics say are a flood of both ridiculous and dangerous requests …

The Department of Corrections received more than 6,000 requests from inmates during the first three quarters of 2008, a figure they say nearly doubled from the same period in 2007. The reason for the sharp increase in inmate requests, said Tim Lang, senior assistant to the attorney general, is a trend to abuse the Public Records Act led by renegade inmate Allan Parmelee, creating what the DOC claims to be thousands of hours of extra work responding to the requests …

John Scott Blonien, assistant secretary to the DOC, explained that the nuisance became dangerous when the handful of inmates abusing the system began requesting documents that contained the addresses, photos and professional histories of corrections officers and Washington State Patrol troopers.  Some of the requesters even asked for the blueprints for all fire escapes and copies of tapes taken by surveillance cameras …

Carrell said that his bill is the Legislature’s best defense against those who abuse the Public Records Act, and giving agencies the ability to try and stop the few abusive requestors through a court process is better than dishing out penalties as a solution.   “What penalty would you have? They haven’t broken the law,” Carrell said.

vericatrajkova Inmate Lawsuits, Washington

The Sacramento Bee has a good detailed story on the dispute that pits California’s CDCR and the Schwarzenegger Administration against a panel of Federal judges.

An appellate court on Thursday will hear oral arguments on how far the law allows a federal judge to go in imposing his will on the officials who run California’s 33 adult prisons.   For weeks, the level of rhetoric and posturing by the principals has been through the roof. State officials contend that U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson of San Francisco and his appointed receiver, law professor J. Clark Kelso, have made unreasonable demands for billions of state dollars to build new facilities and improve existing ones.  Henderson and Kelso, in turn, are convinced they wouldn’t have had to intervene if at least four governors and corrections officials who served under them had done their jobs …

Not funding his projects now will “cost the state – and taxpayers – dearly in the long run,” Kelso claims. He says he has been forced “to put out fires ignited by the Schwarzenegger administration instead of working to save lives and implementing cost-cutting initiatives.”  Attorney General Jerry Brown insists that “federal law does not allow the receiver to commandeer the finances of the state to spend $8 billion for unaccountable and extravagant prison construction … He’s already spent billions and is requesting billions more, despite the fact the costs for prison health care in California have soared to nearly $14,000 per inmate per year” …

Speaking at a Press Club luncheon in Sacramento, a defiant Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised, “The receiver will never get that money. … Because I will not give it to him. I think the controller will not give it to him. And I don’t think the legislators will give it to him” … Brown maintains the Prison Litigation Reform Act, designed by Congress to limit the federal judiciary’s authority over prison operations, “bars courts from ordering the construction of prisons.” Further, says Brown, Henderson’s order violates California’s 11th Amendment guarantee of sovereign immunity …

On Friday, in an apparent attempt to make the receiver’s presence and plans more palatable, Brosnahan submitted to Henderson and the 9th Circuit three cheaper alternatives to Kelso’s $8 billion construction program to build seven new facilities for 10,000 beds and upgrade existing medical facilities. They range in cost from $2.5 billion to $6 billion … The attorney general denounced the new options as “flimflam,” “not grounded in common sense” and “redundant, excessive spending at a time of fiscal crisis.”

vericatrajkova California, Economic Issues, Inmate Health, Inmate Lawsuits

A federal judge on Tuesday threatened Fulton County GA commissioners with fines or incarceration if they don’t provide adequate funding for the county jail.

In a three-page order, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob put officials on notice they could be held in contempt if Sheriff Ted Jackson is not provided the necessary resources to bring the jail into compliance with a court order. Shoob issued the order in an ongoing case filed in 2004 that alleged the jail was understaffed, crowded, dirty and dangerous. In February 2006, Shoob approved a consent decree, under which the county pledged to improve conditions.

Shoob’s court-appointed monitor recently expressed concern over the county’s decision to cut the sheriff’s budget from $98 million to $93.4 million. The monitor believes such a reduced budget will not enable the sheriff to comply with the consent decree, Shoob said.  “The county defendants should be aware that it is their obligation to budget sufficient funds to enable the sheriff to comply with all requirements set out in the consent decree,” Shoob wrote. “This obligation is unconditional.” Revenue shortfalls or a general need to cut spending will not be considered “as a justification for noncompliance with this obligation,” Shoob added …

Shoob listed the defendants as Fulton County, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners and the individual commissioners.

vericatrajkova GA Fulton County, Inmate Lawsuits

Six lawsuits have been filed so far in Allentown’s US District Court on behalf of 30 former or current inmates of Northampton County PA Prison, who claim to have contracted and to have been permanently scarred by the antibiotic-resistant staph infection MRSA as a result of extremely unsavory prison conditions and a lack of appropriate treatment.

Defendants in the suits include Northampton County, PrimeCare Medical Inc. of Harrisburg (the prison’s health-care service), and Corrections Director Todd Buskirk.  Officials have confirmed that a MRSA outbreak did indeed sweep the Northampton County Prison in 2005 …

Water leaks, dirty showers, filthy blankets and cells and an inadequate flow of fresh air have fostered a breeding ground for the illness as far back as 2005, according to the lawsuits. Inmates not being required to shower contributed to the outbreak and their cells were not properly cleaned because prisoners were given dirty mop water that was passed from one cell to another and never drained, the lawsuits say. “‘Mattresses that had been defecated and urinated on were not cleaned or changed between inmates, and instead were quite often left in place for the next inmate’s use,” according to suits filed by attorney Gerald J. Williams in Philadelphia.

vericatrajkova Inmate Health, Inmate Lawsuits, PA Northampton County

• Knox County IL to convert old jail to work release center.
• CA court rules that lukewarm food is hot enough for inmates.
• Lyon County NV slows new jail as economy bites.

vericatrajkova California, Community Corrections, Economic Issues, Food Services, IL Knox County, Inmate Lawsuits, NV Lyon County, Work Release

The following analysis is from the Wall Street Journal:

Prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.  The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.

Prison-policy experts expect inmate populations in 10 states to have increased by 25% or more between 2006 and 2011, according to a report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts. Private prisons housed 7.4% of the country’s 1.59 million incarcerated adults in federal and state prisons as of the middle of 2007, up from 1.57 million in 2006, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a crime-data-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Corrections Corp., the largest private-prison operator in the U.S., with 64 facilities, has built two prisons this year and expanded nine facilities, and it plans to finish two more in 2009. The Nashville, Tenn., company put 1,680 new prison beds into service in its third quarter, helping boost net income 14% to $37.9 million. “There is going to be a larger opportunity for us in the future,” said Damon Hininger, Corrections Corp.’s president and chief operations officer, in a recent interview.  California has shipped more than 5,100 inmates to private prisons run by Corrections Corp. in Arizona, Mississippi and other states since late 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered emergency measures to control a ballooning state-prison population. Prisons were so overcrowded that hundreds of inmates were sleeping in gyms, according to one report. An additional 2,900 prisoners are scheduled to be transferred to private prisons outside the state by the end of next year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.   “Private prisons are a short-term solution while we work on long-term solutions, rehabilitation programs and recidivism strategies,” said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the state’s corrections department.

Geo Group, of Boca Raton, Fla., the second-largest prison company, has built or expanded eight facilities this year in Georgia, Texas, Mississippi and other states, and it plans seven more expansions or new prisons by 2010. Last month, Geo Group was awarded a contract by Florida’s Department of Management Services to design and build a 2,000-bed special-needs prison in that state. Cornell Cos., the nation’s third-largest prison company, recently broke ground on a 1,250-bed private prison for men in Hudson, Colo.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons, the government agency that operates all federal prisons and manages the handling of inmates convicted of federal crimes, has awarded 13 contracts since 1997 to prison companies to build prisons and detention centers that house low-security inmates, primarily “low security criminal aliens,” says Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the agency. The contracts give the bureau “flexibility to manage a rapidly growing inmate population and to help control overcrowding,” Ms. Ponce says.

Outsourcing incarceration to prison companies can reduce a government’s cost of housing those prisoners by as much as 15%, according to a study by the Reason Foundation, a research organization in Los Angeles. Private operators say they can build prisons more quickly and operate them less expensively than governments because their payroll costs are lower and they can consolidate prisoners from many far-flung jurisdictions into facilities located in areas where land and building costs are very low.

Some groups accuse the private prisons of neglecting inmates or of putting them in bad conditions. “Profit is still a motive and it’s structured into the way these prisons are operated,” says Judy Greene, a justice-policy analyst for Justice Strategies, a nonprofit studying prison-sentencing issues and problems. “Just because the system has expanded doesn’t mean there is evidence that conditions have improved.”  The American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits involving several prison companies over the past decade alleging poor treatment of inmates. Last year, the organization and other parties filed a lawsuit against Corrections Corp. and the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm in federal court in San Diego, alleging that the company was operating an overcrowded, unsafe immigrant-detention center in that city. Detainees were routinely assigned in groups of three to sleep in two-room cells — meaning one had to sleep on the floor near the toilet — or to temporary beds in recreation rooms and other common spaces, according to the complaint. The suit also alleged that detainees had little access to mental-health care. “We have serious concerns about for-profit prison companies because they are notorious for cutting essential costs that need to be provided to maintain a safe and constitutional environment for prisoners,” says Jody Kent, a public-policy coordinator for the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

The lawsuit was settled in June, with Corrections Corp. and Homeland Security agreeing to limit immigrant detainees to the number of inmates the facility was designed for. Louise Grant, a Corrections Corp. spokeswoman, says the company’s prison practices complied with federal standards and that it regularly discloses capacity levels and other information in federal filings. “Our government partners monitor us daily,” Ms. Grant says. “There is no cutting corners.”

vericatrajkova CCA, California, Federal Systems, GEO, Inmate Lawsuits, Private Prisons