Louisiana Hall of Shame

Allen Correctional Center
Kinder, Louisiana
GEO Group (formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections)
February 3, 2009 The Town Talk
The three men who escaped from the Allen Correctional Center in Kinder Jan. 26 have been charged with aggravated escape and are back in the custody of the Department of Corrections. Cecil Stratton, the last of the three men to be apprehended, went before a judge Tuesday morning for a brief court appearance before he was released back to the custody of Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. The other two escapees – Troy Hargrave and Daniel Reeder – were both charged Friday with aggravated escape and turned over to state custody.

January 29, 2009 The Town Talk
Fatigue, cold and hunger led one of three Allen Parish prison escapees to turn himself in Wednesday, authorities said. Law enforcement officers have two of the three men, who escaped Monday from the Allen Correctional Center in Kinder, in custody. Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies say they are turning up the heat on the third escaped convict, who remains on the loose. "We are working around the clock to locate Cecil Stratton," Deputy U.S. Marshal Corey Britt said. "And anyone who assists Cecil will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law." Stratton -- who was serving a 25-year sentence for convictions of simple escape, simple burglary, first-degree robbery, marijuana possession, felony theft and flight from an officer out of St. Mary Parish -- is the only escapee who has not been captured. Escapees Daniel Reeder and Troy Hargrave -- both serving sentences for manslaughter convictions -- are back in police custody.

January 27, 2009 The Advertiser
A prison guard has been booked with helping three dangerous inmates escape from the privately run state prison in Kinder, the Allen Parish Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday. Detective Peggy Kennedy said Jesse Jordan, 19, of Glenmora was held without bond after being booked Monday night on three counts of assisting escape and one of malfeasance in office. He had worked there as a guard since May, Chief Deputy Grant Willis said. “It appears the motivation on his part was for monetary value,” Willis said. He said Jordan was cooperating with investigators. Jordan was employed by GEO — Global Expertise in Outsourcing Inc., the private company that runs the prison, Kennedy said. A call to the prison was not immediately returned. Daniel Reeder, 24, of Shreveport, Troy Hargrave, 32, of Crowley, and Cecil Stratton, 29, of Berwick were missing at the 6 a.m. head count, prison officials said. They described all three as dangerous and said Reeder and Hargrave were serving time for manslaughter. Three rows of razor wire on the ground in front of the fence had been cut through, but neither the fence nor the razor wire on top of it had been cut, Willis said. “We can’t say for certain that’s the way they got out, or whether it was a decoy,” he said.

January 27, 2009 The Town Talk
Three inmates -- two of whom were serving time for manslaughter -- escaped from a correctional center in Kinder sometime before 6 a.m. Monday, prison officials reported. Authorities from the Allen Correctional Center in Kinder said the three men should be considered dangerous. Officials are asking anyone with information or anyone who sees the escapees to contact their local authorities or call 911. The three men were discovered missing when the facility conducted its 6 a.m. count. The escapees were identified as: Daniel Reeder, a 24-year-old white man, 5 feet, 6 inches tall and 140 pounds with brown hair. He was serving a 30-year sentence for a manslaughter conviction in Caddo Parish. Troy Hargrave, a 32-year-old white man, 5 feet, 9 inches tall and 203 pounds with blond hair. He was serving a 40-year sentence for a manslaughter conviction in Calcasieu Parish. Cecil Stratton, a 29-year-old white man, 6 feet, 1 inch tall and 185 pounds with balding brown hair. He was serving a 25-year sentence for convictions of simple escape, simple burglary, first-degree robbery, marijuana possession, felony theft and flight from an officer out of St. Mary Parish. In addition to the three offenders, the facility is listing Sidonia Marie Stratton of Morgan City as a person of interest in the incident. She is the sister of Cecil Stratton and is thought to be driving a beige 1998 Mercury Sable with license plate OZK138. The dress code for offenders at Allen Correctional Center is navy blue scrubs with a white undershirt or blue jeans, a blue-jean button-up shirt or gray sweatshirt, but it is not confirmed what the men were wearing when they escaped. Security and K-9 teams from the correctional center are working with local law enforcement in Allen Parish and surrounding parishes to track down the three escaped inmates. The local community has been notified of the escape, as is standard in these situations, officials said. Allen Parish Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Grant Willis said the Sheriff's Office is assisting in the search efforts. According to a release from the facility, Hargrave may have family in the Jennings, Kinder and Lake Arthur areas. Jennifer Allemand, programs manager for the GEO Group facility, said the three men were state Department of Corrections inmates who were housed in the medium-custody private prison.

March 15, 2007 KPLC TV
It was between two and three in the afternoon Wednesday when Brian Scott escaped from the Allen Correctional Center by scaling the fence. Scott is convicted of felony theft and as a fugitive was considered dangerous. The prison is a medium security state facility but is operated by a private company, the Geo Group. Warden Terry Terrell says, with the help of numerous law enforcement agencies, procedures were put in effect to identify the missing inmate and get a manhunt underway to capture him. "I don't know that you could get out of a situation any better than what we did. The inmate was apprehended. Neither he nor anyone in law enforcement was injured so we are very thankful for that. " In such cases they notify those who live near the prison, that is if they've signed up to be notified when there's an escape. "About once a year and sometimes more frequently we put out flyers to all the local residents that we're aware of and ask them if they do wish to be contacted in a similar circumstance to simply fill out the form and name a number so we can put them on the calling list," says Terrell. But people who live near the prison such as in this area called Hickory Flat say they need to do a better job of alerting the public when an inmate escapes. Explains Virgil Richard, "We're taxpayers. Why can't they burn a little gas and let us know something. They were supposed to have had a horn, an alarm system and we don't have that." Neighbor Lloyd Miles agrees. "We've got some elderly people here and some handicapped people here by themselves and I'm mostly concerned about them. And we got kids."

October 23, 2002
Few concerned citizens ventured out to Alexandria City Hall Tuesday evening to speak out on the escape and fatal shooting of an HIV-positive state inmate. But those who attended were vocal in their questions and suggestions for the Department of Corrections and the Allen Correctional Center in Kinder. The committee did not make any recommendations concerning the escape or policies of the Department of Corrections or Wackenhut Corp., which owns Allen Correctional Center in Kinder. Cotton, 43, of Houma, escaped Aug. 21 from his room at the hospital. Thirty-eight hours later, he was shot while hiding underneath a home. Cotton snatched a .357-caliber handgun from the lone female guard assigned to him when she bent down to unshackle him so he could use the restroom, police said. (Alexandria Daily Town Talk)

August 31, 2002
Wackenhut Corp. is not in a position to release information on the probe of the escape and eventual death of Kenneth cotton, a spokeswoman said Friday. Cotton, an inmate at Allen Correctional Center in Kinder, escaped Aug.21 from Rapides Regional Medical Center where he was to have surgery. After a nearby 38-hour search, Cotton 43, of Houma was found hiding under a house in Alexandria. Police Special Response Team officers shot Cotton after he pointed a handgun at them. Cotton stole the gun from a female correctional guard after overcoming her at the hospital. Alexandria police and Wackenhut are probing the escape and standoff. (Alexandria Daily Town Talk)

Claiborne Parish Detention Center
Homer, Louisiana
LaSalle
July 22, 2003
For $3, inmates and visitors to the Claiborne Parish Detention Center in Homer can buy pirated copies of recordings by a wide array of performers, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the music industry. The jail's computers were used to illegally copy recordings by performers ranging from rapper Eminen to country music's George Strait to New Age instrumentalist John Tesh, Baton Rouge-based Utopia Entertainment Inc. charged in the copyright-infringement case filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Shreveport. Defendants in the case are Claiborne Parish through Sheriff Kenneth Volentine; LaSalle Management Co., which is under contract to manage the men's portion of Volentine's jail; and Department of Corrections inmate Bo Fain, identified as a "guiding force" in making the recordings. LaSalle's role at the detention center is to oversee the day-to-day operations of the jail, where all employees work for the sheriff. (Times-Picayune)

East Baton Rouge Parish Schools
East Baton Rouge, Louisiana
ARAMARK
March 19, 2009 The Advocate
A school janitor was arrested in what investigators believe is a crime ring in the thefts of purses, wallets and cell phones from employees at nine public schools in Ascension and East Baton Rouge parishes. Detectives with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office arrested Marnia Marie Parks on Tuesday in the incidents at six schools in the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, said Casey Rayborn Hicks, a Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman. Parks, 20, of 6248 Calion Drive, was booked into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison on seven counts of simple burglary, three counts of attempted theft and six counts of unauthorized use of an access (or credit) card. It is unclear whether Parks was also involved in the burglaries of two schools in the Zachary school system and one in Ascension Parish, Hicks said, adding there is a “definite possibility” the cases are linked. Parks worked for Jani-Care, a commercial cleaning company the East Baton Rouge school system uses for janitorial services, when the burglaries and thefts occurred earlier this month at the schools in the district, Hicks said. Detectives believe Parks had at least three accomplices and that she helped those accomplices gain access to the schools through her job, Hicks said. An arrest warrant has been issued for Tronette Leshae Leonard, 19, 803 Peach St. The other two accomplices, one of whom was caught on surveillance video, have yet to be identified, Hicks said. Chris Trahan, a spokesman with the East Baton Rouge school system, said the school system has a contract with Aramark for its janitorial services and that Aramark subcontracts with Jani-Care.

February 23, 2004
The East Baton Rouge Parish school system is holding a series of informational meetings this week to explain to more than 400 custodians, maintenance, groundskeeping and warehouse workers what will happen now that their jobs are in the hands of ARAMARK Inc. The School Board voted Thursday to approve a $22.5 million contract with ARAMARK, which employs about 216,000 people throughout the world, and it is already taking effect. The school system has set up an automated 24-hour information line -- 225-226-3794 -- outlining meeting times, and has posted similar information on a link on its Web site, http://www.ebrschools.org. The Web site also has a four-page application for employment with ARAMARK. This information was also provided in a letter issued Friday to school system employees. "It is with regret that I must information you are scheduled for separation," said the letter signed by Elizabeth Duran Swinford, associate superintendent for human resources, and Annette Mire, director of personnel services. ARAMARK and the school system's Human Resource Department are holding separate meetings. ARAMARK's meetings, to be held in the physical plant training room, 2875 Michelli Drive, will be from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. today and from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday. Employees will meet with ARAMARK representatives in groups in order of where their last names fall in the alphabet. An optional meeting will also be held from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday. ARAMARK will follow up with interviews from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday with potential employees. Those meetings will be held at the Instructional Resource Center, 1022 S. Foster Drive. Representatives from ARAMARK, the Louisiana Department of Labor, LSU and Baton Rouge Community College will also be on hand. The Human Resources Department is holding meetings of its own for employees A-L from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Thursday and for employees M-Z from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Friday. These meetings will focus on questions about payroll, benefits, retirement issues and job-transition options. These meetings will also take place in the Instructional Resource Center. ARAMARK has yet to lay out what it will pay privatized workers, except to say it will pay "prevailing market wages." Employee organizations that have opposed the deal say already low-paid support workers will inevitably have to take a pay cut. The contract signed by the school system also does not guarantee their employment with ARAMARK. (Advocate)

J.B. Evans Correctional Center
Tensas Parish, Louisiana
LCS Correctional Services
November 19, 2009 News-Star
Inmates at a Tensas Parish prison are refusing to return to their cells Thursday afternoon as a form of protest, according to Tensas Parish Sheriff Ricky Jones. Prisoners at the J.B. Evans Correctional Center are not moving from the prison yard to protest the amount of food they receive, Jones said. The warden and deputy warden at the correctional center were not available Thursday afternoon. Staff at the prison offered no comment on the number of inmates or other details of the protest. According to LCS Correctional Services Inc., the company that operates the prison, Evans Correctional Center is a 400-bed multi-use facility that has housed offenders for the Louisiana, Alabama and Harris County, Texas, corrections departments. Richard Harbison, executive vice president of LCS, was not available for comment Thursday afternoon.

Jena Juvenile Correctional Center (AKA La Salle Detention Facility)
Jena, Louisiana
GEO Group (formerly know as Wackenhut Corrections)
January 13, 2010 Times-Signal
The Times-Signal has learned that The GEO-Group is in the process of downsizing the operation at the La- Salle Detention Facility located in the town of Jena. According to information obtained by this newspaper, the staff at LDF is being cut by 22-percent, from 244 to 191 employees. No information was available as to how the downsizing will affect the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies operating at the facility. The GEO-Group will consolidate some operations as they cut the available bed space for immigration detainees from 1,160 to 576, according to reports obtained. When contacted at their Boca Raton, Florida headquarters, Pablo E. Paez, director of corporate relations, issued the following statement: “The GEO Group values its partnership with the community of Jena and LaSalle Parish and will continue to work with community stakeholders to maximize the overall contribution of the facility to the community. As a matter of corporate policy, however, our company cannot comment on specific personnel related decisions.”

August 22, 2009 Texas Civil Rights Review
The family of imprisoned asylum seeker Rrustem Neza tells the Texas Civil Rights Review that he was visited Friday by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Lufkin). The visit comes as welcome news for Rrustem's brother Xhemal (pronounced Jehmal) Neza who was shocked by the way Rrustem looked during a visit on Thursday. After seeing his brother Rrustem at the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana on Thursday evening, Xhemal drove to Dallas Friday morning to swear out an affidavit of his impressions. "When I saw him he was wasted," says Xhemal about Rrustem in the affidavit provided by attorney John Wheat Gibson of Dallas. "He was wearing the same clothes he had on when he was arrested two weeks ago. His face looked as if he were dead. It made me very weak to see his face." The affidavit alleges that since his arrest on Aug. 5 Rrustem has been kept in "a hole" or solitary confinement in a room of about three feet by six feet with a slit on the door but no window to the outside. "I believe Congressman Gohmert saved Rrustem's life by his intervention," says Friday's affidavit. Xhemal says he approached the facility two times prior to Thursday seeking to visit his brother, but it was only after Rep. Gohmert's office stepped in that a successful visit was completed. The Neza brothers applied for asylum in the USA after they fled Albania following a political assassination. Xhemal's asylum was granted, but Rrustem's was denied. The family believes the difference in treatment can be explained chiefly by the difference in attorneys handling the cases. Rrustem and his brothers fear that a forced return to Albania would endanger his life. The LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana is operated by the GEO Group, Inc. under a "perpetual" contract between the LaSalle Economic Development District (LEDD) of LaSalle Parish and the federal bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A recent $30 million dollar expansion of the former juvenile facility has increased the capacity of the center from 416 beds to 1,160, according to news clips archived online at privateci.org. "The contract is expected to generate approximately $23.5 million in annualized operating revenues for GEO at full occupancy," stated a Business Wire press release of July, 2007. The Texas Civil Rights Review will continuing to monitor developments in this case.

July 21, 2009 Courthouse News
An immigration detainee claims GEO Group employee "Deputy Garrison" repeatedly forced him to perform sexual acts upon Garrison, a jail guard at LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, La., which is run by GEO, in Alexandria, La., Federal Court.

September 11, 2008 Clarion Ledger
Almost $30,000 has been raised by a Jackson-based immigrants rights group to help the families of hundreds of immigrants taken into custody last month. Dozens of families are in crisis after their chief breadwinners were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement following an Aug. 25 raid in Laurel, says the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. Meanwhile, hundreds of detainees are still being processed for deportation, immigration officials said. The immigration raid took place at the Howard Industries Inc. plant in Laurel, where ICE agents rounded up nearly 600 suspected illegal immigrants. A federal warrant also was issued at the company's corporate headquarters in Ellisville. No charges have been filed against the company. Some 481 people remain in custody at the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, La. Eight others face charges of felony aggravated identity theft. About 100 women with children were released on house arrest and made to wear ankle bracelets. MIRA director Bill Chandler said Wednesday some of the detainees may not even be illegal but could be in the process of getting their citizenship. About 10 people, mostly MIRA volunteers or workers, attended a meeting held in Jackson to give an update on the status of the detainees and MIRA's efforts to assist them. "We question whether (all of them) should be charged (as illegal) in the first place," Chandler said. While families wait for their loved ones, many are struggling to make ends meet, Chandler said. Detainees will go before a judge who will determine if they are in the country illegally. Illegal immigrants can voluntarily leave the country within 30 days or face deportation. ICE spokesman Temple Black did not know how long it could take to process the detainees. Howard Industries would not comment and has denied any wrongdoing. After the raid, the company said in a statement that the company "runs every check allowed to ascertain the immigration status of all applicants for its jobs. It is company policy that it hires only U.S. citizens and legal immigrants." Attorney General Jim Hood's office is investigating whether the company violated a new state law requiring employers to use the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify system to check new workers' immigration status. Under the law, any company found guilty of employing illegal immigrants could lose public contracts for up to three years and lose the right to do business in Mississippi for one year. The law took effect July 1 for state agencies and private businesses with state contracts. It takes effect Jan. 1 for all other businesses. The Laurel raid was the largest single workplace immigration raid in U.S. history, according to ICE. The Rev. Roberto Valez, with Iglesia Cristian Peniel (Peniel Christian Church) in Laurel, has been working with the families of the detainees. His church has provided about $2,000 in rent, utility bills, food and cash, he said. Those with loved ones in detention are scared, nervous and worried about their families, he said. "You cannot put into words what these people are feeling," he said. MIRA has gotten calls from some detainees who say they are not being treated fairly while in custody, Chandler said. He added that MIRA is investigating. Black would not comment on the allegations.

May 11, 2008 Washington Post
Neil Sampson, who ran the DIHS as interim director most of last year, left that job with serious questions about the government's commitment. Sampson said in an interview that ICE treated detainee health care "as an afterthought," reflecting what he called a failure of leadership and management at the Homeland Security Department. "They do not have a clear idea or philosophy of their approach to health care [for detainees]," he said. "It's a system failure, not a failure of individuals." A new director for health services arrived six months ago, following a stretch when the agency was run first by Sampson and then by a second interim director. The new boss is LaMont W. Flanagan, who brought with him the credential of having been fired in 2003 by the state of Maryland for bad management and spending practices supervising detention and pretrial services. An audit found that Flanagan had signed off on payments of $145,000 for employee entertainment and other ill-advised expenditures. His reputation was such that the District of Columbia would not hire him for a juvenile-justice position. "Another death that needs to be added to the roster," Diane Aker, the DIHS chief health administrator, tapped out in an e-mail to a records clerk at headquarters on Aug. 14, 2007. Juan Guevara-Lorano, 21, was dead. Guevara, an unemployed legal U.S. resident with a young son, was arrested in El Paso for driving illegal border-crossers farther into the city. He was paid $50. An entry-level emergency medical technician, with barely any training, had done Guevara's intake screening and physical assessment at the Otero County immigration compound in New Mexico. Under DIHS rules, those tasks are supposed to be done by a nurse. After two difficult months in detention, Guevara had decided not to appeal his case. He would go back to Mexico with his family. But on Aug. 4, he came down with a splitting headache, what he called a nine on a pain scale of 10, his medical records show. The rookie medical technician prescribed Tylenol and referred Guevara to the compound's physician "due to severity of headache ... and dizziness," according to medical records. But Guevara never saw a doctor. Eight days after the first incident, he vomited in his cell. The same junior technician came to help but was unable to insert a nasal airway tube. Guevara was taken to a hospital, where doctors determined an aneurism in his brain had burst. His wife, pregnant at the time with their second child, recalled that she rushed to the hospital but ICE guards would not let her inside, until the Mexican Consulate interceded. Guevara's mother waited five hours before they let her in. By then he was brain-dead. "My son is not coming back," sobbed Ana Celia Lozano months later, sitting in Guevara's small mobile home as her grandson played on the floor. "I want to know how he lived and died, nothing more." What appears to be the most incriminating document in Guevara's case has been partially blacked out. Still, what is left shows that he did not receive adequate care. "The detainee was not seen or evaluated by an RN, midlevel or physician. . . . At the time of the incident on 8/12/2007, the detainee was seen and examined by EMTs." Each immigration facility is allotted a different number of positions, and a shortage of doctors and nurses is not unusual at centers across the country. Records from February show that about 30 percent of all DIHS positions in the field were unfilled. ICE officials said last week that the current vacancy rate is 21 percent. Concern about the vacancies is voiced repeatedly at clinical directors' meetings. "How do we state our concerns so that we can be heard? . . . this is a CRITICAL condition. . . . We have bitten off more than we can chew," a physician wrote in the minutes of one meeting last summer. In some prisons, the staffing shortages are acute. The Willacy County detention center in South Texas -- the largest compound, with 2,018 detainees -- has no clinical director, no pharmacist and only a part-time psychiatrist. Nearly 50 percent of the nursing positions were unfilled at the 1,500-detainee Eloy, Ariz., prison in February. At the newly opened 744-bed Jena., La., compound, nurses run the place. It has no clinical director, no staff physician, no psychiatrist and no professional dental staff. Last August, Sampson, who was then DIHS interim director, warned his superiors at ICE that critical personnel shortages were making it impossible to staff the Jena facility adequately. In a vociferous e-mail to Gary Mead, the ICE deputy director in charge of detention centers, he wrote: "With the Jena request we have been re-examining our capabilities to meet health care needs at a new site when we are facing critical staffing shortages at most every other DIHS site. While we developed, executed and achieved major successes in our recruitment efforts we have been unable to meet the demand." The slow ICE security-clearance process forced many job applicants to go elsewhere, Sampson wrote. Of the 312 people who applied for new positions over the past year, 200 withdrew, he wrote, because they found other jobs during the 250 days it took ICE, on average, to conduct the required background investigations. Last week, ICE officials said the average wait had decreased recently to 37 days. These shortages have burdened the remaining staff. In July 2007, a year after Osman's death in Otay Mesa, medical director Hui strongly complained to headquarters about workload stress. "The level of burnout . . . is high and rising," she wrote in an e-mail. "I know that I have been averaging approximately 2-6 hrs of overtime daily for the past 2 months. I will no longer be able to sustain this pace and will be decreasing the number of hours that I work overtime. This being said, more will be left undone because we simply do NOT have the staff." The overcrowding has created a petri dish for the spread of diseases. One mission of the Public Health Service is to detect infectious diseases and contain them before they spread, but last summer, the gigantic Willacy center was hit by a chicken pox outbreak. The illness spread because the facility did not have enough available isolation rooms and its large pods share recycled air, but also because security officers "lack education about the disease and keep moving around detainees from different units without taking into consideration if the unit has been isolated due to heavy exposure," noted the DIHS's top specialist on infectious diseases, Carlos Duchesne. The staff was forced to vaccinate the entire population in mid-July. In one 2007 death, memos and confidential notes show how medical staff missed an infectious disease, meningitis, in their midst. Victor Alfonso Arellano, 23, a transgender Mexican detainee with AIDS, died in custody at the San Pedro center. The first three pages of Duchesne's internal review of the death leave the impression that Arellano's care was proper. But the last page, under the heading "Off the record observations and recommendations," takes a decidedly critical tone: "The clinical staff at all levels fails to recognize early signs and symptoms of meningitis. . . . Pt was evaluated multiple times and an effort to rule out those infections was not even mentioned." Arellano was given a "completely useless" antibiotic, Duchesne wrote. Lab work that should have been performed immediately took 22 days because San Pedro's clinical director had ordered staff members to withhold lab work for new detainees until they had been in detention there "for more than 30 days," a violation of agency rules. "I am sure that there must be a reason why this was mandated but that practice is particularly dangerous with chronic care cases and specially is particularly dangerous with . . . HIV/AIDS patients," Duchesne wrote. "Labs for AIDS patients . . . must be performed ASAP to know their immune status and where you are standing in reference to disease control and meds." Given the frequency with which ICE moves people within the detention network, keeping track of detainees is critical to stopping the spread of infectious illnesses. The purchase of an electronic records system named CaseTrakker in 2004 was supposed to help. But according to internal documents and interviews, CaseTrakker is so riddled with problems that facilities often revert to handwritten records. A study at one site found that it took one-third more time to use CaseTrakker than to use paper. Thousands of patient files are missing. Recorded data often cannot be retrieved. Day-long outages are common. When detainees are transferred from one facility to another, their records, if they follow them, are often misleading. Some show medications with no medical diagnoses, or "lots of diagnoses but no meds," according to Elizabeth Fleming, a former clinical director at one compound in Arizona. After Yusif Osman's death and the discovery of the problem with his computerized records, the DIHS ordered a review of all charts at the Otay Mesa center. During the review, auditors also found that 260 physical exams were never completed as required. The nurse responsible for the error in Osman's case was reprimanded, but the computer problem was not fixed. The CaseTrakker system "has failed and must be replaced," Sampson, the DIHS interim director, wrote to his ICE supervisors in August. In January 2008, medical director Shack told colleagues that CaseTrakker "is more of a liability than the use of paper medical record system," according to the minutes of a meeting. It "puts patients at risk." ICE officials said last week that they are not satisfied with CaseTrakker and are working to replace it. Along with being at the mercy of computer glitches, detainees suffer from human errors that deny or delay their care. And with few advocates on the outside, they are left alone to plead their cases in the most desperate ways, in hand-scribbled notes to doctors they rarely see. "I need medicine for pain. All my bones hurt. Thank you," wrote Mexico native Roberto Ledesma Guerrero, 72, three weeks before he died inside the Otay Mesa compound. Delays persist throughout the system. In January, the detention center in Pearsall, Tex., an hour from San Antonio, had a backlog of 2,097 appointments. Luis Dubegel-Paez, a 60-year-old Cuban, had filled out many sick call requests before he died on March 14. Detained at the Rolling Plains Detention Facility in the West Texas town of Haskell, he wrote on New Year's Day: "need to see doctor for Heart medication; and having chest pains for the past three days. Can't stand pain." Ten days later he went to the clinic and became upset when he wasn't seen. He slugged the window, yelled, pointed at his wristwatch. He was escorted back to his cell. Another of his sick call requests said: "Need to see a doctor. I have a lot of symptoms of sickness ... as soon as possible!" The next was more urgent: "I have a emergency to see the doctor about my heart problems ... for the last couple days and I been getting dizzy a lot." The next day, Dubegel-Paez collapsed and died. His medical records do not show that he ever saw a doctor for his chest pains.

July 25, 2007 Business Wire
The GEO Group, Inc. (NYSE:GEO - News; "GEO") announced today that the LaSalle Economic Development District (the "LEDD") has signed a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") for the housing of up to 1,160 immigration detainees at the GEO-owned LaSalle Detention Facility (the "Facility") located in Jena, Louisiana. GEO will house and manage the immigration detainee population at the Facility pursuant to an agreement with LEDD. GEO expects to commence the intake of 416 detainees during the fourth quarter of 2007, and the Facility is expected to ramp-up to 416 detainees by year-end 2007. As announced previously, GEO is currently expanding the Facility by 744 beds. The 744-bed expansion, which will cost approximately $30.0 million, is expected to be completed by the end of the second quarter of 2008. Following the completion of construction, GEO will begin intake of the additional 744 detainees. The Facility is expected to ramp up to full occupancy of 1,160 beds by the end of the third quarter of 2008. The contract is expected to generate approximately $23.5 million in annualized operating revenues for GEO at full occupancy.

October 5, 2005 AP
The New Orleans sheriff on Wednesday disputed allegations from a human rights group that inmate corpses were floating in the city jail after Hurricane Katrina and that prisoners were left for days without food or drinking water in cells where the floodwaters were chest-high. In separate allegations, Human Rights Watch and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund also have asked the Justice Department to investigate prisoners' allegations of beatings by guards after being evacuated from several New Orleans-area lockups to a former juvenile prison in central Louisiana. One inmate told the groups he was forced to consume his own blood. Lawyers for the groups said the prisoners, many of whom were awaiting trial in Jefferson Parish and have not been convicted, recounted beatings and racial slurs from guards. Louisiana shut the Jena prison in May 2000 after a series of Justice Department reports about violence among inmates and guards. The lockup, owned by the private corrections company Wackenhut, had been empty since then.

August 1, 2002
The Bayou State incarcerates more people per capita than any other state, a Louisiana lawmaker told an international human rights convention Wednesday. "We as a society believe we can lock away our undesirables and solve all our problems," Vincent Wilkins Jr., a staff attorney in the District of Columbia's Public Defender Service, said during a panel discussion on criminal justice moderated by Cravins. "I'm of the opinion you can't," added Wilkins, a Crowley native and former staff lawyer, deputy director and acting director of the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Defender's Office. "Beware of private prisons. You cannot run a for-profit prison," he said. "The mission of a privately-run prison is to make money. You can't do that unless you cut corners." Wilkins said corners are cut on meals, psychological and psychiatric care, and dental care, to name a few. "Medical care -- pretty much nonexistent," he said. "They give you Tylenol for just about everything." (Advocate)

July 16, 2002
Eunice cattleman Cecil Brown, found guilty last year of acting as a frontman for Gov. Edwin Edwards in shaking down Texas businessmen who sought state approval for Louisiana projects, failed Monday to persuade a federal appeals court to give him a new trial. Prosecutors in Brown's trial in March 2001 claimed he demanded and shared with Edwards payoffs from Houston businessmen who wanted to build a $35 million juvenile prison in Jena, get waste disposal contracts in New Orleans and bring the Minnesota Timberwolves basketball team to the city. Edwards was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, which grew out of the same wiretap and secretly recorded evidence that resulted in the former governor's May 2000 conviction involving state gambling licenses. Former Houston Mayor Fred Hofheinz testified against Brown in the extortion case under a plea agreement with the government. Graham, who worked for Hofheinz, told the jury that in September 1993 he delivered $245,000 from Hofheinz to Edwards at the Louisiana governor's mansion. (The Times)

June 3, 2002
Two years after he was convicted of extorting payoffs from businessmen seeking state gambling licenses, former Gov. Edwin Edwards today makes another bid to avoid a decade in prison. Edwards and his co-defendants were found guilty May 9, 2000, of shaking down casino executives in exchange for the promise of riverboat gambling licenses. The former governor was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but he has been allowed to remain free on bond pending the outcome of his appeal.

May 16, 2002
The state conditionally agreed to buy the empty juvenile prison at Jena in a move that may give the state wiggle room to disengage from the expensive Tallulah prison contract. Reports of the potential Jena purchase, however, have dismayed advocates who are pushing the state to spend more money on community-based programs for juvenile offenders and less money on juvenile prisons. Wackenhut Corrections Corp. opened the Jena prison in December 1998, four years after another firm opened a 700-bed prison in Tallulah. Both for-profit prisons had problems with violence and mismanagement that led the state to seize permanent control of the Tallulah prison on Sept. 21, 1999, and temporary control of the Jena prison on April 5, 2000. Three weeks after the Jena seizure, Wackenhut said it would no longer house juveniles at that facility. The state later declined to lease the prison from Wackenhut. Boudreaux said the Division of Administration entered into the Jena conditional purchase agreement at the urging of legislators who wanted a place to house some of the juvenile offenders currently at Tallulah if the Legislature decides not to fund the Tallulah lease. "We keep telling (the legislators), 'It's not a light switch,'" Boudreaux said of the potential decision to end the Tallulah lease. "There needs to be a transitional period," Boudreaux said. The state currently spends $3.4 million a year to lease 400 beds at Tallulah and $13 million a year to operate the prison, he said. The Tallulah lease came under fire when a state legislative audit report last year revealed that the prison's politically connected owners received more than $8.7 million in dividends and salaries since 1995. The report also revealed that the investors will retain ownership of the Tallulah prison when the lease expires in 20 years. "I think the Tallulah contract is a bad deal for the state," state Sen. Jay Dardenne, R-Baton Rouge, said Wednesday. The Jena prison may provide an alternative, Dardenne said, if corrections officials can operate the Jena prison better than they're doing at Tallulah. "I don't want to simply relocate problems." Attorney June Denlinger of the Baton Rouge law firm Nordyke and Denlinger -- which represents some of the plaintiffs in the juvenile prison litigation -- said both prisons have similar problems. Both are "out in the sticks" Denlinger said. "It's hard to get professional personnel and (the rural locations) isolate people who need the most intense treatment." (Advocate)

May 14, 2002
Correctional Properties Trust, a real estate investment trust (REIT), announced today that it has entered into an Agreement to Purchase and Sell, under which the State of Louisiana will acquire the Jena Juvenile Justice Center from the Company. Correctional Properties Trust will receive net proceeds of $15,500,000 from the sale. Correctional Properties Trust has also entered into a Lease Termination Agreement with Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, the lessee of the Jena Juvenile Justice Center (the "Facility"), under which WCC will, conditioned upon the sale of the Facility to the State, make a cash payment of $2,500,000 to Correctional Properties Trust as consideration for terminating the existing lease. The Agreement to Purchase and Sell is subject to certain conditions over which the Company has no control, including approval by the Louisiana Legislature of funding for the purchase and operation of the Facility. Except for the obligation of WCC to pay the Company's expenses in connection with the transaction, the termination of the Jena Facility lease under the WCC Lease Termination Agreement becomes effective only at the time the State acquires the Facility. The Facility, which is not currently housing inmates, was operated by WCC for the State until June 2000, when it was deactivated. WCC has continued to make all lease payments to Correctional Properties Trust, and is expected to continue to do so throughout the term of the lease, or until the Facility is sold, and the lease is terminated. (PRNewswire)

April 4, 2002
So, it's down to this: Should the state reopen the juvenile prison at Jena and close the prison at Tallulah? After years of publicity about riots and abuse, and after settling civil-rights lawsuits over those prisons, the state is now considering taking the juveniles out of Tallulah and moving them to Jena. The appraisal of the Jena prison is pending, but the cost is estimated at $20 million. The rationale is to get the state out of the expensive Tallulah contract. The move is an option that has many reform advocates scratching their heads. They'd like to see the state pull out of Tallulah and stay out of Jena. The two prisons were the state's experiment in juvenile-prison privatization -- an experiment Gov. Mike Foster vowed never to repeat. The for-profit concept didn't work mainly because juvenile prisoners require much more educational, medical and psychological services than adult prisoners. Those services can cut into profits. The decision may rest on which economically distressed community is more in need of the prison. Prison reform advocates say economic impact is not the point. Locating prisons so far from where most of the juveniles live is a hardship for their families. The rural locations also make recruitment and retention of security officers and professionals more difficult. (Advocate)

January 17, 2000
The for-profit Jena Juvenile Justice Center in an "unsafe, violent and inhumane" institution, a consultant to the U.S. Justice Department asserted in a new report filed Thursday in U.S. District Court at baton Rouge. The preliminary, and primarily negative, findings of that consultant and two others are outlined in a report to U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola prepared by John P. Whitley, the court's appointed prison expert. "The high number of juveniles at Jena with bleeding ulcers and hypertension may be related to the stress and fear associated with living in such a violent place," Whitely said medical health expert Dr. Michael Cohen indicated during exit interviews with Jena center and state officials.

March 9, 2000
An Orleans Parish Juvenile Court judge ordered a 17-year-old boy removed from the for-profit Jena Juvenile Justice Center, noting the boy recovering from a gunshot wounds was so severely beaten that portions of his intestines leaked into his colostomy bag. A 17-page opinion filed Wednesday in Juvenile Court, Judge Mark Doherty said the Jena center "treats juveniles as if they walked on all fours." The seventeen year old boy arrived at the Jena center on March 4, 1999, after undergoing colostomy surgery for four gunshot wounds, according to Doherty's opinion. On May 14, after the boy returned from the medical appointment in New Orleans, a nurse was called to the Jena center dorm where she found the youth "laying on the floor, sobbing," Doherty wrote. The nurse noted the "evisceration," or protrusion, of part of the boy's colon through the colostomy opening with about 5 to 6 inches of intestine visible in the colostomy bag. The boy reported to the nurse that a Jena staff member with the rank of sergeant had placed him on his stomach and slammed a knee in his back, Doherty wrote.

March 21, 2000
An New Orleans Parish Juvenile Justice Court judge removed seven boys from Jena Juvenile Justice Center, and an excutive for the company that runs the prison made an unusual visit there last week after highly critical federal reports alleged physical abuse of inmates at the for-profit center. The reports led one Juvenile Court judge, Mark Doherty of Orleans Parish, to pull seven boys from the Jena center as of Friday. Wackenhut in july opened a 489-bed maximum security juvenile center in Baldwin, Mich. (Feb. 15, 01) Louisiana removed its offenders from Jena after a scathing report by the U.S. Department of Justice.

November 21, 2000
Former Houston Mayor Fred Hofheinz changed his plea to guilty in a federal extortion case that spun out of the investigation of former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards. Hofheinz, 62, made the new plea of failing to report a felony in a case that originally included charges of extorting payoffs from Texas businessmen interested in seeking state contracts in Louisiana. The ex-mayor did admit that he agreed to pay off a close friend of Edwards in hopes of obtaining a government contract. U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola sentenced Hofheinz to a year probation and a $5,000 fine. He could have faced up to 3 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. Polozola said he sentenced Hofheinz to probation because of his cooperation with government officials. He wanted to comment further but it would be inappropriate because of the upcoming trial of Eunice cattleman Cecil Brown, a close friend of Edwards. Prosecutors contend Brown tried to shake down Hofheinz and the others seeking state contracts, including one for a proposed juvenile prison in Jena in 1995. Hofheinz said Brown extorted money from him in the Jena deal. In order to receive state approval for the new prison, Brown was to receive large sums of money from Hofheinz's company, Viewpoint Development Corporation. Prosecutors say that Viewpoint paid Brown $10,000 a month, and Hofheinz agreed to pay him $1.3 million when the Jena prison was successfully financed. Viewpoint never raised enough money to fund the prison project and sold its rights to another company so Brown never received the $1.3 million. (Houston Chronicle)

LaSalle Correctional Center
Urania, Louisiana
LaSalle Management Company
November 13, 2008
The Town Talk
Leroy Holliday Sr., warden of the LaSalle Correctional Center, was released on $5,000 bond after being booked into the LaSalle Parish Jail on a charge of malfeasance. LaSalle Parish Sheriff Scott Franklin said Holliday allegedly used inmates and employees at the minimum security prison for personal reasons. Although Holliday has only been charged with the one count of malfeasance, Franklin said, the investigation is ongoing and more counts could be added. He said the Sheriff's Department has evidence to support 40 counts of malfeasance and the number is expected to grow. In addition to being warden for the LaSalle prison in Urania, Holliday, 55, of Tullos was regional warden for LaSalle Management Company LLC, putting him in charge of facilities in Catahoula, Concordia and Ouachita parishes as well, the sheriff said. LaSalle Correctional is operated by the company in partnership with the sheriff who has the power to hire and fire the correctional staff, Franklin said, adding the staff is also commissioned for law enforcement by him. But Holliday is an employee of LaSalle Management, he said, and any questions about his employment status would have to be directed to the private company. The Town Talk was unable to contact William McConnell, the registered agent for the company, but a message was left for him with a receptionist in the office in Rayville. Franklin said Holliday's commission has been revoked and he will not be allowed back on the Urania prison grounds.

LCS Caldwell Detention Center
Clarks, Louisiana
Louisiana Corrections Services
April 6, 2006 The Town Talk
An Olla man who escaped from the Caldwell Correctional Center in Clarks committed suicide tonight at a hunting camp near Dodson in Winn Parish, authorities said. Jimmy L. Peppers, 36, barricaded himself inside the camp as authorities tried to talk him into giving himself up. Authorities fired tear gas into the building because they suspected he was inside. Peppers yelled out that he was inside, and authorities tried unsuccessfully for about 10 minutes to talk him into surrendering. At about 6:55 p.m., authorities heard a gunshot, and a Winnfield Police Department K-9 officer went into the house and discovered the body. Assistant Chief Deputy Becky Ledbetter said the department received calls at about 9 a.m. Thursday that someone had escaped from the Caldwell Correctional Center in Clarks and that a Kelly woman had been taken by force from her home. “We are not really sure how he escaped,” Ledbetter said. “He went to the woman’s house and took her by force. He forced her into her own car.” Ledbetter said the two were driving on La. Highway 126 in Winn Parish, five miles east of Dodson, when they got into a scuffle. The two were romantically involved at one time. The unidentified victim dropped him off near Gaars Mill in northeast Winn Parish. She drove to nearby Dodson, where she told authorities that he was armed with a .38-caliber pistol that he took from her. Peppers was serving time at the Caldwell Correctional Center for a felony driving while intoxicated charge and was scheduled to go to court Tuesday for another count of felony driving while intoxicated in LaSalle Parish, Ledbetter said. This is the second prison escape to occur in Caldwell Parish in less than a month. Five inmates escaped March 11 from privately operated LCS Caldwell Detention Center, located directly beside the Caldwell Correctional Center on La. Highway 845 in Clarks. All five were caught and charged with additional counts and placed back at the facility in less than a week. Owners of the facility are conducting an internal investigation into the escape.

March 16, 2006 KATC TV
Authorities in Jefferson Parish have captured an escapee from the Caldwell Detention Center. Twenty-seven-year-old Jeremy Robinson escaped along with four other inmates over the weekend. He's the last one to be taken into custody. Jefferson Parish deputies stopped a car yesterday afternoon -- that was suspected to be stolen by Robinson. Caldwell Sheriff Steve May says Robinson's girlfriend was driving the car. Deputies then received information that Robinson was at his girlfriend's house in Kenner. Robinson was taken into custody without incident and is expected to be returned to Caldwell Parish today. He was serving time on a drug charge -- and now faces additional charges of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated escape, and attempted murder of a police officer.

March 15, 2006 KPLC TV
Caldwell Parish Sheriff Steve May says an escaped prisoner from a private prison in his parish has probably left the area. Twenty-seven-year-old Jeremy Robinson of Jefferson Parish is the sole inmate still at large after five men overpowered personnel at L-C-S Caldwell Detention Center on Saturday night, then fled the facility. May believes Robinson may have stolen a vehicle in the south end of the parish and may be attempting to return to his home in the New Orleans area. May says authorities statewide have been notified of the escape. Bond has been set at 500-thousand dollars each on the other four escapees, who were captured Saturday night and Sunday morning.

March 14, 2006 AP
Bond has been set at $500,000 each for four of the five men accused of getting a prison worker to open a control room door, taking control of the prison and then driving out in a prison employee's truck. The fifth, Jeremy Robinson, 27, of Jefferson Parish, remained at large. He is described as black, 5-foot-7 and 150 pounds, with "Shanda" tattooed on his right arm. The five escaped Saturday night from the private LSC Caldwell Detention Center in Clarks. Caldwell Parish Sheriff Steve May said that after getting the control room open, the five overpowered employees and eventually took control of the prison. When a town marshal tried to stop their truck, they tried to run over him but crashed the truck, May said. He identified those back in custody as Corey Manshack, 25, of Converse; Keith Gallow, 33, of Ville Platte; Melvin Tipton, 23, of West Monroe; and Ray Eugene Tate of Lawrenceville, Ill. All four were booked with new charges of aggravated kidnapping and aggravated escape; Manshack and Gallow also were booked with theft and trespassing. Tate is wanted on seven counts of failing to appear in court for drug charges in Hopkinsville, Ky., May said. He said Tate was moved to Clarks from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

March 12, 2006 Houma Today
Five inmates escaped a privately run prison in Caldwell Parish, but authorities were able to track down all but one of the escaped convicts by Sunday afternoon, the sheriff's office said. Jeremy Robinson, a 27-yeasr-old inmate from Jefferson Parish, was still at large on Sunday, said Glenn Gilmore, a chief deputy of the sheriff's department. The five inmates overpowered a female guard at about 9 p.m. Saturday at the LCS Caldwell Detention Center, Gilmore said.

Louisiana Correctional Services
January 29, 2010 TPMMuckraker
The four conservative activists arrested for tampering with the phones of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu earlier this week have been linked to the Pelican Institute, a conservative New Orleans think tank. Pelican is a relatively new organization, but it appears to have strong ties to members of the state's Republican elite, most notably Representative Charles Boustany. Though only one of the tamperers is from Louisiana, Pelican appears to have been the group's home base there. The apparent ringleader, James O'Keefe -- also the activist behind last September's ACORN videotape -- spoke at a Pelican Institute luncheon last week. Another one of the four, Robert Flanagan, is a paid blogger for Pelican (Flanagan is the son of the acting US attorney in Shreveport, Bill Flanagan). Pelican's founder, Kevin Kane, blogs at BigGovernment, the site where O'Keefe first posted the ACORN video. TPMMuckraker has found that Pelican "enjoys a prominent voice in Louisiana political circles." A close look at its board of directors helps explain why this is the case. Pelican listed three board members on its 2008 990 (available from Guidestar): founder Kevin Kane, lawyer Stephen Gele, and one "J LeBlanc." A LinkedIn page reveals that the listing refers to Jennifer LeBlanc, a Republican fundraiser who chaired the Louisiana finance committee of presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani in 2008. LeBlanc is extremely tightly linked to Representative Charles Boustany, who was a close friend of her late husband, Patrick LeBlanc, before he died in a 2008 plane crash. LeBlanc was a top Boustany donor, as well, and he and Jennifer hosted a high-profile fundraiser for his Congressional campaign in 2005. Vice president Dick Cheney was the featured guest. The LeBlancs, Boustany, and Senator David Vitter all endorsed Rudy Giuliani's campaign for president in 2007. Boustany and Cheney. Boustany also endorsed LeBlanc during his unsuccessful run for state representative that year. That bid was undone by ongoing scandals related to LeBlanc's prison operation and construction business, LCS Corrections. The company operates private prisons throughout the southeast and Texas, and has been investigated by the FBI for "contracting irregularities" related to possible bribery schemes. Boustany's brother-in-law, Christopher Edwards, was LeBlanc's attorney during his campaign, and threatened to sue LeBlanc's opponent over a negative ad. Edwards is the nephew of disgraced Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards. When Patrick LeBlanc died, Boustany released the following statement: "Pat was my dear friend, a loving family man and a leader in the Lafayette community. It is a terrible loss, and my thoughts and prayers are with Jennifer and his children. Bridget and I will miss him greatly." Boustany and Pelican were both out in front of the ACORN scandal in August and September. Boustany was one of the first members of Congress to react to news of the ACORN videotape last September. The day after the news broke, on September 11, 2009, he called for a House Oversight investigation of the group's tax prep activities. TPM has reported that Pelican published an investigative report on ACORN in August 2009, one month before the O'Keefe videotape was released. The report alleged that ACORN had evaded federal taxes on a number of occasions. Was there coordination between Boustany, BigGovernment, Pelican, and O'Keefe? What role does Jennifer LeBlanc play at the Pelican Institute? Who funds the organization? There's still a lot more to learn here, but this is shaping up to be a very interesting scandal.Leia and WileECoyote have done awesome work updating information on the various networks behind O'Keefe and Pelican. Pelican appears to have strong ties to the Reason Foundation, and Pelican founder Kevin Kane and Breitbart's relationship deserves closer examination, among other things. Let me know if you want to get deep into the Louisiana muck.

March 12, 2008 Express News
A small plane crash Monday night killed a Louisiana businessman whose private prison services company, Premier Management Enterprises, was at the center of a public corruption investigation that last year forced the resignation of Bexar County Sheriff Ralph Lopez. Patrick LeBlanc, 53, died with the pilot while trying to land in rough weather in Lafayette, La., according to a family friend and local press reports. LeBlanc and his brother, Michael LeBlanc, co-owned Premier and LCS Corrections Services, which build or service prisons in several states, including in three South Texas counties. The brothers' company remains the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation into "contracting irregularities," a bureau official confirmed. "He had great integrity and honor, unlike what some of you guys tried to do to him," said Ron Gomez, a close friend and partner in a small weekly newspaper that published its first edition last week. Gomez said LeBlanc went into the news business as a response to negative publicity about his company's role in a Bexar County corruption probe that caused him to lose a race last fall for state legislative office. Premier Management Enterprises, which has operated jail commissaries in Texas, was at the center of a Bexar County district attorney's investigation involving a foreign vacation gift to Lopez and cash payments to the sheriff's top aide, John Reynolds, before, during and after the company was given commissary contracts. The LeBlanc brothers have repeatedly denied all wrongdoing and have not been indicted or formally accused of any crime related to the Bexar County jail commissary contract. But Lopez resigned and pleaded guilty to reduced misdemeanor charges for accepting a Costa Rica golf vacation from the LeBlancs, while Reynolds last month was sentenced to 10 years for demanding thousands of dollars in "consulting fees" and charitable donations from Premier. The FBI took over from state authorities, and over the last several months, agents have interviewed Lopez and Reynolds as part of their respective plea deals. FBI Special Agent Erik Vasys said the bureau was well aware of LeBlanc's death but declined to discuss whether the tragedy might affect the investigation.

March 11, 2008 The Advocate
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Vermilion Parish Sheriff’s Office continue to investigate a single-engine plane crash that killed two people Monday night, including Lafayette businessman and civic leader Patrick LeBlanc. LeBlanc, 53, of Youngsville, co-owner of LCS Corrections Services, and a pilot from Opelousas were killed in a plane crash Monday night near Abbeville. Jason Aguilera, an air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, has identified the plane as a Cessna 210. Aguilera said an initial investigation indicates the pilot, believed to be R. Solomon Reed. 60, of Pavy Road in Opelousas, was attempting to land in Lafayette. The crash happened on La. 82 in Vermilion Parish. The flight originated in Jackson, Miss., the Vermilion Parish Sheriff's Office said. LeBlanc was a leader in the Lafayette Jaycees, was active in the Acadiana Home Builders Association and last fall ran an unsuccessful campaign for state House of Representatives District 43.

Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections
March 12, 2003
Richard Stalder is in the prison business. As secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections for 11 years, Mr. Stalder is primarily responsible for keeping adults behind bars. To understand the department's priorities, just follow the money: A dozen years ago, Louisiana spent $3 million more on probation, residential and day treatment programs than on juvenile jails. Now it spends at least $27 million more on jails than on services. Lawmakers and citizens ought to keep that in mind as the debate over juvenile justice -- and the Tallulah youth prison in particular -- heats up during this spring's legislative session. The notorious prison is on the table because closing it would get rid of unnecessary prison beds and generate savings that can be put to better use. Sadly, getting rid of the Tallulah prison has proved trickier than juvenile-justice reformers and fiscal conservatives had hoped. Three friends of former Gov. Edwin Edwards own it, even though taxpayers are footing the construction bill. Despite contract terms that would let the state stop payment, bond rating agencies on Wall Street have told state officials that they plan to hold Louisiana responsible for the debt anyway. Last month the administration said it had been negotiating with the Edwards cronies to buy the prison outright. (Nola.com)

Louisiana Department of Corrections
August 29, 2004
New agreements need closer look. While a footnote to the most urgent business at the latest meeting of the State Bond Commission, we are nevertheless heartened by the pledge of Commissioner of Administration Jerry Luke LeBlanc to watch out for the state's interests when making deals with private groups. State government has become deeply involved with "cooperative endeavor agreements" that are essentially contracts between the state and businesses or nonprofit organizations. From prisons to art museums, arrangements for financing or administering facilities traditionally built or operated by the state have become commonplace. Some of these agreements have become enormous financial drains. The worst, probably, was an agreement with Tallulah authorities that requires the state to continue paying rent to the owners of a private prison there even after the state stopped using it as a juvenile prison. The beneficiary of that deal was the company headed by cronies of Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, even if the cooperative endeavor agreement was negotiated formally between the state and Tallulah. State government should not be allowed to contract away its responsibility to taxpayers and recipients of public services, or users of public buildings, after private negotiations with interested parties. Not, at least, without meaningful debate and disclosure of the circumstances and the options - not only those approved, but those dismissed. (Sunday Advocate)

February 27, 2004
Gov. Kathleen Blanco rejected advice from one of her transition committees and reappointed Richard Stalder as secretary of the Department of Corrections. Opposition to the controversial veteran chief of the state prison system subsided after she created a new and separate justice system for juvenile offenders, Blanco said at a press conference Thursday. Stalder first started working in the prison system in 1971 and has been secretary since 1992, when then-Gov. Edwin Edwards appointed him. Former Gov. Mike Foster reappointed him. Stalder is among several top Foster aides Blanco is keeping. "I did a fair search," Blanco said, and Stalder "can do as good a job as anybody." Stalder "rose head and shoulders" above every other candidate she considered for the job, she said. Asked for specific ways he improved corrections in his 12 years as secretary, Blanco said Stalder brought "serious" reform to a once-troubled prison system. Stalder agreed to help create the new juvenile justice system and let it remain independent of the adult prison system, she said. Much of the criticism of Stalder focused on the deal he signed to lease a privately owned juvenile prison in Tallulah. The deal devolved into a financial and legal disaster. The state was sued over conditions at Tallulah and continues to make lease payments, although the Legislature voted to close the prison. The Associated Press reported last month that the committee advising Blanco on her choice to run the prison system picked three finalists, none of them Stalder. A minority of committee members pushed to have Stalder added as a finalist. The state's sheriffs backed Stalder. The state pays sheriff's offices $22 a day per prisoner to house state inmates in parish jails. Several have financed new jails based on revenues from housing state inmates. "I took into consideration what each of the groups were interested in," Blanco said. As corrections chief, Stalder must work on better preparing inmates for their re-entry into a free society, Blanco said. Teaching them skills and improving literacy rates among inmates is one way to help cut the numbers of released inmates committing crimes and landing back in prison, she said. The state is also plagued with a disproportionately high percentage of black people in prison, Blanco said. (Advocate)

January 28, 2003
Louisiana lawmakers should strip the Department of Corrections of its oversight of young offenders and close down one of the state's four juvenile prisons, a group of legislators was told Monday. Secretary Richard Stalder said shutting down a prison is unfeasible for space and financial reasons and that lawmakers should first consider taking the responsibility for juvenile rehabilitation out of his agency. The Casey Foundation offered the most potentially contentious recommendation, suggesting that Louisiana close one of the state's four youth prisons. That could save the state about $16 million to $20 million a year, money that could be spent on other programs that aim to rehabilitate delinquents in their communities, said Joseph Liu, a senior associate with the nonprofit group. That suggestion was immediately embraced by opponents of the Tallulah prison in northeast Louisiana, a lightening rod of criticism since the state took it over from a private company in 1998 after a federal investigation revealed abuse and neglect of teens at the hands of guards and fellow inmates. Stadler also said the state is still on the hook for paying the bond debt on privately owned prison, the result of a cooperative endeavor agreement inked in the early 1990s. Under the agreement, the government is obliged to continue paying the annual bond debt on the facility. If lawmakers move to close the facility by stopping those payments, the state's bond rating would be in jeopardy, he said. Commissioner of Administration Mark Drennen confirmed after the meeting that Wall Street bonding agencies have threatened to penalize the state if the agreement is breached. One option is being considered is for the state to buy the facility, taking on the debt instead of paying it for the private company. That could save some money on interest payments, he said. (Capital Bureau)

Louisiana Juvenile Justice Commission
March 7, 2003
The state's Juvenile Justice Commission gave its approval on Thursday to a proposed overhaul of Louisiana's juvenile justice system. The far-reaching proposals include the possible closing of one of the state's four juvenile prisons and the creation of a new state agency for juvenile justice and family issues. The idea is to redirect the state's focus away from putting juveniles in prisons and toward cheaper and more effective community-based alternatives. Although the recommendation doesn't name the prison, most of the commissioners and speakers agreed it will probably be the high-security prison at Tallulah. The Tallulah complex would not sit idle. The state could use it for older juvenile offenders or juvenile offenders sentenced to adult prison, as a medium-security adult prison, or convert the prison for some other purpose, commissioners noted. (Advocate)

Louisiana Legislature
February 16, 2008 The Advocate
Gov. Bobby Jindal has about $600,000 on hand after paying expenses related to his transition office and inauguration. The governor is uncertain how the remaining money will be spent, his press secretary, Melissa Sellers, said Friday. Jindal set up a nonprofit organization to raise money for his transition and January inauguration. The organization’s latest financial report was released 5 p.m. Friday without a description of the nature of expenses or overall totals. The report covers contributions and expenses after Jan. 14, when Jindal was sworn into office. The report shows $782,821 in expenses and $251,020 in contributions. One of the biggest expenditures was $202,478.11 to the Baton Rouge River Center, where Jindal held a legislative luncheon and a ball for his inauguration. Jindal also used the money he raised to pay for staff, pizza, coffee, cabs and more than 400 FedEx shipments. Other big expenses: $65,841.11, LSU, where Jindal had his transition office. $39,059, The Bautsch Group. $13,927.34, Jet Logistics. Jindal set a $10,000 ceiling on contributions. Contributors giving the maximum amount were Ciber, CH2M Hill, Allergan, Helis Oil & Gas Co., Andersen-Wells, Robert A. Wolf, The GEO Group, Gary & Beth Chumley, Northrop Grumman, Affiliated Computer Services, SSH Management and Conoco Phillips Company.

October 21, 2007 The Advertiser
The involvement of his opponent's company in a Texas jail contract investigation may have helped Page Cortez capture the House District 43 race in Saturday's election. Complete but unofficial returns show Cortez, R-Lafayette, with 7,742 or 55 percent of the vote and Patrick LeBlanc, R-Youngsville, with 6,218 or 45 percent. Cortez replaces state Rep. Ernie Alexander, R-Lafayette, who chose not to seek re-election to the District 43 seat. "I'm tickled to death that it turned out the way it did," Cortez said Saturday night. "I think that ultimately the people of District 43 said their priorities are roads, ethics and teamwork." Cortez is the owner and operator of La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries and Stoma's Furniture in Lafayette. He previous worked as a teacher and coached at Catholic High of New Iberia and Lafayette High. LeBlanc, 53, owns and operates LCS Corrections Services, a private jail company, as well as Premier Management Enterprises, which provides commissary services to jails in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. He also has been associated with the architectural firm The LeBlanc Group and LeBlanc Construction Company. This race heated up in recent weeks when unopposed state Sen. Mike Michot, R-Lafayette, and unopposed state Rep. Joel Robideaux, I-Lafayette, through their political organization Leadership for Louisiana, ran ads opposing LeBlanc's candidacy because of the Texas investigation. The Bexar County, Texas, sheriff resigned and pleaded guilty to accepting a free trip to Costa Rica from LeBlanc and his brother, and not reporting the contribution. The sheriff's campaign manager also pled guilty for accepting donations from LeBlanc's company to a phony charity, then pocketing the money. The FBI continues to investigate interstate aspects of a commissary contract the LeBlancs had with the Bexar County jail.

October 10, 2007 The Advertiser
Ethics reform is the buzzword of the fall 2007 election cycle. Everybody from the gubernatorial candidates to state House and Senate candidates have jumped on the bandwagon calling for sweeping ethics reforms. The two candidates for House District 43 in Lafayette Parish are no different. Both said they support ethics reform. Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, and Patrick LeBlanc, R-Youngsville, both newcomers to politics, signed the Blueprint Louisiana contract, which calls for adoption of the best ethics laws in the nation. But ethics is at the heart of this particular race for another reason. Premier Management Enterprises, a company LeBlanc co-owns with his brother, Mike, is involved in a Texas investigation that took down a sheriff and the sheriff's campaign manager. The FBI continues to investigate. Bexar County, Texas, Sheriff Ralph Lopez was forced to resign and pled guilty to three misdemeanor charges: gift to a public servant, failure to report a gift and tampering with a governmental record. Some time after Premier Management Enterprises was awarded a contract to provide commissary services to Bexar County prisoners, the LeBlancs took Lopez and other sheriffs on a golfing trip to Costa Rica. Patrick LeBlanc has said the trip was a conference of several sheriffs his company conducts business with to discuss escape attempts, gang threats and the lockup of immigrants. The LeBlancs also own LCS Corrections Services, which operates private jails in Louisiana, Texas and Alabama. Some of them have experienced escapes by prisoners. As part of an Aug. 31 plea agreement, Lopez agreed to provide information to the Texas Rangers, FBI, District Attorney's Office and others about all transactions, legal and illegal, involving, among others, Michael LeBlanc, Patrick LeBlanc and Premier Management Enterprises. On Sept. 25, Lopez's campaign manager, John Wayne Reynolds, who chaired a benevolent fund board that awarded the LeBlancs the commissary contract, pled guilty to three counts of pocketing more than $22,000 in checks Premier Management had made payable to the Optimist Club Scholarship Fund. The Bexar County District Attorney did not file charges against the LeBlancs. Documents show Ian Williamson, who was a one-third owner in Premier Management at the time, signed the checks given to Reynolds. Patrick LeBlanc said Williamson is no longer a partner in the company. LeBlanc maintains he and his company are innocent of wrongdoing. He said the sheriff was at fault for not reporting the Costa Rica trip. Trips like that are just a part of doing business, he said. "There is nothing unethical or inappropriate about taking clients on trips, be it public or private," LeBlanc said. His company was duped by Reynolds, LeBlanc said. They believed they were donating to a legitimate organization, he said. In late September, the Bexar District Attorney's Office completed its case and turned it over to the FBI. FBI spokesman Erik Vasys told The Daily Advertiser the investigation is ongoing. There are interstate aspects of the case, such as letters, e-mail and telephone communications, that crossed state lines and are still under investigation. He was unable to say more. "Nowhere in ... the official public record that they used to get the plea deal do they mention my involvement in any way other than as a stockholder in this company," LeBlanc said. "You don't see them investigating me, questioning me, calling me a target." Interviewed Friday, LeBlanc again said elected officials should be able to accept free trips if they are approved by the ethics commission and are for legitimate reasons. While both House District 43 candidates say they're for ethics reform, they seem to disagree to some extent on what it means. Cortez disagrees with LeBlanc's assertion that doing business with government is the same as doing business with oilfield companies. "To try and woo somebody with gifts and money and trips, the taxpayers ultimately pay for that," he said. Cortez said legislators should be required to provide full financial disclosure for themselves and their families, making is clear where they derive their money and whether they have state contracts or do business with the state. Then full disclosure needs to be applied to local governments, he said. "What is ethics reform?" LeBlanc said Friday. "It's an overused word. The bottom line is we need to provide more teeth to ethics laws so they can be enforced."

March 19, 2004
Gov. Kathleen Blanco collected more than $1 million from private corporations and individuals to spend on her inauguration activities and in her transition to the governor's office, according to figures released Wednesday. The Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield for the state Department of Corrections, donated $5,000. Wackenhut Corrections, which runs the Allen Correctional Center in Kinder, donated $10,000. LCS Corrections Services, which owns a private prison in Basile, contributed $4,000. (Nola.com)

June 6, 2003
Lawmakers continue to negotiate about legislation to rework the state's juvenile justice system, as some senators Thursday questioned a decision to direct a substantial chunk of money from a prison closing to beef up community programs to the rural Delta region of the state. When House Bill 2018 passed the House this week, lawmakers included an amendment that earmarked 40 percent of the savings -- no more than $3 million -- from closing the youth prison in Tallulah for residential or day-treatment programs in the surrounding parishes. Rep. Francis Thompson, D-Delhi, whose constituents work at the prison, said the measure is necessary to protect needed jobs in one of the most impoverished areas in the country. But several members of the Senate Judiciary B Committee criticized the decision to specify the use of the money that the state will save when juvenile offenders are transferred out of the troubled Tallulah facility by either Dec. 31, 2004, or May 31, 2005. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jay Dardenne, R-Baton Rouge, said the Legislature should not make a commitment to maintain a certain number of state jobs in a particular community. The Tallulah prison has been the focus of much criticism in recent years, in part because of allegations of inmate abuse by guards and other juveniles at the prison. But critics have also zeroed in on the unusual cooperative endeavor agreement signed by the Corrections Department in the 1990s that keeps the state on the hook to make $3.4 million annual debt payments on a facility it does not own. (Times-Picayune)

May 23, 2003
A group of inmates at Tutwiler Prison for Women is giving state prison officials more time to implement their plan for relieving overcrowding at the prison. Attorneys for the inmates Thursday withdrew their request for a second preliminary injunction requiring the state to take immediate action. The 60-year-old prison was built for 364 inmates but has held as many as 1,000 in recent months. Serwer said the plaintiffs do not support transferring inmates to private, out-of-state prisons -- one of the steps Campbell has taken since his appointment in January. Alabama has sent 140 women prisoners to a Louisiana prison and has plans to send about another 150 eventually. (AP)

May 13, 2003
Legislation to overhaul Louisiana's juvenile justice system was approved by a Senate panel Monday after lawmakers amended the bill to hand off the chore of implementing and paying for the sweeping changes to next year's Legislature and a new governor. The panel approved not only Senate Bill 957, which aims to create a framework for changing the juvenile justice system, but also SB 963, which would transfer all juvenile offenders out of the prison in Tallulah by next summer. Cravins and other proponents say the money spent on that facility could be used to expand the state's residential and day-treatment programs. After the meeting, Trey Boudreaux, undersecretary of the corrections department, said the 12-month timeline to remove juveniles from Tallulah might not give the agency enough time or resources, saying the agency is constrained by expected increases in the costs of contracting with nonprofit groups that run residential programs and future judicial assignments of young offenders to secure facilities. The state currently spends $14.8 million on the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth-Madison Parish unit, the formal name for the Tallulah prison. About $3.4 million must be spent on maintaining the debt service on the prison, which leaves $11.4 million that could be spent on other programs, according to the department's analysis. (Times-Picayune)

November 15, 2002
Louisiana's $89 million juvenile justice system, which locks up youths mostly for minor, nonviolent crimes, and jails black youths more often and for more time than white youths, badly needs and overhaul so that judges can help young offenders address their problems closer to home, a Baltimore philanthropy has concluded. That and other findings from the Annie E. Casey Foundation's study of how Louisianna deals with young offenders were detailed at the New Orleans City Council chamber Thursday night in the last of a series of public hearings held by a commissioner studying ways to reform juvenile justice. Many people in the audience held up signs urging the state to close its juvenile prison at Tallulah, a privatelty owned facility. Judge Mark Doherty of Orleans Parish Juvenile Court told the audience that he has "grave fears" for youths in the state's juvenile prisons, which he said offer them "broken jaws, broken bones and destroyed lives." This week, Doherty ordered the state Corrections Department to get any youngster from his court out of the Tallulah prison and into "an alternate secure care facility for the purpose of treatment and rehabilitation." (Times-Picayune)

October 4, 2002
Former Gov. Edwin Edwards and two other men were ordered Wednesday to report to federal prison on Oct. 21 to begin serving their sentences in the riverboat corruption case. Suspended Insurance Com-missioner Jim Brown also received a reporting date, Oct. 15, for being convicted of lying to an FBI agent about an insurance company liquidation. Edwards, his son Stephen, Baton Rouge businessman Bobby Johnson and Brown must surrender at a yet-to-be designated prison unless the U.S. Supreme Court steps in and grants the men bail. (Advocate)

September 24, 2002
An appeals court ruling Monday has put Edwin Edwards on the verge of becoming the second governor in the state's history to go to prison. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans unanimously declined to rehear Edwards' appeal of his convictions in the riverboat casino corruption case. The court also rejected the requests of Edwards' son Stephen, Baton Rouge businessman Bobby Johnson, former Edwards aide Andrew Martin and Eunice cattleman Cecil Brown. The 5th Circuit's ruling means that the Edwardses and Johnson could be ordered to a federal penitentiary within a few weeks. (Advocate)

September 9, 2002
Edwin Edwards and his son, Stephen, asked an appeals court Thursday to let them stay out of prison while they appeal their riverboat casino corruption convictions. Edwin Edwards said the issues raise important questions that apply not only to his case but to the future defendants and to the entire legal system. "And hopefully, if the court looks at the the issues, it will conclude that a new trial is in order," the former governor said. A unanimous three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit on Aug.23 upheld the convictions of the Edwardses, Baton Rouge businessman Bobby Johnson and two others. (Advocate)

August 27, 2002
Former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards said Monday he expects to be ordered to federal prison within a month while he keeps fighting his racketeering and fraud convictions. "If I go, I will obey the rules, I will serve my time," said Edwards,75. "I will hope to live long enough to get out." He was found guilty in a scheme to extort millions of dollars from businessmen hoping to get lucrative riverboat casino licenses from the state during and after his fourth and final term in office, which ended in early 1996. Edwards was convicted along with his son Stephen, longtime friends Cecil Brown and Andrew Martin- who are serving prison time for convictions to separate cases- and businessman bobby Johnson. (AP)

August 12, 2001
Louisiana has more prisoners than it knows what to do with. With more than 36,000 inmates behind bars, our state locks up more people per capita than any other. Hundreds of inmates are in parish jails because of crowding in state prisons. To get a grip on the runaway incarceration rate, lawmakers last spring cut many drug sentences in half and did away with mandatory minimum sentences for many nonviolent offenses. But that law just took effect, and it is unlikely to lead to the release of many current prisoners. Given this situation, it makes no sense for Louisiana prisons to be poised to take 500 inmates from Alabama. Granted, the prisons vying for the out-of-state inmates are privately owned and operated, and state officials apparently can't stop them. That doesn't make it sound policy, though. (Times-Picayune)

Pine Prairie Correctional Center
Evangeline Parish, Louisiana
Louisiana Correctional Services
June 29, 2006 The Advocate
A former guard at a private prison in Evangeline Parish was sentenced Wednesday to two years and eight months in prison on federal charges of beating an inmate and then asking other guards to lie about the incident. Gilbert Self, 51, of Florine was convicted at trial in February of one count of a criminal civil rights violation and three counts of witness tampering. Self worked as a captain at Pine Prairie Correctional Center, owned by Lafayette-based private prison company LCS Corrections Services. He was accused of beating a Cuban national being held at the prison on immigration violations after the detainee allegedly made crude remarks to a woman guard in July 2003. The guard reported the incident to Self, her supervisor, who then went into the detainee’s cell and punched and kicked the man while he was restrained and lying face down, according to trial testimony. Three other guards who were present have said they repeatedly asked Self to stop and eventually removed him from the cell and sought medical assistance for the detainee. Self asked the guards to file false reports to cover up the beating, telling them that “if he went down they were also going down,” according to a written statement about the case from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The three guards initially prepared false reports, prosecutors said, but one of the guards decided the next day to tell a supervisor what had really happened. “This is a serious offense, and no one knows better than you the necessity of promoting respect for the law,” U.S. District Judge Richard Haik told Self before handing down a sentence.

February 16, 2006 Montgomery Advertiser
How willing would you be to do business with a company with a record of legal problems, even if it was the low bidder? Most Alabamians, we'd wager, would have some reservations about that -- and Alabamians certainly should have reservations about their state sending prison inmates to a private prison. For years, the Advertiser has expressed serious concerns about the use of private prisons. Nothing reported from the ones involved in state contracts has eased those concerns. The Birmingham News reported this week that the Department of Corrections has begun transferring male inmates to a private prison in Pine Prairie, La. The prison is operated by Louisiana Corrections Service, which also operates a facility in Basile, La., where Alabama has housed about 300 female inmates since 2003. The reason for using these facilities is the chronic overcrowding of Alabama's prison system, which is the subject of constant litigation. The transfer of male inmates -- eventually about 500 of them -- is an effort to ease the backlog in county jails of state inmates who haven't been sent to state prisons because there is no space for them. The overcrowding problem is at present intractable, given Alabama's sentencing structure and its decades of failing to address the shortcomings of a system now bulging with almost twice as many inmates as its facilities were designed to handle. LCS will house the male inmates for $29.50 per day per inmate, but how much of a bargain is that? There are important issues inherent in any private prison operation. This is not someone's hobby; this is a for-profit enterprise. That's fine in most pursuits; in fact, it is the core of the American economy. But incarceration is a solemn obligation of the state. Depriving individuals of liberty is serious business and the state, even though justified in doing so, has an undeniable responsibility to those individuals. A for-profit prison has financial considerations that a state facility does not. It has profit expectations from its investors, and these could all too easily lead to dangerous corner-cutting that compromises the safety of inmates and potentially the public as well. Unlike the state, a private prison operator has no stake in the rehabilitation of inmates vs. the mere warehousing of them. Add to those concerns -- inherent in any private prison operation -- the legal troubles at LSC facilities and it is easy to see why Alabamians should be uncomfortable with this arrangement. Last week, the News reported, a former supervisor at Pine Prairie was convicted of rights violations and witness tampering in the beating of an inmate. Earlier, four guards at the Basile facility were indicted on sexual abuse charges. Problems can occur at state prisons, of course, but there the state has direct authority to act, to set employment standards and to otherwise control the addressing of problems. That is largely lost when private prisons are used. The private prison issue is not going to fade away. LCS is working with officials in Perry County to open a private prison there. The facility, located outside Uniontown, will be ready in a few months. The Department of Corrections says there is no agreement for it to place prisoners there, but clearly there will be great political pressure to do so. This is a poor approach to prison issues. A far better one is broad reform of Alabama's sentencing structure, which now sends to prison far too many people who could serve their sentences in community-based corrections facilities with drug treatment programs and work opportunities -- without presenting a significant threat to the safety of the populace. Funneling non-violent offenders into prisons is always costly and seldom productive. Absent this kind of reform of the current system, inherently unsound practices such as the use of private prisons will continue -- not because they are better, but because they are cheaper.

February 16, 2006 Ledger-Enquirer
Tough on crime, or on taxpayers. Last week, Alabama's prison commissioner went over the wall. And who could blame Commissioner Donal Campbell for resigning? He had been given the literally impossible task of operating an Alabama prison system with too many inmates and not nearly enough money. Not only is he set up for failure, but he is also set up to go to jail himself for not obeying court orders to relieve crowding. Of course, he can't build prisons out of his own pocket, and the Alabama legislature isn't about to spend precious tax dollars on inmates, so what could the commissioner do but throw up his hands and walk away? "I wouldn't want that job," said Lynda Flynt, executive director of the Alabama Sentencing Commission. She knows what she's talking about, having worked closely with Campbell to alleviate crowding. Knowing they're going to have a problem filling a position that includes perks such as being party to a lawsuit, state officials are finally scrambling to do something. On Monday, the state announced that it is going to send 500 state inmates to a private prison in Louisiana. The private prison company there already houses more than 300 Alabama inmates. At $29.50 a day per inmate, that's going to cost Alabama taxpayers about $24,000 a day. That's Alabama tax money that's flowing into the Louisiana economy. If Alabama would build the prisons it needs (or consider sentencing reforms that might ease the stress on the system) some of that cash might stay home. Or some of it might be sent to Alabama counties that are picking up a huge tab for housing state prisoners. As of last December, there were about 100 state inmates being housed in Russell, Lee and Chambers County jails. It costs counties about $30 a day to house a state prisoner, but the state pays the counties about $1.75 a day. So housing those prisoners costs East Alabama taxpayers more than a million dollars a year, while the state is sending more than $8 million a year to Louisiana private prisons. If the Alabama legislature is going to insist that this many people be in prison, then the lawmakers have the moral responsibility to see that there is space to house the inmates. If you're going to be tough on crime, then you're going to have to be tough enough to pay the piper. -- Michael Owen, for the editorial board

February 10, 2006 The Advocate
A former guard at a private prison in Evangeline Parish has been convicted on federal charges of beating an inmate and then asking other guards to cover up the incident. The jury deliberated about 45 minutes before returning a guilty verdict late Wednesday against Gilbert Self, 51, after a three-day trial. Self was a captain at the Pine Prairie Correctional Center, owned by LCS Corrections Services. He faces up to 10 years in prison on criminal civil rights violations and charges of witness tampering. “The Department of Justice will not tolerate civil rights violations committed by those sworn to uphold the law,” U.S. Attorney Donald Washington said in a statement. “… It was Mr. Self’s responsibility to control such violent outbreaks in the facility, not to initiate the violence.” Self was accused of beating a Cuban national who was being detained for immigration violations. Prosecutors said the July 2003 incident began when the detainee allegedly made crude remarks to a female guard. She reported the remarks to Self, who went into the detainee’s cell, punched him repeatedly, slammed his head into the floor and kicked the man inthe ribs, according to guards who witnesses the incident. The guards, who said they attempted to stop Self, told investigators that he later asked them to file false reports to cover up the beating. The guards prepared false reports on the incident, but the next day, one of the men told Self’s supervisor what had actually happened. The detainee, who lost consciousness during the attack, suffered bruising and swelling to both eyes, cuts, and rib injuries, prosecutors said. The injuries were not properly documented at the time because Self asked a nurse to alter her medical report, according to prosecutors, and LCS later fired the nurse for not following proper procedures and sending the detainee to the hospital for treatment.

May 6, 2004
A federal grand jury has joined local prosecutors and civil rights attorneys in bringing charges against employees at private, for-profit prisons in Evangeline Parish. In the most recent charges, Gilbert Self, 49, of Florien, a former captain at the Pine Prairie Detention Center, has been indicted on one count of felony criminal civil rights violation and three counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly beating a prisoner. U.S. Attorney Donald W. Washington said Self was arraigned Wednesday morning in Lafayette and released on a $75,000 bond. A tentative trial date is set for July 12 on the four charges, which each carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Washington said sentencing in federal court is governed by the U.S. sentencing guidelines, which do not allow for parole. He said the federal charges stem from a government contract with LCS Corrections Services Inc., a Lafayette-based company, which owns the private prison near Pine Prairie and another near Basile. The current indictment alleges that in July 2003, Self assaulted and caused bodily harm to a Cuban national, who was being detained at the facility under the authority of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service. The indictment also alleges that Self obstructed the investigation by trying to persuade three fellow guards to lie to federal law enforcement officials. LCS owns two private prisons in Evangeline Parish. Both are currently facing ongoing lawsuits. Last month, Evangeline Parish District Attorney Brent Coreil opened an investigation of the South Louisiana Correctional Center near Basile in regard to repeated charges of sexual assaults on female prisoners. (Louisiana Gannett)

July 7, 2003
A guard at a private prison in Evangeline Parish has been booked on charges of having sex with an inmate.
Todd Daniel Arnold, 22, of Oberlin faces one count of malfeasance in office for allegedly having sex with a female inmate at Pine Prairie Correctional Center, a prison run by Lafayette-based Louisiana Corrections Services. Arnold was booked into the Evangeline Parish Jail on Monday and released on $7,500 bond, according to jail records. LCS General Manager Richard Harbison said prison officials began an internal investigation of Arnold on Thursday, after an inmate made a complaint about the alleged sexual contact. The prison officials met with Evangeline Parish Sheriff's Office investigators Sunday, and Arnold was arrested after giving a statement to investigators when he came to work Monday, Harbison said. Harbison said Arnold was suspended immediately, pending the outcome of the criminal case. Pine Prairie Executive Warden Gary Copes said that Arnold had worked at the prison since February 2002. He did not have prior law enforcement experience but had been through a 90-hour training course for LCS guards, Copes said. Sheriff Wayne Morein did not return calls for comment. LCS runs four correctional facilities in Louisiana -- including one in Pine Prairie, one in Basile and two in north Louisiana -- and two in Texas. The Pine Prairie facility holds about 650 inmates. The woman Arnold is accused of having sex with was a Louisiana Department of Corrections inmate the facility had a contract to hold. The incident comes about two years after the former warden of the Evangeline Parish Jail was convicted on two counts of malfeasance in office for extorting sexual favors from the family members of inmates. Michael J. Savant, 48, was sentenced to six months in jail and three years probation on the charges. Malfeasance in office involving sexual conduct between an inmate and a jail worker carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. (Daily Advertiser)

South Louisiana Correctional Center
Basile, Louisiana
Louisiana Correctional Services
August 1, 2009 New America Media
Some one hundred immigrant detainees at a private prison in Louisiana, angered by what they say are awful conditions, are engaged in increasingly tense protests. Beginning in early July, they’ve staged waves of hunger strikes and provided immigrant advocates with testimonies to gain attention for their complaints. Prison authorities, meanwhile, have been reacting by placing hunger strikers in isolation for days at a time. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency in charge of immigrant detention, has said the solitary confinement isn’t disciplinary, but precautionary “medical isolation.” At least six inmates remain in solitary confinement as a result of the last hunger strike, which began July 27, according to Saket Soni, of the New Orleans Worker’s Center for Racial Justice. He spoke to New America Media via cellphone Saturday afternoon. He was on his way to visit the prison, the Southern Louisiana Correctional Center, a 1,000-bed facility set near rice fields in the town of Basile, a four-hour drive west of New Orleans. The detainees “are facing a severe sense of isolation and desperation,” he says. In a report compiled by Soni and other advocates and published on the center’s website July 30, some 100 detainees acting as “human rights monitors” complain of lack of responsible medical attention, even for serious ailments like leukemia, high blood pressure, and asthma. They also report unreliable, and in some cases nonexistent, phone contact with lawyers and family, a vacuum of information about their deportation cases, and scarcity of soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and even underwear. One detainee reports “rats, mosquitoes, flies, and spiders inside the cell,” one of several shared by scores of detainees. A Jewish detainee says he was denied a kosher diet, while another said the detention center’s food routinely made him sick. These testimonies would put the facility in violation of several standards issued by the Department of Homeland Security for immigrant detainees, according to Soni. But federal officials responsible for the detainees flatly deny they have been subjected to any mistreatment. Philip Miller, acting field office director in New Orleans for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE, says he visited the Basile facility on July 16 and found its maintenance and pest control program satisfactory. In the July 30 report, one detainee claims there was no soap and toothpaste for three weeks in May, but Miller denies that: “That’s not true,” since inmates receive toiletries upon request. To date, there have been five hunger strikes to protest conditions at the Basile detention center, and they’ve involved some 60 detainees, says Soni. Prison staff reportedly sought to quell these protests by isolating hunger strikers, sometimes even before they began refusing food, according to testimonials from men who participated in earlier hunger strikes. In the report, Joaquin López says that on the morning of July 23 he and four other immigrant detainees in a cell called Wolf 3 were put into the “hole” for planning a hunger strike. The next day, López said, they were brought out of the “hole,” cuffed at the ankles and wrists, and interrogated for two hours, then placed in solitary confinement again, in cells measuring twelve by six feet. He was brought out of the isolation cell to speak with advocates on July 25. Another detainee, Fausto Gonzalez, who has asthma, said that on July 28, over 30 people in his cell, Tiger 2, refused food and voiced their complaints. Guards showed up in black riot uniforms, said Gonzalez, and two men were sent to the “hole.” Soni says he doesn’t know how long the men mentioned in the report remained in solitary, since the limited contact doesn’t allow him to track them. “Solitary confinement as retaliatory punishment for peaceful protest of conditions is unacceptable,” said the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights in a statement. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency which oversees immigrant detention, denies any hunger strikers would be punished with solitary confinement, or unduly pressured. Federal detention standards require that a hunger striker be placed in “medical isolation in order to closely monitor the detainee and meet his medical needs,” says Miller, the ICE field officer for detention and removal. Also, says Miller, hunger strikers undergo a medical review and counseling about the health risks they face. Seven national advocacy groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, sent Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano a letter demanding she investigate the Basile, Louisiana prison and the detainees’ grievances. Last month, Napolitano denied a court petition asking for bolstered, legally enforceable detention standards at facilities housing immigrant detainees. Instead, DHS opted to stick with “performance-based” standards enforced by private contractors.

July 30, 2009 AP
A group of detainees at a Louisiana immigration detention center have begun three-day hunger strikes to protest poor conditions there, immigrant advocates said. The news comes just days after Department of Homeland Security officials dismissed a report critical of conditions at its immigration holding centers nationwide. About 100 detainees contributed to a report released Thursday by the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, claiming bleak conditions at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lockup in Basile, La., 183 miles northwest of New Orleans. "It's not fit for a human being," read a comment attributed to Fausto Gonzalez, according to the report a detainee from the Dominican Republic. "There are rats, mosquitoes, flies, and spiders inside the cell and inside the dorm. The ventilation is terrible," he said. "We have tried to complain about all of these problems, and we haven't gotten anywhere. They tell us, 'It's a jail. This is how it is.'" Dora Schriro, special adviser on detention and removal for Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not return requests for comment Thursday. Philip Miller, ICE's acting field office director in New Orleans, who oversees five southern states, said the facility was cleaned daily and that he had talked with staff about addressing detainee concerns. "We acknowledge and accept the fact that immigration detention is not punitive in nature," he said. "And we have to take a high degree of caution and a high degree of sensitivity in how we maintain our facility." The Associated Press has requested access to the 1,002-bed complex which is run through private contracts with several law enforcement bodies, including ICE. Dick Harbison, executive vice president of contractor LCS Corrections Services Inc., has agreed to the tour and ICE officials are considering it. Access to immigration detainees is generally limited to family and legal representatives, which staff attorneys at the New Orleans group have become for those quoted in its report. Detainees at Basil are being held on federal charges of staying in the country without authorization, but in some cases local charges as well. Gonzalez is among 60 detainees who have undertaken rotating 72-hour hunger strikes over the last month to protest conditions, said Saket Soni, executive director of the Workers' Center. They would strike for longer periods, Soni said, but the detainees feared inadequate medical care and placement of strikers in solitary confinement could lead to serious illnesses. The conditions outlined in the report are similar to those highlighted in the report released Tuesday by the National Immigration Law Center. Homeland Security officials dismissed that report as being outdated because it used data and detainee accounts no fresher than 2005. The grievances in the latest report are no older than two weeks. Among the report's claims: - A detainee said guards humiliated him and other men by issuing them women's nylon underwear. - A Jewish man said when he requested Kosher food, guards said they didn't know what it was and he was given unsealed food that made him throw up. - One detainee said he has not had phone contact with his family or lawyer for a month because phone cards that they are required to buy take a week to be issued and then do not work in most holding cells. - For about three weeks in May, the jail ran out of soap and toothpaste, said a detainee. - A hunger striker said air conditioning was turned down in his room after he began his protest and he was eventually placed in solitary confinement and pressured to eat. "Ninety-five percent of it's untrue," said Harbison. "Occasionally, an inmate tells you a lie." Harbison said records showed only two inmates had failed to report to the mess hall during the period in which the hunger strikes were to have taken place. Striking detainees reported to the mess so they would not face retaliation, said Soni, but left their trays full.

July 27, 2006 AP
About 320 female Alabama prisoners being housed in Louisiana are being moved to another prison in that state but one closer to Alabama. The women inmates had been housed at a private prison at Basile in southwest Louisiana. They are being moved to J.B. Evans Correctional Center in Newellton, La., which is on the Louisiana-Mississippi line about 60 miles west of Jackson. The move brings the inmates about two and a-half hours closer to the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, prisons commissioner Richard Allen said Thursday. It also reduces travel time for corrections officers. The Alabama Department of Corrections has a contract with LCS Correctional Services to house the inmates to help reduce overcrowded conditions at Tutwiler. The J.B. Evans Correctional Center opened in 1994 and is a medium security facility with the capacity of holding 440 inmates. Allen said it will be used exclusively for the Alabama women prisoners. More than 600 male inmates are also housed in private facilities in Louisiana because of overcrowded conditions in Alabama prisons.

January 25, 2006 Birmingham News
When the Alabama Department of Corrections decided to put prisoners in a private out-of-state prison, women went first. The state opened a transition center for people on parole, and it was for women. A close look at these experiments, however, shows that, for the overall prison population to drop by much, the state may need to turn to alternatives such as expanded drug courts and community-based treatment and sentencing reform. A bill endorsed by Gov. Bob Riley takes a step in that direction by stressing changes in Alabama's sentencing structure. In reaction to a federal court settlement that forced the state to cut the population at Tutwiler Prison for Women to 950, the state Parole Board released several hundred low-level offenders and the state began housing pockets of women in other facilities - the Louisiana private prison, the LifeTech parole transition center and county jails. But Alabama now incarcerates 1,920 women, only a 4 percent drop in three years. And instead of steering female drug offenders into community programs - as numerous government task forces have recommended - the state is locking up more women for drug crimes than ever before. "The path that Alabama has taken over the last four years of renting more bed space for women has proven to be the wrong path," said Lisa Kung, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit law firm that has won settlements over conditions at prisons. In Birmingham, only 40 of 100 spaces are filled in "Second Chance" a federally funded program that allows newly released women to live in apartments and work regular jobs while receiving drug treatment, medical and mental health services. Not enough women are being paroled to fill the slots. Kung agreed that LifeTech is a better option than prison. But she wants the state to use the center for incarcerated women, not probationers. Nearly 40 percent of the women at the private prison in Louisiana will be eligible for parole over the next three years, according to DOC records. Many have served terms of 15 years or more for crimes Kung said often involved abusive partners. She's hoping parole officials will consider letting some of these women into LifeTech, and she has been working with lawmakers on gender-specific parole guidelines that might help cut the numbers of low-risk women locked in private prisons. LCS Corrections houses 320 Alabama women at its Louisiana prison, with a price tag climbing toward $10 million since the contract began in 2003. A prison run by the same company is set to open in Perry County and may end up housing Alabama men. Kung's problem with shipping so many women to Louisiana is that they are housed 900 miles from their children and families and have no opportunities to take the classes that the parole board looks to as signs prisoners are trying to improve themselves. "The inmates housed here have too much idle time on their hands and that defeats the purpose of rehabilitation," inmate Sharron Kay Jones, 47, serving 15 years for solicitation to commit murder, wrote in a letter from Louisiana "There is no rehabilitation here at all." Inmate Paula Settle, 34, of Tuscaloosa, serving 15 years for drug trafficking, signed up for anger management, substance abuse, parenting and trade school classes at Tutwiler. But she was immediately transferred to Louisiana. "There are no classes, programs, meetings, jobs or counselors here. No trades, no furthering education, no chaplain or religious assemblies or functions," she said.

August 16, 2005 The Advocate
A private prison company has settled a federal lawsuit filed by the family of an inmate who died in custody after he was allegedly beaten and denied adequate medical care. Gregory Lee, 35, died June 22, 2003, less than a week after he was transferred from LCS South Louisiana Detention Center in Basile to the state-run Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel for medical treatment. LCS Vice-President Dick Harbison confirmed Monday that a settlement had been reached but declined to discuss the terms. Willie Nunnery, the attorney representing Lee' family in the lawsuit, also declined to offer any specifics on the settlement. "It is a strictly, strictly confidential matter," he said. The settlement of the lawsuit against Lafayette-based LCS comes after prosecutors filed charges last year against guards at the company's two south Louisiana facilities. Gilbert Self, 50, a former captain at LCS's Pine Prairie Correctional Center, was indicted by a federal grand jury in May 2004, accused of hitting an inmate and then trying to persuade three fellow corrections officers not to cooperate in an investigation of the incident. Self, who faces one count of violating civil rights and three counts of witness tampering, is set for trial in September. An Evangeline Parish grand jury in June 2004 indicted four guards at the company's Basile facility on charges of malfeasance in office for allegedly having inappropriate sexual contact with inmates. LCS officials have said that all of the guards facing criminal charges at the two facilities were terminated after internal investigations.

April 6, 2005 Montgomery Advertiser
From the day the Department of Corrections began talking about sending some inmates to private, out-of-state prisons, the Advertiser expressed serious reservations about the idea, and for several reasons. Nothing that has happened since has changed our view of the practice. Questions raised by female inmates sent to a privately operated prison in Louisiana have prompted a new concern -- whether incarceration there hurts their chances for parole. The private prison in Basile, La., nearly 500 miles from DOC headquarters in Montgomery, now houses about 270 Alabama inmates. Severe overcrowding at Tutwiler Prison in Wetumpka, Alabama's only penitentiary for women, led the department to send some inmates there to bring the Tutwiler population down to a more manageable level. The state's short-term options were limited, so using the private prison as a stopgap measure was understandable. But private prisons have a lot of inherent qualities that should concern Alabamians. They are for-profit enterprises, of course, so there are financial pressures that could lead to potentially dangerous cutting of corners. In many cases, they are little more than warehouses for inmates, with few opportunities for work or training. That could be a detrimental factor in parole considerations. As a group of inmates notes in a call for reform, this prison that sits surrounded by Louisiana rice fields offers no classes, no training programs, no rehabilitation groups or any of the things that inmates can point to when they come up for parole consideration. "Down here, the time is not constructive," said Phyllis Richey, an inmate from Muscle Shoals. "We have nothing to do. We're basically housed. That's it." For inmates who are well behaved and are trying to serve their time responsibly and get out of prison, this is clearly frustrating. Rather than having an incentive to improve themselves in preparation for life outside prison, inmates are stuck in a prison far away from their homes and families in Alabama, simply marking time. That's bad enough. The prospect that their parole consideration is affected only makes matters worse. Private prisons are a bad concept. The sooner Alabama can get its inmates out of them, the better.

April 1, 2005 Birmingham News
Alabama female prisoners locked in a rural Louisiana prison are demanding changes they say could give them a fairer shot at parole and curb the state's reliance on private, forprofit lockups. Women at the South Louisiana Correctional Center, some of whom have been housed 500 miles from their families for two years, wrote a Platform for Fair Reform. The two-page document includes reasons for their concerns and five demands they think would improve their chances for getting parole and leading productive lives. The women have asked for: Objective parole criteria, workrelease opportunities, an end to the parole board's backlog, an end to the ''heinous crime'' designation that prevents some of them from working outside the prison and a chance to face their victims as well as the parole board. The move to the Louisiana prison, 475 miles from Montgomery, makes it difficult or impossible for families to visit, the inmates said. Surrounded by rice fields, the prison has no classes, programs or rehabilitation groups, the opportunities prisoners rely on to show the parole board they have worked to better themselves.

January 21, 2005 The Advocate
The family of an inmate who died in prison held a news conference Thursday to release the details of his death. The family members of Gregory Lee, 35, of Kenner, convicted in 2003 of distribution of cocaine near a church, say he died because he didn't receive proper medical care at the South Louisiana Correctional Center, a private prison in Basile. The family has filed suit in federal court against LCS Corrections Services Inc. and Patrick LeBlanc of Lafayette, Gary Copes, former Lafayette police chief and warden of the facility, and several facility employees. The suit was filed in 2003 and is pending before U.S. District Judge Tucker L. Melançon. Willie Nunnery, the family's attorney, provided the media with a report from an expert his clients have hired. "This case has taken on a new twist," Nunnery said. "It is the intent of his family that the public know what happened to Gregory Lee." According to his death certificate, Lee died June 22, 2003. The medical transfer document from the SLCC indicates he left there June 17, 2003. The autopsy report, prepared by the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office, indicates that Lee died of complications from AIDS. However, a forensic pathologist hired by Lee's family has examined microscope slides -- which the Orleans officials did not do -- and determined that Lee probably died from sepsis, a severe infection. Dr. Robert Huntington III, an associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, participated in the news conference via speakerphone. Huntington said sepsis can be the result of infected wounds that aren't treated, and it also can start with pneumonia, bladder infections or heart infections, he said. Nunnery said he also has taken the deposition of two inmates who were being held in Basile at the time Lee was there. Those depositions indicate that the inmates testified Lee was being beaten and sprayed with tear gas. Nunnery said Lee was "hogtied" and beaten, shackled and left in chains for hours. "There can be no justice until the courts deal with the privatization of prisons in this state," Nunnery said. "There should be a massive inquiry into what happened to Gregory Lee. This individual was beaten, and the system sought to hide and cover this up."

October 21, 2004 Montgomery Advertiser
Although it is important to acknowledge that the filing of a lawsuit proves nothing in and of itself, the suit filed by an Alabama inmate housed in an out-of-state private prison raises anew some valid concerns about such facilities. The Advertiser has long had reservations about private prisons and nothing in Alabama's recent experience has alleviated them in the slightest. In April of last year, Alabama began sending female inmates to a private prison in Basile, La., to relieve overcrowding at Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama's only prison for females. Private prisons are, of course, intended to be money-making ventures, and that creates the potential for some serious problems. Even the most fervent believers in free enterprise -- count the Advertiser among them -- surely can see that the profit motive and the function of prisons are ripe for conflict. When a state deprives a citizen of liberty for having violated its laws, it also assumes the custody of that individual. That is a solemn responsibility. When an individual is incarcerated for the protection of society, the state is not absolved of the obligation to carry out that incarceration in a constitutional manner. With a private prison, the pursuit of profit invariably creates the temptation to cut corners, to skimp on safety, personnel, medical attention, nutrition and other facets of the operation. It's simply a bad mix of private-sector motives and public-sector responsibilities. The merits of this particular suit will be determined in court, but the inherent problems with private prisons are something Alabama has to face. They are not an acceptable solution to Alabama's prison problems in the long term, and even their short-term use is questionable.

October 19, 2004 Daily Comet
An Alabama inmate is suing the state Department of Corrections and a private prison company in Louisiana, claiming she was raped after being shipped out of state due to a lack of space. The lawsuit, filed Oct. 1 in Louisiana federal court, claims that guards at the South Louisiana Correctional Center sexually assaulted at least two prisoners, including raping the woman who filed the suit, and that the guards had sex with one another and played cards and drank beer during the night shift. The four guards named in the lawsuit have been fired. Also, an Evangeline Parish grand jury indicted them on charges of malfeasance in office for sexual conduct prohibited for people confined in a correctional institution. All four pleaded not guilty, The Birmingham News reported Tuesday. The lawsuit claims that Alabama prison Commissioner Donal Campbell failed to properly investigate LCS before shipping Alabama women there and failed to implement proper policies and procedures for the oversight of the contract. The inmate who filed the suit claims she got no medical treatment after the assault.

August 15, 2004
Soon after arriving at the South Louisiana Correctional Center near Basile in 2003 inmate Gregory Lee died. Attorney Willie J. Nunnery, who is representing Lee's mother, Mae Thompson Lee, is charging that the private, for-profit prison abused and tortured him. Nunnery is seeking access to prisoners who allegedly witnessed what happened to Lee and a reexamination of the forensic evidence. When the charges where first filed, prison guards said Lee jumped off the top bunk of his cell, hitting his head on the toilet. Nunnery, a civil rights attorney, has a darker theory. He claims that following an altercation after the evening meal, prison guards attempted to punish Lee by beating him. Following the incident, Lee, badly injured from whatever cause, was transferred to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center , a state facility, where he died several days later. Nunnery said he is in possession of photographs taken when Lee arrived at Elayn Hunt. "They were very barbaric pictures," Nunnery said. "If you saw those pictures it would make your stomach turn." The Basile facility and another LCS private prison at Pine Prairie have repeatedly made headlines recently with both female employees and inmates bringing charges of sexual harassment against the company. "I don't understand why there isn't any public outcry to have that place shut down," Nunnery said. (Daily World)

June 11, 2004
Four guards who worked at the Basile Detention Center in Evangeline Parish were indicted Friday for allegedly having sexual contact with female inmates. An Evangeline Parish grand jury indicted the four guards on charges of malfeasance in office for sexual conduct prohibited for persons confined in a correctional institution. Kenneth Stenson Sr., Horace Edwards, Frank Lenoir and Jeffery Collins will be arraigned July 1 and will face up to 10 years in jail and a $10,000 fine. The indictments follow four days of testimony from investigators, prison guards and 22 inmates at the south Louisiana correctional center. (AP)

June 7, 2004
Allegations of sexual contact between security officers and female inmates from Alabama at a private prison in Basile are scheduled to be studied this week by a grand jury. Two prison employees were fired after an internal investigation into the allegations made by female inmates who were being held at the South Louisiana Correctional Center. (AP)

April 7, 2004
A Louisiana district attorney says he will pursue criminal charges against guards at a private prison over sexual contact with inmates from Alabama, The Birmingham News reported. About 200 female prisoners from Alabama are being housed at the South Louisiana Correctional Center, where they were transferred last year to help relieve overcrowding at Tutwiler Prison for Women. The criminal case, involving an incident late last year, is the result of an investigation begun by the Alabama Department of Corrections. "There is definite misconduct that did occur, and we will follow through with it," Evangeline Parish District Attorney Brent Coreil said Tuesday. He said he has not decided whether to file direct charges or present a case to a grand jury. The Basile, La., lockup is owned and operated by LCS Corrections, based in Lafayette, La. Alabama pays the company about $23 per inmate per day to house the women. "ADOC's investigation produced a confession from an employee at South Louisiana Correctional Center, along with subsequent termination of that employee. We then turned our investigative report over to the local district attorney for prosecution," Alabama prisons spokesman Brian Corbett said. (AP)

February 13, 2004
Investigators are looking into allegations of illegal sexual contact between a female prisoner and a guard at the Louisiana private prison housing prisoners from Alabama. This is the second such investigation involving an Alabama inmate and an employee or employees of Southeastern Louisiana Correctional Center, said Richard Harbison, general manager of LCS Corrections Services. The Lafayette, La., company runs the prison housing about 275 Alabama women. "We do have the district attorney involved in it," Harbison said Thursday. "Which means we're taking it very seriously." Harbison said the current investigation stems from an alleged incident that occurred about two months ago, but was reported only recently. He said it was not considered an assault. Under Louisiana and Alabama law, sex between prisoners and guards is illegal. The laws are aimed at keeping guards from using their power to coerce or abuse prisoners. The Alabama Department of Corrections pays LCS about $24 per prisoner to per day. DOC signed the contract with the for-profit company last April because of pressure to relieve crowding at Tutwiler Prison for Women. Tutwiler Warden Gladys Deese and a DOC investigator visited the Basile, La., prison this week to look into the recent claim, Harbison said. Deese's visit was already scheduled and part of her duties as warden, said Steve Hayes, an Alabama prison spokesman. Hayes confirmed that Alabama authorities are investigating reports of an inappropriate incident at the Louisiana prison. LCS has placed three guards on leave during the investigation. Harbison said not all of them are suspects, that some are suspected of observing improper activity and not reporting it. Last year, officials at the Louisiana prison investigated another alleged sexual incident between an Alabama inmate and a prison employee or employees. "The first one we were unable to prove or disprove," Harbison said. LCS had arranged for the inmate who made the first allegation to take a polygraph test. Before the test could be administered, the Alabama DOC transferred to the woman back to Tutwiler, one of a group of 30 inmates who returned last November, Harbison said. (Advocate)

September 25, 2003
The mother of former South Louisiana Correctional Center inmate Gregory Lee has filed a lawsuit alleging that Lee was beaten and tortured before being transferred to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, where he died. The lawsuit was filed Aug. 15 in U.S. District Court in Lafayette against Warden Gary Copes, state Corrections Secretary Richard Stalder and unnamed prison guards. Lee was incarcerated May 6 at the Basile facility to begin serving an eight-year sentence for distribution of drugs, said Willie J. Nunnery, an attorney for Lee's mother, Mae Thompson Lee. Sometime before June 17, "we believe he was severely beaten and brutalized before he left Basile," said Nunnery, of Madison, Wis. Lee was transferred from the Basile prison to Hunt Correctional June 17. He died June 22; his death certificate lists the cause of death as "complications of AIDS." Nunnery disputes that claim and points to an autopsy report by the Iberville Parish Coroner's Office that found some recent hemorrhage adjacent to Lee's three lower right ribs. He also has photographs taken post-autopsy that he said illustrate the torture that Lee endured. The photographs show scrapes on both sides of Lee's back near his shoulder blades, on his face near his eyebrow and on his right elbow and knee. They also show a cut several inches long on his left shoulder and a large bruise on his left side. Nunnery said he and Lee's family believe those injuries, especially to Lee's back, occurred when Lee was beaten or struck with some sort of instrument. If he mutilated himself, like some have alleged, how did he sustain injuries on his back, Nunnery said. Mae Lee said Wednesday that she wants to know who beat her son and she wants the person or people responsible convicted. The mother said she felt she had to file the lawsuit to get to the truth about what happened to her son. "I'm hoping the truth will come out," she said. "The pictures are proof." In a letter from Hunt Warden C. M. Lensing to state Sen. Arthur Lentini, R-Metairie, Lensing said he received information from Evangeline Parish authorities that Lee had tried to escape the morning of June 17. Upon capture, "he mutilated himself and while bleeding from the mouth he began spitting at the guards and medical staff," Lensing wrote. Lee was HIV positive, Lensing wrote. Lee arrived at Hunt in a paper gown and wrapped in a blanket, Lensing wrote. He was fully restrained. Lensing wrote that there were numerous cuts, bruises and scrapes on Lee's body. Once at Hunt, Lee was placed on extreme suicide watch until the following morning, Lensing wrote. Lensing wrote that Lee's "wounds were tended to, he took his medication, his appetite was poor but he did eat and drink." The suicide watch log indicates that Lee was observed sleeping at 2:01 p.m. About 2:15 p.m., Lee was found dead in his cell, Lensing wrote. Lensing also wrote that after an autopsy performed by Dr. William Newman of the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office, Newman theorized that an infection in the heart valve, which can be caused by AIDS, led to an arrhythmia which in turn caused sudden cardiac arrest. Nunnery said he and Lee's family attribute Lee's death to a "major collapse" in the Louisiana prison system, partly attributed to the privatization of some prisons. "I think they knew he was in such bad shape, they got him out of the private prison system," Nunnery said. Nunnery also said that federal officials have decided to get involved in the matter. "I do know it's being taken very seriously," Nunnery said. Attorney Christopher Edwards, who represents Copes and LCS Corrections Services, the company that owns and operates the Basile correctional center, said he has spoken with security officers and other prisoners who said they saw Lee leap from his top bunk and fall head first into his toilet in a suicide attempt. The witnesses allegedly watched Lee awake from a daze, bang his head and throw his body against his cell wall, Edwards said. "I think what happened was a big misunderstanding," Edwards said. When the family received Lee's body, it was covered with self-inflicted cuts and scrapes, Edwards said. The escape attempt referred to occurred when Lee was being loaded into an ambulance for his transfer to Hunt, Edwards said. "He was still mad and angry and trying to run," Edwards said. The attorney said that Lee's transfer was a common procedure for any inmate deemed a danger to himself or to others. He also defended the facility's care of its inmates. "We have policies and procedures written down for the care of prisoners," Edwards said. Stalder was unavailable for comment late Wednesday afternoon. Copes, who served as Lafayette police chief from 1987 to 1994, faced federal criminal charges in 1996 in connection with a prison disturbance at the private Tensas Parish Correctional Center. He was acquitted on a charge of witness tampering, but jurors in the federal trial in Monroe were unable to reach a verdict on one count of conspiracy and six counts of violating civil rights of inmates. Nunnery has scheduled a news conference today in Lafayette to discuss the lawsuit. (Advocate)

September 15, 2003
Lawyer Bruce Rozas, who was handling four sexual harassment cases against LCS Corrections Services Inc., which operates private, for-profit prisons in Basile and Pine Prairie, is now handling seven. "Following the media coverage, I had three more women come to see me today," Rozas said Friday from his office in Mamou. He said the newest complaints date back to 1998, all involving the same two officers named in his earlier Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints on behalf of Maggie Dupre, a nurse at South Louisiana Correctional Center near Basile, and Sandra Whittington, a nurse at Pine Prairie Correctional Center. Dupre was fired this week after coming forward with her complaints. According to Rozas, the new complaints show the same pattern. He said two of his new clients, Carla T. Zeno and Laurie Ardoin, both claim they were also fired after making complaints about unwanted sexual advances by superior officers. "I expect that before this is over, we will have many more complaints," Rozas said. Lafayette-based LCS Corrections Services Inc., which also operates two private prisons in Texas and another in Tensas Parish, referred calls to Sue Fontenot, an Abbeville attorney who represents the company. Fontenot was unavailable for comment. (Daily World)

September 12, 2003
Two employees who filed complaints against the South Louisiana Correctional Center near Basile have lost their jobs. “They fired them,” said Mamou lawyer Bruce Rozas, who represents licensed practical nurse Maggie Dupre. “They said, ‘We don’t have to give you a reason.’ ” The prison Wednesday fired Dupre and Bethani Benjudah, a corrections officer. Benjudah has asked Rozas to represent her. Dupre’s story of alleged continuing sexual harassment and intimidation by prison guards and administrators, along with that of Fonda Autin, a female corrections officer at the private, for-profit prison, was reported Thursday. At that time, Rozas was representing three women charging LCS Corrections Services Inc., which operates the Basile facility, with fostering an atmosphere of intimidation and sexual harassment. “I now have four cases and naming three different officers,” Rozas said. “You have to blame management. One complaint is a campfire — four is a bonfire. The problem is clearly at the top.” Dick Harbison, general manager of LCS, said that now that lawyers are involved, he cannot comment on the case. He referred all calls to Sue Fontenot, an Abbeville attorney who represents the company. Fontenot said she has just received the case, but from what she’s learned “it does not appear Ms. Dupre’s complaint is meritorious.” She said that, to her knowledge, Dupre was reprimanded for “a serious violation of policy.” In the case of Benjudah, Fontenot said “her termination was clearly for good cause. It had absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the claims of Ms. Dupre.” Fontenot declined to go into any specifics. Rozas got involved in the matter last year when Sandra Whittington, a nurse at the Pine Prairie Correctional Center, also owned by LCS, came to him with complaints of sexual harassment. As with the other three women Rozas represents, Benjudah tells a tale of continuing sexual harassment and complaints to administrators that went unanswered. Rozas has filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission office in New Orleans. All laws enforced by EEOC, including sexual harassment, require filing a complaint with EEOC before a private lawsuit can be brought. (The Advertiser)

September 11, 2003
Two female employees of the South Louisiana Correctional Center near Basile have come forward, charging the private, for-profit prison with fostering an institutional atmosphere of sexual harassment and intimidation. Acting on the complaints of Maggie Dupre, a licensed practical nurse at the prison, the Evangeline Parish District Attorney's office has issued a warrant against Capt. Ray Rider, a shift captain at the prison, charging him with battery. Dupre said her complaint is the most recent against the prison. "They have other suits like mine," Dupre said. "There was even a rape in the prison. The company won't do anything. Something needs to be done about this prison." Dupre has charged Rider with a pattern of harassment, including sexually explicit language, fondling and exposing himself in her presence. Dupre claims that after the most recent incident, in which she alleges Rider commented on her breasts, pulled open her shirt and poured a bottle of water down her chest, he was only given a three-day suspension and required to watch a sensitivity tape. She had hoped for more. "Other women have had complaints, but this time I had a witness," Dupre said. "He's back now and he's making my life hell. He basically told me he can do whatever he wants," Dupre said. Dupre's story is similar to that of Fonda Autin, a female correctional officer at the prison. She said sexually explicit conversations and touching of female employees is common. Autin filed a complaint with the company about an incident in July when she alleges a male officer harassed her. "I couldn't make him leave. He has rank over me," Autin said. She claims that after more than 40 days she has yet to get a response to her complaint. "I could still feel his hands on me five hours later," Autin said of the July incident in which she claims the officer fondled her. She claims the officer had previously been disciplined for harassing another woman by removing her blouse in front of the prisoners. "He wasn't back two weeks before he did this to me," Autin said. "I feel safer around the prisoners than the guards," Autin said. "At least they know if they step out of line there are consequences." Capt. Caesar, the prison's complaint officer, refused to confirm or deny whether any complaints have been filed with her office. "I cannot talk to you," she said, refusing even to give her first name. Both Dupre and Autin have filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against LCS Corrections Services Inc., a Lafayette-based firm that owns the Basile facility and several others in Texas and Louisiana. "My last resort was legal help. It is clear the company is not going to protect us," Dupre said. Both women have retained Mamou lawyer Bruce Rosa to represent them. "It seems starting with Warden (Gary) Copes on down there is a disregard toward enforcing the sexual harassment laws," Rosa said. Rosa is also representing Sandra Whittington, a nurse at LCS' Pine Prairie Correctional Center. Copes, as executive warden, is over all of LCS' prison facilities. Calls for Copes' office were answered by a male voice that refused to give an indentity. That voice asked the nature of the call and then refused to comment. Copes, a former chief of police in Lafayette, retired from that position under a cloud in 1994 when he was accused of tipping off the owners of a strip club about a pending police sting operation. Copes went to work with LCS and in 1996. Rosa said for now his clients will simply have to wait. All laws enforced by EEOC, including sexual harassment, require filing a complaint with EEOC before a private lawsuit can be filed. EEOC then has 180 days to investigate. If it has not acted within that time frame, it will issue a letter allowing the parties to seek legal action on their own. "They are flooded with complaints and so many are bogus. I believe they intentionally go slow hoping that many of these situations will work themselves out," Rosa said. John Berendsen, a case manager with the New Orleans EEOC office where Rosa filed the complaint, said the agency does not confirm or deny whether cases exist. Dick Harbison, general manager of LCS, referred all calls to Sue Fontenot, an Abbeville attorney who represents the company. Fontenot's secretary said she was out of the office Wednesday and could not be reached. (Daily World)

April 16, 2003
The private Louisiana prison where Alabama sent female inmates Monday was the scene of a riot, escapes and other problems that led Idaho to remove its inmates five years ago. The problems occurred at South Louisiana Correctional Center in Basile, La., which is operated by LCS Corrections Services Inc. Alabama sent 70 female inmates to the prison on Monday and plans to send more, Department of Corrections Commissioner Donal Campbell said Tuesday. Teresa Jones, public information officer for the Idaho Department of Corrections, said Idaho transferred 300 inmates to the LCS prison in the summer of 1997. In September 1997, five inmates escaped by cutting a hole in a fence. Most were recaptured, but one remains at large eight years later, Jones said. Idaho hired a monitor, who conducted an audit of the prison. In an Oct. 2, 1997, report, he found the prison generally complied with the terms of its contract with Idaho, but also cited problems. Among them: A riot had occurred in July 1997; the warden was at the prison only two days a week; some cells had the windows painted over with no natural light; and staff training was inadequate. Jones said Idaho removed all of its inmates by January 1998 and has not used LCS facilities since. The state also is in negotiations with private prison companies to transfer 600 male inmates. Campbell said Tuesday that no decision has been made on a facility or transfer date. Gary Copes, executive warden of the company, was indicted by a federal grand jury in 1999 on charges of violating prisoners' civil rights. The Alabama transfers are part of the state's efforts to resolve overcrowding at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka. (The Montgomery Advertiser)

June 29, 2001
Authorities are saying the inmate who escaped from the Basile Correctional Facility on Sunday night is considered armed and dangerous. Gerald Matte of Eunice escaped from the private prison Sunday night by overpowering a prison guard and later stole a truck, which he abandoned near Mamou Monday morning. An all-day search by more than 30 law enforcement officials in the wooded area near where the truck was found turned up nothing. Detective Joe Demoruelle of the Evangeline Parish Sheriff's Department said Matte is suspected of being involved in at least one of three burglaries in the Eunice area Tuesday night. A cellphone and a gun were taken in one of the house burglaries, he said. A review of the calls made from the stolen phone showed that one of the calls was made to the fugitive's sister. (The Baton Rouge Advocate)

Tallulah Juvenile Prison
Tallulah, LA.
TransAmerican Development Associates (CSC)
January 19, 2007 Times Picayune
The state is preparing to purchase a Tallulah correctional center that for years has been a target of criticism for financial deals and management problems that occurred under a group of private owners with ties to former Gov. Edwin Edwards. The Louisiana Correctional Facilities Corp., a state agency, received permission Thursday from the State Bond Commission to borrow as much as $30 million to buy the facility, which was once known as the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth. The Department of Corrections currently leases the property from the private firm FBA LLC and runs it as an adult substance abuse treatment center. The department intends to keep running the facility for that purpose. Under the current deal, which has been criticized over the years, the state is obligated to make annual payments to FBA through 2020 to pay off the debt that backed the construction of the prison. Even though the state is meeting the payments, the private group in the end would still own the property under the old deal. Under the new plan, the state would pay off the old debt, take ownership of the facility and then pay off the new bonds over the next 13 years. According to the Bond Commission staff, the state would save about $4.2 million over time and FBA will be out of the picture. The Bond Commission's approval is contingent on the state receiving indemnity from a lawsuit related to the facility between the city of Tallulah and the private owners. If that legal step is completed, the state can proceed with the deal. FBA will get $1.6 million that is kept in an escrow account for maintenance costs. Verdi Adam, an FBA partner who is president of the Baton Rouge engineering company GEC Inc., said the partners would have to pay some taxes, debts, legal fees and other expenses with that money. In the end, FBA would have "way below" $1.6 million, he said. Secretary of State Jay Dardenne was the only commission member who opposed the deal. He said the state should not allow the owners to keep the $1.6 million in the maintenance reserve fund. "I have felt, going back a number of years, that the state should acquire the facility by assuming the debt service but not paying the owners," said Dardenne, a former state senator and longtime critic of the deal. "The owners of that facility have done quite well by the state over the years, and I think we have more than fulfilled whatever obligation we have to them."

October 4, 2006 The Advocate
The state wants to buy the infamous Tallulah juvenile prison from its owners, whose politically tinged deal requires the state to keep paying even though its conditions required removal of all the inmates, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Tuesday. “At least we would own it instead of them,” Blanco said about the owners, who were political allies of former Gov. Edwin Edwards. Her chief administrative officer, Jerry Luke LeBlanc, said Tuesday, “We felt the solution would be cheaper for the taxpayers of this state.” Within 30 days, LeBlanc said, a deal should be completed to take over Swanson Correctional Center for Youth-Madison Parish Unit facilities, near Tallulah in the northeast corner of the state. State officials are still considering what to do with the buildings once the state owns them, he said. The 700-bed facility was built by private developers closely aligned with Edwards and paid for with $122.5 million in bonds backed with money out of the state budget. Called the nation’s worst “gladiator school,” Tallulah became the symbol of Louisiana’s broken juvenile justice system, which was rife with violence and poor living conditions. Two class-action lawsuits and worldwide human rights groups claimed the treatment at the adult-style prison prepared youthful offenders for a life of crime. The state closed Swanson and by June 2004 transferred all its juvenile inmates. But the state is required to continue paying $3.4 million annually for the next 15 years under a 1994 agreement among the state Department of Corrections, the City of Tallulah and the private prison developer, Trans-American Development Associates. Edwards was governor at the time. Once that debt is paid, TADA continues to own the facility under the agreement. “The state was saddled with a really horrendous deal from a prior administration,” LeBlanc said. “We’ve been trying to work out of the situation for many years.” The primary owners of TADA are George Fischer, a chief of staff, campaign manager and transportation secretary under former Gov. Edwin Edwards; James Brown, former Tallulah state Sen. Charles Brown’s son; and Verdi Adam, a former state highway official, who had business connections with Fischer.

September 13, 2003
A state inspector general's investigation of the school inside the state's juvenile prison in Tallulah revealed missing computers, a potential case of nepotism and a principal who had juvenile offenders make campaign signs for her unsuccessful School Board campaign. "We consider these findings both singularly and as a whole quite serious, and as such, requiring immediate and unconditional corrective action," state Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard wrote to Inspector General Bill Lynch on May 9. Lynch and his staff completed their report May 9, but the Governor's Office made the report public Friday only after inquiries by The Advocate. Westside Alternative School Principal Clara Durr was put on paid leave from May 2 to May 22 while state education officials conducted a follow-up investigation. Durr is now back on the job and all but one of the 16 computers in question are accounted for, said Cline Jenkins, acting state director of Special School District 1. Jenkins said Friday the department has upgraded inventory control procedures at the school and that no disciplinary action has been taken against Durr as of Friday. Meanwhile, internal department audits of the school's Sunshine Club "flower fund" for ill employees and of Durr's school-issued credit card will be completed and forwarded to the Finance/Audit Committee of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education by Oct. 14, Jenkins said. Westside Alternative High is located behind the razor wire-topped gates of the Tallulah juvenile prison, officially called the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth -- Madison Parish Unit. Like the schools at the state's other juvenile prisons in East Baton Rouge, Monroe and Bridge City, Westside Alternative High is run under the direct jurisdiction of the state Department of Education through Special School District 1. On March 18, inspector general's investigators conducted an inventory of computers at the school, but could not locate 16 computers and two printers, costing more than $30,000, according to the report. Lynch also wrote that Durr improperly commingled the school's public petty cash fund with the employees' private "flower fund" in violation of Department of Education policy. The report also revealed that Durr hired her son for 20 days as a teacher's aide, in apparent violation of the state's nepotism laws, and had a vocational teacher use students to partially build political signs for her unsuccessful campaign for Madison Parish School Board. (The Advocate)

September 11, 2003
With the ceremonial signing Wednesday of the state's Juvenile Justice Reform Act, reform advocates called on the next governor and legislature to enact the reforms called for in the legislation. The reforms include creating a new state agency, the Department of Children, Youth and Juveniles, to be carved from the state corrections, health and social services departments. The legislation signed into law by Gov. Mike Foster also calls for the closure of the state's juvenile prison at Tallulah within the next 18 months. (the Advocate)

June 3, 2003
A much-maligned juvenile prison in Tallulah would undergo minor changes and still accept youthful offenders under a proposal put forth by the state's corrections chief. But one of the chief sponsors of a juvenile justice reform bill, passed Monday and aimed at taking juveniles out of the Tallulah facility, said the proposal defies the will of lawmakers. Department of Corrections Secretary Richard Stalder said the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth-Madison Parish Unit would no longer accept inmates treated as juveniles. Instead, the facility, set up to handle inmates under 21 years old, could still be used for youthful offenders treated as adults by the judicial system, Stalder said. "It really doesn't matter if that adolescent came in as an adult or a juvenile," Stalder said. "He's still the same 18-year-old, and his problems are still the same." The proposal to keep any youthful offenders at the controversial facility drew the ire of Sen. Don Cravins, D-Arnaudville, a sponsor of a juvenile justice reform bill. "He either follows the will and intent of the legislation, or we need to find another alternative for him: looking for another job," Cravins said. The House approved House Bill 2018 on Monday, which requires the state to turn the juvenile prison in Tallulah into an adult prison within 18 months. Along with taking juveniles out of Tallulah, the bill would form a commission to set up a new juvenile justice department, which would pull together entities spread among several state departments, including corrections, education and social services. HB2018, sponsored by Rep. Mitch Landrieu, D-New Orleans, cleared the House 104-0. The Senate previously passed similar legislation. Cravins said the bill should be on Gov. Mike Foster's desk by next week for him to sign into law. "It's a huge day for Louisiana," said David Utter, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, which has pushed to close the prison. The prison houses juveniles convicted in juvenile court who can be held up to their 21st birthday. Under the conversion plan, the facility's educational, therapeutic and life skills units could still be used, Stalder said. "We will transform that facility from one that deals with juveniles from age 17 to 20 to adults 17 to 20," Stalder said after the bill passed. Cravins said the intent of the legislation is to keep all juveniles out of Tallulah, not simply to make a change on paper about who is housed there. Given the near unanimous support for the measures in the House and Senate, Stalder should realize the intent of the legislation, Cravins said. "I guess we're going to have to spell it out for Mr. Stalder in clear, concise terms," Cravins said. "It really doesn't matter what you do with it, just so long as it's not for juvenile services at all." The privately run facility at Tallulah, modeled after adult facilities, has a short, but marred history. A riot broke out almost as soon as it opened; a state takeover occurred in 1999 and allegations of physical abuse and questions of the propriety of the contract between the state and builder/manager Trans-American Development Associates Inc. became public. The primary owners of that company, which will take ownership of the facility once the state pays off the bonds, are George Fischer, a chief of staff, campaign manager and transportation secretary under former Gov. Edwin Edwards; James Brown, son of former Tallulah state Sen. Charles Brown; and Verdi Adam, who had previous business dealings with Fischer. A 2001 legislative auditor's report showed the owners made nearly $9 million in dividends and salaries since 1995. That deal, along with the allegations of abuse at the facility, lent momentum to the push to reform the juvenile justice system, Utter said. The measure passed Monday should spur a further look at the deal the state made with the prison's owners, Utter said. (The Advocate)

May 15, 2003
A compromise proposal to overhaul Louisiana's juvenile justice system by shutting down the much-criticized Tallulah prison and moving to create more rehabilitative programs closer to the communities where young lawbreakers live unanimously passed the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. A centerpiece of the proposal is to close the secure juvenile facility in Tallulah, formally known as the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth-Madison Parish Unit. The operating money spent on the prison and care of the offenders, which by one estimate is $16 million to $20.6 million, would be used to pay for myriad residential, day-treatment and other programs to work with many juvenile delinquents instead of just locking them up. The legislation calls for all juveniles to be moved out of the prison by Dec. 31, 2004, about six months longer than was mandated by another bill that passed the Senate earlier in the day. The governor also would be given an emergency option to keep the facility open until May 31, 2005. Closure of the Tallulah prison in remote northeast Louisiana has become a hot-button issue in recent years, as critics have pointed to what they describe as a pattern of inmate abuse and mistreatment by other inmates and by guards. Also, many of the offenders assigned to the prison are from the New Orleans area and other parts of south Louisiana, making it difficult for the teenagers to stay in touch with parents and other relatives. (The Times-Picaqune)

May 7, 2003
State Sen. C.D. Jones, who represents the Tallulah area, cast the lone vote against closing the juvenile prison. Jones, D-Monroe, said some of the problems at Tallulah are not unique to Tallulah. "I certainly don't want to suggest in any way that I'm not interested in the protection of our children," he said. Jones, saying he also was looking out for the 300-plus employees of the facility, suggested changing the mission to handling offenders age 17 to 21 who have been sentenced as adults. The committee voted against that provision. The big problem in the juvenile system is population density, cautioned Elijah Lewis, assistant secretary for Youth Development for the state Corrections Department. He suggested that closing the Tallulah prison would push more juvenile prisoners together in closer quarters elsewhere. Cravins told Lewis that, after three years of discussions and studies, the Legislature has to act. "I believe the only way you are going to comply with the will of the people of Louisiana is if you are forced to do it by legislative act, period," Cravins said. (The Adovocate)

March 2, 2003
Louisiana officials are negotiating with the owners of the juvenile prison in Tallulah on a deal that would eventually give the state ownership of the troubled youth prison. Under the current agreement, signed in 1994 with the town of Tallulah, the state of Louisiana pays the annual $3.4 million debt service on the prison but will not own the property when the bonds are paid off in 15 years. Instead, the company that contracted with the town to build the prison, Trans-American Development Associates Inc., will own the buildings. Drennen has asked the state's bond attorneys to negotiate with the owners of the prison, officially called the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth, Madison Parish Unit, to change that arrangement, having the state take over the bond indebtedness on the prison. The Foster administration will move to do so, he said, only if the owners agree to give up the prison without getting any extra money on top of the state taking over the debt. That could be a problem for the owners, who also want the state to pay any taxes they incur as a result of the transaction, said David Sherman, an attorney for Trans-American Development Associates. Sherman said he did not know exactly how much those taxes would be but that they could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The owners also want to keep the money they have put into a maintenance fund to pay for major repairs on the property, he said. Of the state's four juvenile prisons, the Tallulah facility has come under particular fire. Foes of the prison want to close it, citing a pattern of inmate abuse, not only when it was operated by Trans-American in the mid-1990s but also after the state took it over in 1999. "I'm shocked that there might be support for buying more prison beds in a state that is overbuilt both in terms of juveniles and adults," said David Utter, an attorney with the Juvenile Justice Project in New Orleans. Lawmakers last spring considered stopping payment on the debt service, looking to use a provision of the agreement obligating the state that allows the Legislature to stop appropriating at any time it deems it necessary. But bond analysts told state officials that move would jeopardize the state's bond rating, signaling that the Louisiana government is unwilling to make good on its debts. (Capital Bureau)

February 17, 2003
Louisiana should close the juvenile prison at Tallulah to make way for a new juvenile justice system that offers more treatment and less incarceration, a top judge and New Orleans lawmaker said Thursday. Tallulah, formerly known as Swanson Correctional Center for Youth, Madison Parish Unit, built in 1994 with a fleet of maximum-security, single cells symbolizes what the state does wrong handling young offenders, they said: It's punitive, expensive and ineffective. "The idea of Tallulah is the problem," said state Rep. Mitch Landrieu, D-New Orleans. Landrieu, who heads a legislative commission formed in 2001 to review juvenile justice, was joined by Orleans Parish Juvenile Court Chief Judge C. Hearn Taylor in blasting Tallulah as a solution to juvenile crime. The judge decried Louisiana's juvenile justice system as one that "produces a place that throws kids through plate-glass windows," a reference to reports of guard-on-inmate abuses at the Tallulah prison. Tallulah opened in 1994 as a for-profit prison. The state took it over in 1999, after a federal civil rights lawsuit found rampant abuse and neglect of the young inmates. (Staff)

September 20, 2002
Agreeing wholeheartedly with advocacy groups calling for juvenile justice reform, five candidates in the race for New Orleans Parish district attorney said Wednesday that the state should close the youth prison at Tallulah and create alternatives to locking up troubled children. Eddie Jordan, James Gray II, Paul Massa and Gary Wainwright met with juvenile advocates at the office of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. Dale Atkins had a scheduling conflict, but said later she also is in agreement. Each endorsed a three-step plan laid out by the Coalition for an Effective Juvenile Justice System, a group of 26 New Orleans organizations. The group invited all eight candidates for the top prosecutor's job to the event, which had been rescheduled from Tuesday. Half of the showed up. The plan calls for closing the 400-bed facility in Tallulah, which holds about 330 juveniles, and putting the money used to house New Orleans juveniles-- an estimated $2.4 million a year-- into local rehabilitation programs. (The Times-Picayune)

May 29, 2002
Escaping a private-prison contract would shackle the state to a horrid bond rating, Commissioner of Administration Mark Drennen warned the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday. The state spends $3.2 million a year to lease a privately owned juvenile prison in Tallulah. "I think we need to know how we're going to exit Tallulah," Sen. Don Cravins, D-Arnaudville, said. "Find a solution so we do not default. We're either in or out. I'd rather be out." If the state's going to make more than $30 million in lease payments until 2019, it might as well go ahead an spend that money on buying the prison, Drennen said. (The Advocate)

May 29, 2002
Cutting off state money for the juvenile prison in Tallulah could hurt Louisiana's bond rating, jeopardizing many construction projects around the state, Gov. Foster's chief financial adviser said Tuesday. Commissioner of Administration Mark Drennen's testimony before the Senate Finance Committee comes as many lawmakers are suggesting closing the Tallulah prison. They cite reports of inmate abuse and say the state's lease to operate the privately owned prison is a bad deal for taxpayers. Although the lease specifies that the Department of Corrections must ask for financing each year, it also contains a provision letting the Legislature get out of the arrangement by not ponying up money in the budget bill. (The Times-Picayune)

May 28, 2002
Almost the entire budget for programs to keep young people from going to prison and to provide shelter for runaway youths is in jeopardy. Also on the table is whether the state should continue financing the juvenile prison in Tallulah, which has been the subject of persistent criticism, said Senate President John Hainkel, R-New Orleans. Many lawmakers, critical of the facility's lease and concerned about complaints inmates have been abused, have agitated to close the prison, perhaps directing many of the nonviolent offenders to community-based programs. "I think there is general agreement that Tallulah was born of parents named avarice and greed, "Hainkel told Corrections Secretary Richard Stadler. The state took over operation of the privately owned facility in 1999, but continues to pay Trans-American Development Associates Inc. rent on the building, which last year came to about $3.2 million. Stalder said bonding agencies have questioned whether a legislative move to stop paying the rent would jeopardize the state's bond rating. (The Times-Picayune)

May 23, 2002
If the Legislature decides to close the controversial youth prison in Tallulah, the administration will need time places for its 400 inmates, Corrections Secretary Richard Stalder said Wednesday. The prison is owned by a private company, Trans-American Development Associates Inc., but the state took over operations in 1999 after reports of rampant abuse there. Some lawmakers say it remains a violent place, and they are chafing to quit paying on the state's operating contract with Trans-American. They have suggested simply not appropriating any more money for the prison as a way to get out of the contract. If the Legislature decides to close Tallulah, the administration has a conditional agreement to but the now-closed youth prison in Jena for $14.5 million from the Wackenhut Corrections Corp. The final decision on buying it will be left to the Legislature. The plan would call for the youths in Tallulah being moved to Jena. But David Utter, director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, said both prisons are doomed. "Both Jena and Tallulah will never run safely because of the small rural parishes they're located in," he said. The small population near the prison often leads to a limited hiring pool of staff who are often not properly trained, critics say. (The Times-Picayune)

May 23, 2002
State Corrections Secretary Richard Stalder said he may have to put juvenile offenders in parish prisons with adult inmates if the state empties the Tallulah juvenile prison without building, buying or leasing adequate cell space elsewhere. Stalder, speaking Wednesday to the state Senate Judiciary B Committee, said he'll need up to three years before he can transfer the last of the 400 juvenile offenders from the for-profit Tallulah prison. Donald M. Fendlason, a 22nd Judicial District judge and president of the Louisiana Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, urged the legislators to reject "Wackenhut's attempt to sell the Jena facility to our state and use your appropriations authority and oversight to force the Department of Corrections to begin developing non-secure alternatives to incarceration immediately." The state Office of Facilities Planning on May 8 signed a 90-day conditional option to purchase the Jena prison for $14.5 million. The Jena deal won't go through without the following conditions: The Legislature must appropriate enough funds to operate the prison, estimated at $10 million a year; the state must raise enough money in bonds to buy the prison; and the plaintiffs in the civil-rights juvenile prison lawsuits must agree to allow the state to house juveniles at the Jena prison. Tim Roche, deputy director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., said states such as Maryland have closed juvenile prisons in far less time than the three years that Stalder said he needs. Key Louisiana legislators expressed a desire to end the Tallulah contract after a legislative audit report revealed last year that the prison's politically connected owners received more than $8.7 million in dividends and salaries since 1995. The report also revealed that the investors will retain ownership of the Tallulah prison when the state's lease expires in 20 years. State Sen. Jay Dardenne, R-Baton Rouge, who called the contract "a bad deal for the state," suggested to Stalder on Wednesday that ending the Tallulah contract should not be tied to buying the Jena prison. Both private prisons, which have separate owners, have troubled histories involving riots and allegations of abuse and neglect. (The Advocate)

May 9, 2002
Lawmakers told corrections officials to present them with a plan for the possible closure of the juvenile prison at Tallulah, where conditions have outraged advocates of young inmates. The request Tuesday came after a lawyer explained that the Legislature can legally terminate the Department of Correction's contract with the private owners of the youth prison, without penalty, simply by suspending funding -- a move advocated by Sen. Don Cravins, D-Arnaudville, chairman of a judiciary committee. The state took over day-to-day operations of the once-private prison in 1999 but continues to lease the building from Trans-American Development Associates through a contract that involves the town of Tallulah. The state pays about $3.2 million a year to run the Tallulah prison, including a lease to cover debt payments owed on the building by Trans-American Development. A number of lawmakers have complained about continuing to pay down the debt on a building that a private company will own when it's paid off. (Leesville Daily Leader News)

May 8, 2002
Louisiana could get out of its legal agreement with owners of the Tallulah juvenile prison simply by not anteing up the money to pay off its debt, a contract lawyer told a Senate panel Tuesday. The focus of much criticism since shortly after it opened as a privately controlled prison in 1994, the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth-Madison Parish Unit is commonly known by its location in Tallulah. After repeated reports of inmate abuse, the Department of Corrections took over operations in 1999 from the owner, Trans-American Development Associates Inc., but some legislators continue to agitate to close it. "It is a scourge to this state," said Sen. Donald Cravins, D-Arnaudville, chairman of the Senate Judiciary B Committee. Closing Tallulah is complicated by the state's contractual agreement to pay $3.2 million every year on the construction debts of Trans-American Development. Even when the debt is retired, Trans-American Development will still own the prison. But Laurence Eisenstein, a Washington lawyer, said the Legislature has the authority under the agreement simply to stop appropriating money, thereby canceling the contract and closing the prison. The Senate committee also heard from parents of former juvenile inmates, who decried the treatment of their children at Tallulah, which houses only boys, and other lock-down institutions. Mary Fontenette of Breaux Bridge, whose son was released from Tallulah this week, said he was knocked down by a guard in March. Grace Bauer of Sulphur said her son was always injured -- whether a broken nose, a black eye or bruises -- when she visited him at Tallulah. (The Times-Picayune)

March 28, 2002
The question of how to reform Louisiana's juvenile justice system played out Wednesday before the state Senate Judiciary B Committee. Should the state close the juvenile prison in Tallulah and spend $20 million to buy and expand the empty prison at Jena? Or, should the state close Tallulah and redirect funding to community programs? David Utter, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, said the Tallulah prison -- officially known as the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth, Madison Campus -- remains an unsafe place for juveniles. The Juvenile Justice Project, a nonprofit law firm, represents some of the plaintiffs in the civil-rights litigation over the state's operation of the juvenile prisons. Stalder said the state is meeting most of the settlement's prison improvement requirements. Utter, however, said violence at the Tallulah prison remains a concern. He said more than 25 percent of the 408 juveniles at the Tallulah prison report to the prison infirmary each month with violence-related injuries. Stalder challenged Utter's assertion, but said he'll investigate it further. The private 700-bed Tallulah prison opened Nov. 18, 1994, but serious problems led to a number of state takeovers before a final, permanent takeover on Sept. 21, 1999. Last year, a state legislative audit report revealed that the prison's private owners received more than $8.7 million in dividends and salaries since 1995. That report led to the Legislature's decision last year to slash $1 million from the $4.4 million proposed for the Tallulah lease. The $3.4 million "barely pays the principal, interest and taxes" that the investors owe on the prison, Verdi Adam of Baton Rouge said last week. Adam, George A. Fischer of Metairie and James R. Brown of Tallulah are the principal investors in FBA, the firm that owns the Tallulah prison. The Legislature can end the contract by voting down the appropriation. "A logical, common-sense decision would be to close the place down," Committee Chairman Cravins said after Wednesday's meeting. During the 2001 regular legislative session, Cravins and state Sen. Noble Ellington, D-Winnsboro, introduced a resolution requesting Stalder to enter into good-faith discussions on the suitability and cost-effectiveness of buying the Jena prison. The 276-bed prison, owned by Wackenhut Corrections Corp. of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., opened in December 1998 and closed April 5, 2000, after serious problems led to a temporary state takeover. Cravins said he originally supported buying the Jena prison because it would be cheaper in the long-run than leasing the Tallulah prison. He has since changed his mind. "When we have to use juveniles as an economic development tool, it's disgraceful," Cravins said of the studies examining the effect of the prisons on the economies of Madison and LaSalle parishes. (The Advocate)

July 1, 2001
The three politically connected owners of the juvenile prison at Tallulah may find themselves hauled before a state Senate committee to explain how they reaped millions of dollars in fees and profits from the prison. The prison owners received more than $8.7 million in dividends and salaries since 1995, at a time when mismanagement led to the eventual state takeover of the prison, according to a May 16 state Legislative Auditor's report. "I was absolutely sickened to see the profiteering that took place at the state's expense," said Sen. Jay Dardenne, a member of the Senate Judiciary B Committee that oversees corrections issues. The audit report also reveals that the day after Trans-American refinanced its debt for an additional $7.6 million in 1997, the company paid the three owners $2 million in dividends. (Sunday Advocate)

May 27, 2001
The juvenile prison at Tallulah is still a monument to bad Louisiana politics and proof that the private sector doesn't always perform better than government. It shows how difficult it can be to undo political shenanigans, even when they're revealed to the public, and how costly they can continue to be, even after it becomes clear the public's interest has not been served. State corrections officials had to step in and take over the troubled private juvenile prison at Tallulah in 1999. Now, two years later, three politically wired allies of former Gov. Edwin Edwards still own the place, and it's still making them richer at the state's expense. This is a rip-off, pure and simple. George Fischer, James Brown and Verdi Adam got the contract to build and operate the prison in the mid-1990s, during Edwards' last administration. Fischer served Edwards as a campaign manager and head of the state highway department, where Adam was a chief engineer. Brown, from Tallulah, was a supporter of the former governor. The three didn't have any experience or background in running a prison. Imagine that. Three politically connected characters got a contract to build and run a private prison for the state, and nobody seems to know exactly who picked them to get the pact. Is this a great state, or what? We continue to believe that privatization of public prisons is very bad public policy. We hope, though, that any future efforts to privatize state government functions will be structured to prohibit the privatizers from continuing to rip off the public if privatization fails. (Sunday Advocate)

May 21, 2001
Although the department of corrections now operates the Tallulah juvenile prison, the private owners of the facility are still raking in money from the state. The three owners, all tied to former Gov. Edwin Edwards, have made nearly $9 million since 1995 and will make $600,000 this fiscal year despite the state takeover of the troubled facility in 1999. In addition, once the construction bonds are paid off with state dollars, the three men will retain ownership of the facility, Legislative Auditor Dan Kyle. The owners, George Fischer, James Brown and Verdi Adam, got the contract to build and operate the private prison in 1994-95 during the last administration of Edwards. No current or former official will take responsibility for selecting those three men to get a contract to build the prison. Also involved in the contracting process was Richard Stalder, who has served as secretary of corrections under Edwards and Gov. Mike Foster. (AP)

West Carroll Detention Center
Epps, Louisiana
Emerald Correctional Management
August 29, 2007 The Huntsville Times
The Alabama Department of Corrections said Tuesday that it will transfer 134 male inmates from a private Louisiana prison to the Limestone Correctional Facility as part of a cost-cutting measure. Prisons Commissioner Richard Allen said the transfer is the first of several required to return more than 1,100 Alabama convicts who are housed out of state. "In an attempt to save taxpayer dollars and eliminate our budget shortfall, we plan to return all out-of-state inmates to Alabama by year's end," Allen said in a prepared statement. "This move will allow us to save an estimated $10 million annually on rented bed space." Prior to Tuesday's transfer, 294 male inmates were housed at the West Carroll Detention Center in Epps, La., at a cost of $26.75 per inmate, per day. Alabama inmates are also kept at the J.B. Evans Correctional Facility, South Louisiana Correctional Center and Perry County Detention Center, all owned and operated by Lafayette, La.-based LCS Corrections Services.

July 22, 2007 Houston Chronicle
The weathered guard tower that looms over the east side of the West Carroll Detention Center here is positioned just a home run away from the village's modest baseball diamond and small public school complex. Requisite cyclone fencing and razor wire surround the perimeter of the compound that can house more then 700 prisoners. And within the walls of the the dingy yellow sheet metal building is a fish house where tilapia are grown. During the past 12 years that the private jail has been operated by Emerald Correctional Management, the approximately 600 residents of this economically challenged northeastern Louisiana town have coexisted peacefully with the medium-security jail. The jail has provided much-needed jobs, while Epps and the surrounding area have provided a source of cheap labor. But with the arrival this month of the first 100 of what is expected to be at least 400 prisoners from the chronically overcrowded and understaffed Harris County Jail, residents and leaders of Epps are taking a closer look at their relationship with the private lockup. Chief among their concerns is the possibility that some of the jail's new inmates might decide to bolt. "It's a half-mile from the high school, so the type of prisoner they're bringing in there concerns me," Mayor Jeff Guice said last week. "I live near the jail, too." Millions to be spent - Harris County began shipping prisoners to the jail as part of efforts to meet Texas' state-mandated prisoner-to-guard ratio of 48-to-1. The county also has spent close to $24 million in guard overtime during the past 16 months. This month, Harris County Commissioner's Court approved spending up to $4 million during the next six months to relocate up to 400 prisoners — and perhaps more — to Epps. Officials with the sheriff's office, which operates the county jail system of more than 9,000 inmates, say that all the prisoners transferred to Louisiana will have been convicted of state jail felonies — nonviolent crimes often involving drug use and with sentences of two years or less. But that information has been slow in making its way to Louisiana. Last week, Epps officials met with about a dozen local residents in a town meeting called in response to the transfer of the big city criminals to this one-traffic-light community. So far, the mayor says, neither he nor the police chief has been able to get information — such as the number of inmates and the crimes for which they were convicted — from the private jail officials or Emerald. "We're trying to get on top of the situation," Guice said. According to the contract between Epps and Emerald, the city "shall have access to all reports and data maintained by Emerald with respect to the operation of the (jail) including, but not limited to, a listing of all inmates and the charges upon which they were convicted." Like the mayor, Police Chief Roosevelt Porter was elected to office in January. He says he is concerned about the qualifications of the guards at the private jail. "I assume they have some training, but I don't know," Porter said. 'Adequate' - Porter's words are of no comfort to Kathelene Donohue, 64, who lives with her three grandchildren, ages 6, 4 and 2, seven miles north of Epps. "He should have known how many prisoners were coming, when they were coming and why they were coming," Donohue said. "It's a private facility and they tell you right up front that they don't have to tell you anything." Both the mayor and chief say they are still reviewing the contract between the city and Emerald. A 2004 Louisiana Department of Corrections audit of the Epps facility described its staffing as "adequate" and stated that inspectors were "totally impressed" with the facility's cleanliness and organization. The audit made no mention of the fish house. Silent on issue - Emerald CEO Clay Lee did not respond to questions about his jail's fish operation. The contract states that all food grown at the jail shall be consumed by inmates and staff or donated to nonprofit charitable organizations. Lee also refused the Chronicle's request for a tour of the jail, saying he was acting on orders of the Harris County Sheriff's Office. HCSO Chief Deputy Mike Smith says Lee was given no such directive. Lee would not discuss the Shreveport-based company's contract with the city of Epps or what the company pays its guards, how many guards the site employs or what qualifications they have. "I'll look so bad in the paper telling you what these guys make, compared to what a correctional officer makes in Texas," Lee said in an earlier interview. A spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Corrections did not return calls about private guard qualifications. Starting pay for Louisiana DOC guards is $1,530 a month — $18,360 a year or about $9.56 an hour — with an increase to $1,700 a month at the end of a six-month training and probationary period, according to the agency's Web site. Few employment options - Though Lee refuses to discuss how much his private guards make, the owners of the only grocery store in Epps say it isn't as much as the Louisiana DOC guards. "We cash (the guard's) paychecks, and I can tell you they make about $6 an hour — or about what we pay our clerks," said Crystal Hale, 33, who runs the Best Way market with her husband, Timmy, 45. The couple describe the area around Epps as "economically depressed" farmland where residents have few employment options beside agriculture. Surrounded by miles and miles of corn fields, Epps is in the lower Mississippi River valley, 400 miles northeast of Houston. Only three of the state jail facilities in Texas are farther from Houston than Epps. But the distance is just one of the hurdles facing anyone making the trip from Houston. In addition to the minimum seven-hour trip by car, visitors must also be preapproved by jail officials. Prisoners must provide background information on any potential visitor. A check is then run on each of those persons, according to jail visitation rules. Visiting hours are from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday — but only on one of the days, not both.

Winn Correctional Center
Shreveport, La
CCA
August 13, 2010 Monroe Free Press
Winn Correctional Center inmate Calvin Walker is back in court a third time requesting that 19th Judicial District Court Judge Wilson Fields enforce his February 19, 2010, ruling ordering Corrections Corporation of America to pay Walker $1,700.00 for jewelry W.N.C. officials unlawfully “took” from Walker in January of 2003. Walker, who is completing the last four months of two consecutive 12-year terms for simple theft successfully proved to the court that his jewelry was “jacked” in an awkward attempt by a Winn Correctional Center shift supervisor to “create” an opportunity to steal (his) watch and ring(s). The Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007-CA-1824, Walker vs. Department of Corrections et al, ruled that Walker’s watch and rings were “arbitrarily and capriciously taken against (his) constitutional rights.” The court also took judicial notice that “The Department of Public Safety and Corrections submitted a forged intake property sheet as their evidence provided by Corrections Corporation of America.” Walker said the jewelry, which he “Kept on his person because of its sentimental value,” were his parent’s marriage rings. They consisted of an 18k gold nugget, one inch width band with one-carat diamond offset center; an 18k gold plain one quarter inch width band with five 0.3carat diamonds totaling 1.5 carats; and an 18kgold nugget one half inch band. “Walker said that it was after being placed in the Administration Segregation lockdown unit on July 29, 2004, Case Manger J. Whitaker and three CCA officers forcibly held me down and stripped me of my clothing this is when they found the rings and seized them.” “Later in the day I saw Unit Manager Christopher Myles and told him how Whitaker and three of his henchmen had ‘gangstered’ my property.” Walker says Myles then summoned Whitaker and ordered him to return Walker’s property or turn the rings over to Property Room Supervisor Connie Brinson, to be inventoried and stored in “my Personal Property Bin.” Whitaker was also instructed to issue Walker a copy of the Personal Property Sheet. Walker said the Personal Property Sheet signed by case manager Whitaker was issued to him. Eight months later Walker says a CCA officer in a casual conversation mentioned that Case Manager Whitaker told him he’d “sold Walkers old rings for $1,500.00.” Walker said he immediately wrote Property Room Supervisor Connie Brinson inquiring “as to whether she received his rings from Whitaker.” On April 20, 2005, the Property Room wrote back, “There are no rings in your property.” In 19th Judicial District Court (Docket #537-071 Section 25 Walker vs. Stalder, et al) Corrections Corporation of America Warden Timothy Wilkinson told the court he had Walker’s rings locked in their security safe. District Judge Wilson Fields then ordered the warden to mail Walker’s jewelry to his relatives. Walker says when asked why the rings had not reached his relatives per the order of the court Wilkinson replied, “F__k the Court, I ain’t giving you sh_t.” Judge Fields then ordered Wilkerson through CCA, to compensate Walker $1,700.00. That order was issued February 10, 2010. Walker says Tim Wilkerson still maintains “the judge’s order means absolutely nothing to him.”

January 19, 2006 Daily Town Talk
Former Winn Correctional Center officer Capt. John Charles Roberts pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of oral sex with an inmate and one count of lying to an FBI agent. The first charge is a civil-rights charge. A prisoner has a constitutional right to be free from sexual assault and sexual abuse. A federal grand jury originally indicted Roberts, 43, on two counts of civil-rights violations, for lying to an FBI agent about it and obstruction of justice. U.S. District Judge Dee D. Drell will sentence Roberts April 26. Roberts faces a maximum sentence of one year in prison, a $250,000 fine or both on the oral sex charge, and five years, a $250,000 fine or both for lying to the FBI agent. Following any imprisonment, Roberts will be on at least three years of supervised probation. A document signed by Roberts states that he coerced an inmate "to perform oral sex," and "if he didn't do it, he would send him to lockdown with dangerous inmates, and no one would hear (the inmate's) screams."

June 24, 2001
One correctional officer has been fired and another suspended for apparent mistakes that allowed two prisoners to escape outside LSU Hospital in Shreveport. Winn Correctional Center authorities declined to identify the officers punished over the escapes on April 18. Inmates Jasen Webb and Buyong Jones fled as they stepped from a van at the hospital for medical appointments. Jones, convicted of manslaughter, was quickly captured. Webb, who was serving 16 years for armed robbery, eluded authorities for two days. He was found hiding under a Shreveport house. An investigation found that Webb and Jones were able to get out of their handcuffs, waist chains and leg irons because Webb had a small handcuff key, Warden Tim Wilkinson said. The investigation also concluded that the two officers transporting the eight inmates failed to follow procedure, Wilkinson said. (AP)