American Service Group
Brentwood, Tennessee
PHS
August 17, 2007 Tennessean
America Service Group Inc. said Thursday that its Prison Health Services subsidiary would lose its contract with the Alabama Department of Corrections. The contract expires on Oct. 31. PHS provides medical services to inmates. Brentwood-based America Service Group said it would update its fourth-quarter earnings estimate later. It had projected revenues from a renewed contract of $12.3 million in the three months ending Dec. 31.

April 12, 2007 Business Wire
America Service Group Inc. (NASDAQ:ASGR) announced today that it has executed an asset purchase agreement for the sale of certain assets of its indirect subsidiary, Secure Pharmacy Plus, LLC (SPP), to Maxor National Pharmacy Services Corporation (Maxor). Additionally, as a part of the transaction, Maxor and Prison Health Services, Inc. (PHS), the Company's primary operating subsidiary, have entered into a long-term pharmacy services agreement pursuant to which Maxor will become the provider of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to PHS. The asset purchase agreement is to be effective April 30, 2007, subject to standard closing conditions. The pharmacy services agreement will commence May 1, 2007, subject to the closing of the asset purchase agreement. America Service Group Inc., based in Brentwood, Tennessee, is a leading provider of correctional healthcare services in the United States. America Service Group Inc., through its subsidiaries, provides a wide range of healthcare and pharmacy programs to government agencies for the medical care of inmates. More information about America Service Group Inc. can be found on the Company's website at www.asgr.com or www.prisonhealthmedia.com.

December 11, 2006 AP
Prison health care and pharmacy service provider America Service Group Inc. lowered its 2006 guidance again on Monday, but said it expects "stronger, more consistent performance from its contract portfolio in 2007." The company now sees adjusted 2006 earnings of $5.3 million, or 50 cents per share, on sales between $640 million and 650 million. In October, the company forecast adjusted earnings in a range of 58 cents to 61 cents per share, on sales between $650 million to $655 million. In August, America Service said it saw profit of 72 cents to 75 cents per share on revenue between $650 million and $660 million for the year. The company said its lower 2006 outlook is due mainly to the Florida Department of Corrections' decision to "reject all bids to provide comprehensive health care services in its Region IV," and to expected cost increases, including professional liability expenses. Looking toward 2007, the company sees adjusted earnings of $8.2 million, or 86 cents per share, on sales in the range of $570 million to $580 million. Shares fell 91 cents, or 5.8 percent, to $14.69 in after-hours trading. The stock had closed unchanged at $15.60 on the Nasdaq.

November 14, 2006 Burlington Free Press
Vermont prisons are looking for a new medical services provider for the second time in three years following a decision by Prison Health Services Inc. to opt out of its contract with the state. Robert Hofmann, state Corrections Department commissioner, said Monday the Tennessee-based Prison Health Services notified him Oct. 30 that it would stop providing care to the state's 1,700 in-state inmates at the end of January. "Obviously, we're disappointed and a little bit surprised," Hofmann said of the company's decision. "There were some bumps in the road at the start of their contract but, really, over the past 12 months, they had been doing a very good job." The company's top three officials in Vermont resigned their posts just 10 months after it began operations in Vermont and the firm, along with the state, was sued last month by the family of an inmate who died from heroin withdrawal symptoms in 2005. Prison Health Services won the three-year, $26 million contract to provide health care to inmates at the state's nine prisons in early 2005. The previous contractor, Correctional Medical Services Inc., had come under fire for $700,000 in billing mistakes, including $144,547 for services that company employees never provided. Susan Morgenstern, a spokeswoman for Prison Health Services, said Monday that the company decided to opt out of the contract at the end of the second year because it was losing too much money. "The cost of providing health care to inmates has risen beyond the contract's ability to cover that cost," Morgenstern said in a statement released by the company. "Prison Health Services will never compromise the quality of our patient care because of financial reasons." According to a company Web site, Prison Health Services lost $1 million on its Vermont contract in the third quarter of 2006 alone, a figure that Hofmann disputed. Morgenstern said the staffing costs were an issue for the company in Vermont.

August 9, 2006 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager's campaign took her opponent, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, to task for taking donations from those pursuing Dane County business. Lautenschlager's aides said that was inconsistent with Falk's statements that as attorney general she would not take money from people subject to enforcement actions by the state Department of Justice. Lautenschlager's campaign blasted Falk for accepting a $10,000 donation June 27 from the political action committee of Unite Here, a laundry workers union. The donation came six days after Dane County started an audit of non-union laundry contractor Superior Health Linens - a company that Unite Here has long criticized for its labor practices. Lautenschlager's campaign also criticized Falk for: • Accepting $1,500 from America Service Group Inc.'s political action committee in 2004 because its subsidiary Prison Health Services has a contract with the county. • Taking $2,500 from Government Payment Service CEO Dale Conrad last year because his firm has a county contract allowing people to pay bail with credit cards. • Receiving money from developers and others who sat on a committee that Falk convened to advise her on a land-use plan.

August 2, 2006 Nashville Business Journal
America Service Group Inc. saw its earnings for the second quarter plummet 81 percent compared to results for the same period last year. The provider of prison health care and pharmacy services showed a profit of $514,000, or 5 cents per diluted share, in the quarter ended June 30 compared to $2.8 million, or 26 cents per diluted share last year. Though earnings were down, the second quarter saw the company return to an operating profit - something that hasn't occurred since the second quarter last year. Nevertheless, the company's stock dropped nearly 19 percent, trading at $11.66 at 10:20 a.m. The 52-week range of the stock is $11.32 to $23.20. Brentwood-based America Service (NASDAQ: ASGR) lowered its guidance and now expects revenues to fall between $650 million and $660 million and earnings to range between $7.7 million to 8 million. The company cited an underperforming Florida Department of Corrections contract as the cause of the reduction. The company's previous guidance called for revenues between $660 million and $680 million and earnings between $9.4 million and $10 million. Second-quarter revenues were on the upswing, coming in at $160 million compared to $139 million in the second quarter a year ago. Expenses increased to $150 million in the quarter compared to $128 million in the second quarter last year. The company also recorded $1.0 million in charges associated with an audit committee investigation of its Secure Pharmacy Plus subsidiary. On March 15, the company said an investigation into financial improprieties at its Secure Pharmacy Plus unit found that the company failed to properly credit customers with discounts, rebates and savings and failed to give customers proper credit for returned pharmaceuticals. Expenses related to the audit amounted to $4.6 million through the first half of this year and the company expects it will spend another $400,000 to $900,000. The company continued its stock repurchase program approved in July of last year to repurchase and retire 217,000 shares at a value of $3.0 million. The repurchase was suspended during part of the second quarter when the company received a third-party proposal to acquire pharmacy services subsidiary Secure Pharmacy Plus. Ultimately, a deal wasn't reached.

June 22, 2006 Tennessean
America Service Group Inc. says it has received notice that its stock won't be dropped from the Nasdaq National Market. Last month, after two directors quit, the Brentwood-based prison health company said it had received notice that it was no longer in compliance with Nasdaq rules requiring a majority of independent directors. On June 14, ASG added four independent directors. On Wednesday, it said Nasdaq had determined the company is now in compliance with rules governing board membership and corporate oversight.

June 14, 2006 Tennessean
Brentwood’s America Service Group Inc., the prison health company whose stock was in danger of being dropped by the Nasdaq National Market, named four new independent members to its board today. The move should bring the company back into compliance with Nasdaq’s rules requiring a certain number of outside directors and allow the stock to continue to be listed, company officials said this afternoon. Two outside directors bolted from America Service Group’s board earlier this year after they unsuccessfully tried to oust CEO Michael Catalano. New board members are: • John C. McCauley, assistant vice chancellor of risk and insurance management at Vanderbilt University. • William E. Hale, formerly president and chief executive of Beech Street Corp., a preferred provider organization. • John W. Gildea, managing director of Gildea Management Co., and a former board member of America Service Group from 1986-1999. • William M. Fenimore, managing partner of BridgeLink LLC, Swiss-based capital advisors.

May 30, 2006 Tennessean
America Service Group Inc., the beleaguered prison health-care company, expects to beat a June 14 deadline to fill at least one vacancy on its board of directors so its stock won't be dropped from the Nasdaq National Market. Under Nasdaq rules, the departure this month of two board members who quit after trying to oust CEO Michael Catalano meant the company no longer complied with a requirement that a majority of its directors be independent. A third independent director left in December. Only two of its four remaining directors have no other ties to the company. ASG has until its next annual meeting, scheduled for June 14, to address the vacancies on its board. Catalano said the company would fill at least two of the three vacant seats by that deadline. "We're confident we'll come back into compliance," he said. But this month's departure of two board members and Nasdaq's threat to drop or delist the Brentwood-based company's stock as a result aren't its only problems. It has come under fire in several states over the quality of medical care it provides to inmates. The Washington Post in an editorial recently called on officials to keep a closer eye on the company's Prison Health Services subsidiary after the Associated Press reported that some inmates in Virginia had said medical care there was so shoddy that they feared for their lives. Last spring, a report by the Metro Health Department blamed the death of a diabetic inmate at Metro Jail on myriad failures by the jail's nurses, who were employed by PHS. Catalano wouldn't comment on the specific allegations against the company but said competitors get similar complaints about the quality of care they provide.

May 19, 2006 Nashville Business Journal
America Service Group Inc. announced today it received an expected notice on May 17 from NASDAQ Listing Qualifications indicating it no longer complies stock exchange's independent director and audit committee requirements. The company received the notification due to the resignation of Michael E. Gallagher and Carol R. Goldberg on May 6 and May 8 from the company's board of directors. NASDAQ rules requires that a majority of board members be comprised of independent directors and that the company's audit committee be comprised of at least three members, each of whom are independent. Gallagher and Goldberg were members of the company's audit committee. The addition of one qualified independent director to serve on the audit committee will allow the company to regain compliance. The company is actively conducting a search for at least two independent directors to serve on its board of directors and audit committee, according to a release announcing the NASDAQ notice. Gallagher is the director of Edgar Group LLC, a health care consulting firm and was a partner in Shamrock Investments LLC, a health care advisory firm. Goldberg is president of AVCAR Group Ltd., a management consulting firm. Brentwood-based America Service (NASDAQ: ASGR - News) provides prison health services through its subsidiaries Prison Health Services and Secure Pharmacy Plus.

May 11, 2006 Tennessean
America Service Group Inc. says two members of its board quit after saying they'd lost confidence in the company's chief executive officer. Michael Gallagher, who led the board's audit committee, which recently looked into mismanagement at the company's prison pharmacy unit, submitted his resignation on Friday. Carol Goldberg, who led the board's compensation com- mittee, resigned on Monday. Brentwood-based ASG, which is being sued by shareholders in federal court over the problems at its Secure Pharmacy Plus subsidiary, disclosed the resignations in a regulatory filing after the markets closed Tuesday. According to the filing, the company's remaining board members met Tuesday and "confirmed their view that the company's chief executive officer should continue to serve in that capacity." CEO Michael Catalano, who chairs the board, "abstained from consideration of this matter," the company said in its filing. On Wednesday, Catalano said in a statement that the company wouldn't allow itself to become distracted by the developments. "While the public filings from America Service Group Inc. speak to the issues of two directors' resignations, I think it is important to know that our focus remains unchanged," Catalano said. "The dedicated health-care professionals representing our company are committed to the mission of providing quality medical care to the patients we serve in jails and prisons nationwide." Gallagher and Goldberg, who couldn't be reached yesterday, told a meeting of the board's governance committee they believed "the company would be better served by replacing its chief executive." Gallagher apparently resigned soon after the meeting. Goldberg e-mailed her resignation letter to the company on Monday. She said simply, "I hereby tender my resignation as a director of America Service Group Inc., effective today. I wish the company the best in its future endeavors." In his letter, Gallagher wrote that because "my fellow independent board members are unwilling to make a change … I have no other alternative but to hold true to the courage of my convictions and resign. "It is my business judgment that while there are many good people in the executive ranks of the company there nonetheless needs to be a change at the top," Gallagher said. "Such change is urgently needed in order to maximize the probability of successfully meeting the company's challenges and to ensure the full implementation of the recommendations resulting from the recent investigation (into Secure Pharmacy Plus)," he said. In March, the company said the audit committee recommended strengthening the company's internal controls and compliance functions after finding that problems at Secure Pharmacy Plus caused the company as a whole to post inflated earnings over a four-and-a-half-year period. ASG, which provides health services at jails and prisons nationwide, said that problems with the subsidiary had caused the company as a whole to overstate profits by $2.1 million for 2001 through the second quarter of 2005. It also agreed to refund $3.6 million to clients who were overcharged for prescription drugs. It found that some clients weren't properly credited with discounts or rebates on drug purchases and others weren't properly credited for prescription drugs that were returned. The resignation of two board members was "just one of those unfortunate things following a hard year," said Anton Hie, an analyst with Jefferies & Co. in Nashville. In a research note to clients, he maintained his "hold" rating on the stock. ASG said in its quarterly earnings filing on Wednesday that it had 104 health-care and pharmacy contracts as of April 1, five fewer than it had a year earlier. It posted a net loss of about $1.1 million in the first quarter, compared with a profit of $3.9 million in the first quarter of 2005. Still, shares of the company were up Wednesday, climbing 44 cents, or 3.4 percent, in moderate trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market to close at $13.42 a share, well below its 52-week high of $23.81.

May 3, 2006 Nashville Business Journal
Prison health services provider America Service Group Inc.'s troubles with its Secure Pharmacy Plus business helped push the company into a first-quarter loss. The company posted a loss of $1.4 million in the quarter ended March 31 compared to a profit of $3.9 million in the first quarter a year ago. Revenue from health care services were up nearly 26 percent to $167 million, but expenses to provide those services rose nearly 30 percent. Further denting the first-quarter numbers was a $3.6 million charge associated with an audit committee investigation into financial improprieties at Secure Pharmacy Plus. Brentwood-based America Service (NASDAQ: ASGR) expects to record another $200,000 to $700,000 in expenses related to the audit this year. That audit found that the company failed to properly credit customers with discounts, rebates and savings and failed to give customers proper credit for returned pharmaceuticals. The investigation also found that SPP inappropriately created reserves over the past five years to ensure the company's reported earnings matched budgeted results. The company restated its earnings going back to 2001. Excluding that charge, income from operations prior to income tax, interest and discontinued operations, would have been $2.4 million. Income from operations in the first quarter a year ago amounted to $6.2 million. The company also saw a $1.6 million increase in selling, general and administrative expenses, with $1 million of that coming from share-based compensation expense. The company has affirmed its guidance for 2006 and expects total revenue to be in the range of $660 million to $680 million. Earnings per diluted share are expected to be in the range of 90 cents to 96 cents. The revised 2005 number was 39 cents.

April 11, 2006 Nashville City Paper
A Brentwood prison health company’s announcement that it will restate earnings because of internal problems in its pharmacy subsidiary has spawned a shareholders’ lawsuit by a union pension fund. The Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 51 Pension Fund filed the suit last week in U.S. District Court in Nashville against America Service Group, which provides health care services to prisons. The complaint stems from the company’s March 15 disclosure of an internal investigation that uncovered several problems with its Secure Pharmacy Plus (SPP) subsidiary, which contracts with governments to distribute medications to inmates. The announcement “shocked the market,” the suit states. The company’s stock price fell nearly 29 percent, or $5.65 per share, to close at $13.95. The pension fund claims that America Service Group, through its public statements and filings, knowingly misled shareholders about the company’s financial health, which artificially inflated ASG’s common stock. The pension fund’s law firms — Barrett, Johnston & Parsley of Nashville and Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia, Geller, Rudman & Robbins of New York — are seeking class-action status on behalf of shareholders of common stock between Sept. 24, 2003, and March 16, 2006. The suit asks for unspecified damages.

April 7, 2006 Tennessean
The law firm of Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP said yesterday that a potential class-action lawsuit has been filed in federal court here on behalf of investors who bought stock in America Service Group Inc. between Sept. 24, 2003, and March 16, 2006. Attorneys said the suit stems from the Brentwood-based prison health services company's internal investigation into the business practices of its Secure Pharmacy Plus subsidiary. Last month, ASG said an investigation into the unit had caused the company as a whole to overstate profits by $2.1 million for 2001 through the second quarter of 2005. ASG also said it would refund $3.6 million to clients who were overcharged for prescription drugs. It found that some clients weren't properly credited with discounts or rebates on drug purchases and others weren't properly credited for prescription drugs that were returned.

March 29, 2006 Tennessean
Brentwood-based America Service Group Inc. has named Richard Hallworth as chief operating officer. He will also serve as president and chief executive officer of the company's wholly owned subsidiary, Prison Health Services Inc. Hallworth previously held several executive positions with Tufts Health Plan, a managed care company. He began his career as a certified public accountant, first with Coopers & Lybrand and then as a partner with Ernst & Young LLP. He will replace former executive vice president Trey Hartman as president of Prison Health Services, which provides medical care to jail and prison inmates. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, America Service Group said Hartman was fired for cause in December in connection with an internal probe into whether the company’s Secure Pharmacy Plus subsidiary had overcharged for drugs and failed to follow proper accounting procedures. Hartman was a former head of the pharmacy unit.

March 16, 2006 Nashville Business Journal
Prison health care services company America Service Group Inc. has released the findings of an internal investigation into financial improprieties at its Secure Pharmacy Plus subsidiary. The results: restated earnings going back to 2001, a stock price plunge and a $3.7 million bill for the investigation. Last October, the company announced that the audit committee of its board of directors would conduct an investigation of SPP over pharmaceutical pricing and accounting practices. Independent forensic accountants conducted the investigation and found that SPP failed to properly credit customers with discounts, rebates and savings and failed to give customers proper credit for returned pharmaceuticals. Brentwood-based America Service (NASDAQ: ASGRE) plans to refund $3.6 million, plus interest, to customers as a result. Management of SPP also inappropriately created reserves over the past five years to ensure the company's reported earnings matched budgeted results. Auditors determined the company's pre-tax income was $355,000 higher than previously reported. Auditors also found that SPP charged some of its customers less than it should have to the tune of $5.9 million. The company will try to collect that money, but is uncertain of how much success it will have doing so. The news slammed America Service shares. At 12:40 p.m., they were trading at $13.90, down more than 29 percent their closing price Wednesday. The 52-week range of the stock is $12 to $26.10. On Dec. 7, the company fired Grant Bryson, president and CEO of SPP, in connection with the investigation. Two days later, it sent packing Trey Hartman, president and chief operating officer of Prison Health Services Inc., a move also connected with the investigation. Hartman was with SPP when America Service bought the company in 2000. Kendall Lynch is now CEO of SPP. In a statement announcing the results of the investigation, America Service said both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee are conducting informal inquiries. The company says it will continue to cooperate with both. As it wrapped up its own investigation, the company had delayed reporting its third-quarter results. Those financials were released after the market closed March 15 along with fourth-quarter and full-year numbers and restated earnings going back to 2001. Fourth-quarter results show America Service with a loss of $1.2 million compared to restated earnings of $4.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2004. Revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 came to $149 million compared to $130 million the year before. The fourth-quarter loss includes $3.3 million in expenses related to the investigation. During the third quarter ended Sept. 30, the company also posted a loss of $1.2 million compared to restated earnings of $81,000 last year. Revenue for the quarter came to $140 million compared to $135 million last year. Third-quarter results include $370,000 in expenses related to the investigation. Other restated earnings: The company's earnings for the first two quarters of 2005 were $6.7 million instead of the $7.1 million that was reported. Revenues for the two-quarter period were $273 million instead of $315 million. In 2004, the company had a profit of $9.9 million instead of the $9 million that was reported. Revenues for the year were $517 million instead of $665 million. Earnings in 2003 were $11.3 million instead of the previously reported $11.9 million. Revenues for the year were $380 million instead of $517 million. In 2002, the company's profit was $11.3 million instead of $11.9 million. Revenue for the year was $293 million instead of $410 million. The company's loss in 2001 was $46.5 million rather than the reported $45 million. Revenue for the year was $299 million instead of $397 million.

January 16, 2006 Tennessean
Prison health care services provider America Service Group Inc. will continue to be listed on NASDAQ. The company had received notice from the stock exchange in November that it was subject to delisting because it had failed to make timely financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company delayed its third quarter financial reports pending the conclusion of an internal investigation by its audit committee of a subsidiary, Secure Pharmacy Plus. On Jan. 10, the company received a letter from NASDAQ that it would continue to be listed on the exchange provided it files its quarterly report for the third quarter ended Sept. 30 by March 15, according to a statement released by the company. The company also must provide the final report of the internal investigation by Feb. 28. The investigation was to "determine whether SPP provided pricing of pharmaceuticals in accordance with" client contracts and whether accruals and reserves maintained by the company were in line with accounting principles, according to a Oct. 24 statement by the company. America Service Group fired Grant Bryson, president and CEO of Secure Pharmacy, on Dec. 7 in connection with the internal investigation. On Dec. 9, the company also fired Trey Hartman, president and chief operating officer of Prison Health Services Inc. His termination also was based on the ongoing internal investigation. Hartman formerly served as the head of Secure Pharmacy. The trading symbol for the company currently is "ASGRE." The "E" will be removed from the trading symbol when the company has fully complied with NASDAQ filing requirements.

December 13, 2005 Tennessean
Brentwood-based America Service Group Inc. said today that it has fired two people in connection with an ongoing investigation into the billing practices of its prison pharmacy subsidiary. The company fired Trey Hartman, its executive vice president, on Dec. 9 and Grant Bryson, head of Secure Pharmacy Plus, on Dec. 7. Hartman also was president and chief operating officer of Prison Health Services, which provides medical services to jail and prison inmates. He previously ran America Service Group's pharmacy unit. The company said Hartman and Bryson were terminated for cause. Bryson had been on paid leave. He wasn't an executive officer of the company. America Service Group also said that Richard M. Mastaler would resign from the company's board of directors on Dec. 30 to pursue other interests. The company said his resignation is unrelated to its internal investigation of the pharmacy unit. The company announced in October that it was looking into whether its pharmacy operation overcharged for drugs and failed to follow proper accounting procedures. It said its audit committee had hired outside counsel who, in turn, had brought in a team of independent auditors to review the books of Secure Pharmacy Plus. Secure Pharmacy's former controller, who recently resigned, had identified the issues that are under investigation, the company said.

November 17, 2005 Tennessean
NASDAQ notified the company on Nov. 11 that its stock may be delisted because of a delay in filing its third-quarter report. ASG announced late Monday that it had received the notice. It informed the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The Brentwood-based jail and prison health-care company said on Nov. 9 that it would be late in filing its quarterly financial report because of a previously announced internal investigation into a pharmacy subsidiary. On Tuesday, the company's stock symbol changed from "ASGR" to "ASGRE." Shares in the company were at $16.27, down 83 cents, or 4.85%, in early trading today. If the company is dropped from the stock exchange, its shares would be traded over the counter. Some institutional investors have policies against owning shares in companies that aren't traded on one of the major exchanges, analyst Anton Hie said. If these investors are forced to sell a large amount of stock, the price would probably fall sharply, said Hie, an analyst with Jefferies & Co. in Nashville.

October 25, 2005 Tennessean
Shares in America Service Group Inc. plunged 28% yesterday on news that the company is looking into whether its pharmacy unit overcharged for drugs and failed to follow proper accounting procedures. The Brentwood-based prison health-care company said its audit committee had hired outside counsel who, in turn, had brought in a team of independent auditors to review the books of Secure Pharmacy Plus. Secure Pharmacy's former controller, who recently resigned, had identified the issues that are under investigation, the company said. The unit's president, Grant Bryson, has been placed on paid leave. America Service Group didn't name the former controller, and there was no controller listed on the unit's Web site yesterday, but an earlier version of the site, saved on www.google.com, identified him as Randy Beaman. Beaman would not comment on issues under investigation. Because of the probe, America Service Group has withdrawn its earlier financial guidance and warned that it will delay filing its quarterly earnings report.

October 24, 2005 Tennessean
America Service Group Inc.'s stock tumbled in early trading today on the disclosure that its audit committee is investigating the company's pharmacy subsidiary. The Brentwood-based prison health company said in a news release this morning that the inquiry is being conducted to determine whether Secure Pharmacy Plus is providing pricing of prescription drugs in accordance with the terms of its contracts. America Service Group also is looking into whether some of the unit's financial accounts were established and utilized in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. By mid-morning, the company's stock was trading at $13.31 a share, down $4.85, or nearly 27%, from Friday's closing price of $18.16 on the NASDAQ Stock Market. Jeffries & Company analysts Anton Hie downgraded the stock to "hold" from "buy" and lowered his target price to $20 from $22.50. The internal investigation is only the latest setback for America Service Group. Since its stock closed at $30 a share in February, the price has dropped on a string of bad news beginning with a series in The New York Times that month that claimed the company's care was "flawed and sometimes lethal." It also has lost several large contracts since the first of the year, including one to treat inmates at Nashville's Metro Jail. The company's nurses were blamed in the death of a diabetic inmate there last winter.

October 24, 2005 Yahoo
America Service Group Inc. (NASDAQ:ASGR - News) announced today that the Audit Committee of its Board of Directors is conducting an internal investigation into certain matters related to its subsidiary, Secure Pharmacy Plus ("SPP"). The Company said the investigation primarily is being conducted to determine whether SPP provided pricing of pharmaceuticals in accordance with applicable client contract terms and whether some of the accruals and reserves maintained by SPP were established and utilized in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. "We take allegations of impropriety very seriously, and we are conducting a thorough investigative process to determine if the issues described in this press release, as well as any other issues which may be identified as a result of the investigation, will impact the Company's previously reported financial results," said Michael Gallagher, a member of the Company's Board of Directors and Chairman of its Audit Committee. "We will report on our findings as soon as the investigation is complete." Secure Pharmacy Plus provides pharmacy services to the Company, in facilities where the Company provides correctional medical services, as well as to third party clients who provide their own correctional medical services. The Audit Committee's inquiry into whether SPP charged its clients in accordance with applicable contract terms includes reviewing whether discounts received from wholesalers, rebates received from manufacturers or wholesalers, certain temporary price reductions from alternate vendors and distributions received from a group purchasing organization of which SPP is a member should have been credited, under the terms of the contracts, to such clients. The Audit Committee also is examining whether returns of unused pharmaceuticals were appropriately credited to clients.

September 25, 2005 Tennessean
America Service Group Inc., whose business is built around providing care for sick or injured inmates, is having a rough year. Or, it's doing OK. It depends on your point of view. Since its stock closed at $30 a share in February, the price has fallen about 45% on a run of bad news — beginning with a series in The New York Times that month that claimed the company's care was "flawed and sometimes lethal." Based in Brentwood, the company has lost at least six contracts since the first of the year, including one to treat inmates at Nashville's Metro Jail. The company's nurses were blamed in the death of a diabetic inmate there last winter. Recently, it warned Wall Street of lower profits. Originally, the company expected to earn $1.45 to $1.52 a share on the year, but last month, on a Friday night, it disclosed the loss of yet another contract and lowered its earnings estimate by 2 cents. Its stock fell an additional 8% the following Monday. Only about a third of the country's correctional health services are provided by for-profit companies, said Michael Catalano, America Service Group's chairman, president and chief executive. But every year, more agencies privatize their medical services in hopes of reducing costs and improving the quality of care. It's not clear whether privatization improves the quality of correctional care; but since the 1970s, a growing number of public officials have decided that "it's much easier to turn it over to a health consortium, and they can handle the whole nine yards," said Ken Kerle, managing editor of American Jail, the magazine of the American Jail Association. America Service Group has 21% of the outsourced correctional health market, behind Correctional Medical Services, which has an estimated 22%, Catalano said. CMS, a privately held company based in St. Louis, underbid America Service Group by about 10% in Maryland, about 14% in Idaho and about 21% in Indiana. Catalano said he doesn't understand why CMS believes it can provide adequate care for less money. "We're there providing services," he said. "We know what it costs." Catalano said, "The most significant rebids we haven't won this year have been based upon price." But this month in South Carolina, the Richland County Council voted unanimously to fire Prison Health Services after the deaths of three mentally ill inmates. One council member told The State newspaper of Columbia the treatment of the prisoners was "unacceptable and inhumane." Richland County officials didn't return calls to The Tennessean. And locally, the company's contract with Metro Jail will be allowed to expire Sept. 30. In March, a city government report blamed the Jan. 19 death of a diabetic inmate on a "failure to adhere to established practices on the part of individual employees of Prison Health Services." Claims of poor medical care are common throughout the correctional health industry. Correct Care Solutions, the Nashville company replacing Prison Health Servicesat Metro Jail, was criticized by the family of a Virginia woman who died in July in a Norfolk jail. Relatives said she complained that her pneumonia wasn't being treated. Officials said the company wasn't to blame. A month earlier, the American Civil Liberties Union sued CMS, alleging that inmates of a Mississippi prison were misdiagnosed and received poor care.

July 3, 2005 The Tennessean
America Service Group couldn't seem to catch a break in the second quarter. Its stock fell 28.4% in the three months ended June 30, shoved lower by troubles that unnerved many investors and left the health-services company lying near the bottom of the Bloomberg Tennessee Index.  Of 73 businesses on the list, onlyonefell harder in the period.  "ASGR has had a tough 2005 so far," analyst Anton Hie said, referring to the Brentwood-based company by its stock symbol.  Its stock took a hit in the first quarter after The New York Times ran several stories questioningthe quality of care provided by its Prison Health Services subsidiary, which cares for inmates.  But investors really started to worry in the most recent three months, as the company announced the loss of lucrative contracts with the Maryland, Idaho and Indiana prison systems.  He said ASGR's greatest challenge, at least in the short term, could be aggressive bidding by one of its competitors, Correctional Medical Services.  CMS, based in St. Louis, is privately held, meaning it doesn't have the legal and auditing costs associated with filing quarterly earnings reports, Hie said.  Patrick Swindle, an analyst with Avondale Partners in Nashville, said CMS also doesn't have to please investors by posting ever-increasing quarterly earnings.  "What a private company can do," Swindle said, "is take lower margins in the short term, hoping to improve those margins in time."  CMS underbid ASGR in Maryland and Idaho and is likely to replace the company in Indiana, as well, Swindle said.  One issue that has affected the company's stock but shouldn't affect its ability to win business in the future is negative news about the company.   In a front-page story in February, The Times reported that a yearlong investigation into the company's operations had found numerous examples "of medical care that has been flawed and sometimes lethal."  "The company's performance around the nation has provoked criticism from judges and sheriffs, lawsuits from inmates' families and whistle-blowers and condemnations by federal, state and local authorities," the newspaper said.  Locally, the Metro Health Department concluded recently that the death of a diabetic inmate at the Metro Jail in January could have been prevented if nurses working for Prison Health Services had followed procedures. The report said nurses failed to properly document the patient's medical problems when he was booked, lost track of his medical history and ignored repeated requests for help.

Board of Probation and Parole
STOP
February 1, 2005 Tennessean
A state contract for satellite tracking of 600 sex and violent offenders will go up for bid a second time after a protest by a company chaired by the former chief executive officer of Corrections Corporation of America. Satellite Tracking of People LLC's challenge of plans for an award to rival Sentinel Offender Services has delayed start of the pilot project. ''We were anticipating it being up and running,'' said John W. Carney Jr., district attorney general for Montgomery and Robertson counties. Nashville-based STOP was among four bidders under the first request for proposals. STOP's chairman is Doctor Crants, co-founder of prison operator CCA. After the state's Board of Probation and Parole decided Sentinel had the best program, STOP protested. STOP, meanwhile, also sued another bidder, Pro Tech Monitoring of Odessa, Fla., last week. STOP's suit seeks to block Pro Tech from offering a rival product that STOP claims violates its patent. The patent in question was inherited through STOP's purchase earlier this year of a business called VeriTracks from defense contractor General Dynamics.

Brentwood Patrol
Forest Hills, Tennessee
September 3, 2003
The president of a private security firm at the center of a federal civil-rights lawsuit contends that he has ''nothing to hide'' as lawyers and state regulators begin combing through the firm's hiring practices and patrol activities.  A security guard for Brentwood Patrol was arrested last year after he was charged with rape and kidnapping. Metro police say that in August 2002, Loren Janosky flashed his green lights at a motorist, pulled her over, and after purportedly arresting her on DUI charges, took her to a Forest Hills swim club where he raped her. His jury trial is scheduled for November.  One past employee listed in the suit, Joseph Lee Bernell Bryant, had worked for Brentwood Patrol in 1993-94. After that, he worked for another security company. While employed at Integrity Security, he was charged with raping a colleague and was later convicted. Before his employment at Brentwood Patrol, court records show, he had amassed a lengthy criminal record in the 1980s.  (Tennessean.com)

Chad Youth Enhancement Center
Clarksville, Tennessee
Universal Health Services (formerly run by Keystone Education and Youth Services)
October 12, 2007 The Tennessean
A troubled Philadelphia, Pa., teen who was sent to a Tennessee youth center for treatment died of strangulation after a confrontation with staff members, a coroner found. The death of Omega Leach, 17, was ruled a homicide, according to the autopsy report by state medical examiner Bruce Levy. He found that Leach had multiple hemorrhages of his neck muscles after a struggle with two staff members at the Chad Youth Enhancement Center in Clarksville, Tenn. A grand jury in Montgomery County will have to decide if charges are warranted, said Ted Denny, a spokesman for the county sheriff's office. The Philadelphia Department of Human Services has sent scores of emotionally troubled youngsters to Chad since 2001, saying no Pennsylvania facility would take them. Leach's death on June 3 prompted city officials to begin removing children from Chad, but eight still remain there, a city official told The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday. The autopsy found other scrapes and bruises on Leach's body, but also noted that the teen's enlarged heart contributed to his death. Tennessee child-welfare officials have already cited Chad in the Leach case, saying staff members needlessly provoked him.

August 6, 2007 AP
A Pennsylvania family court judge has begun removing troubled Philadelphia children from a controversial treatment center in Montgomery County, Tenn., where a 17-year-old resident died after a confrontation with staff. The children were sent to the Chad Youth Enhancement Center in Montgomery County by Philadelphia's Department of Human Services, even though an agency official who visited the facility in 2005 concluded that "residents were being harshly and improperly restrained." Chad leaders rebuked -- The family court's top judge, Kevin Dougherty, ordered six Philadelphia children discharged from Chad on Friday, and more hearings are planned. Dougherty said he harshly rebuked Chad leaders in court. "I told them I was not sending another kid down there," he told The Philadelphia Inquirer for Sunday's editions. "They were too aggressive." Philadelphia has sent scores of emotionally troubled youngsters to the center since 2001, saying it has been forced to do so because no Pennsylvania facility would take them. It has paid Chad $6 million in the past three years. A 14-year-old Long Island, N.Y., girl died of heart failure at Chad in 2005 after a confrontation with staff. Then in June, Omega Leach of Philadelphia died after Chad staff physically restrained him, pushing him face-down to the floor and apparently cutting off his air, investigators said. On the day Leach died, Philadelphia had 44 children and teens in Chad, all under city oversight. The Philadelphians — some from abusive homes, others with arrest records — made up the biggest share of 85 residents who slept, attended school and got therapy at Chad. Arthur C. Evans Jr., the acting human services commissioner, said his agency's oversight of Chad was unacceptable. The department has come under harsh criticism and has seen an administrative shake-up after Inquirer reports detailing the number of children who have died under its watch. Center defends its staff -- Chad spokesman Nick Ragone said in a statement Friday that staff put youngsters in physical holds only as a last resort to protect them or others. Moreover, he said, Chad worked zealously to train its staff and responded quickly to issues raised by Tennessee regulators.

August 5, 2007 Philadelphia Inquirer
In March 2005, a man called the Philadelphia child-abuse hotline with a warning: His coworkers were using "improper and illegal" force against city youngsters sent to the Chad Youth Enhancement Center. In June 2005, a Philadelphia child-care investigator learned that a staffer at the Tennessee center had been fired after he allegedly slammed a boy to the floor so hard the child fouled himself. In September 2005, the city was told that a 14-year-old girl from Long Island, N.Y., had dropped dead of a heart attack after a confrontation with staff. While an investigation cleared Chad of blame in the death, New York and Tennessee stopped sending children to the residential treatment center. But Philadelphia, despite a drumbeat of warnings that children were being violently subdued and injured, continued to send emotionally troubled children to Chad. The city's Department of Human Services stuck with Chad even after a top DHS official concluded that "residents were being harshly and improperly restrained." Not until the June death of 17-year-old Philadelphian Omega Leach did the city finally lose faith. In a physical restraint gone wrong, Leach died after Chad staff pushed him face-down to the floor, apparently cutting off his air, investigators say. When done safely, restraints can calm youths who are out of control and prevent children from hurting themselves or others. But when they go wrong, these "holds" can be brutal. They can dislocate a shoulder, split a chin or snap an arm. In extreme cases, they can kill. On the day Leach died, Philadelphia had 44 children and teens in Chad, all under DHS oversight. The Philadelphians - some from abusive homes, others with arrest records - made up the biggest share of 85 residents who slept, attended school and got therapy at Chad. Since 2001, the city has sent scores of youngsters to the center, saying it has been forced to do so because no Pennsylvania facility would take them. It has paid Chad $6 million in the last three years. Arthur C. Evans Jr., the acting DHS commissioner, took command late last year after Mayor Street ousted its top official following an Inquirer investigation into a string of child deaths in Philadelphia. "A good facility should not rely on restraints," Evans said. "This is really unacceptable." Further, he said, his agency's oversight of Chad was also unacceptable. Nick Ragone, a Chad spokesman, said in a statement Friday that the facility put youngsters in physical holds only as a last resort to protect them or others. Moreover, he said, Chad worked zealously to train its staff and responded quickly to issues raised by regulators. Last week, as a result of Leach's death, Philadelphia began Family Court hearings in a first step to pull children out of Chad. The court's top judge, Kevin Dougherty, said Friday that he had harshly rebuked Chad leaders in court. "I told them I was not sending another kid down there," he said. "They were too aggressive." On Friday, Dougherty ordered six children discharged from Chad, with more hearings to come. The Inquirer has obtained hundreds of regulatory documents about Chad, drawn from government files in Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Based on these records and interviews with former Chad staff, regulatory officials in both states, and former Chad residents and their families, the newspaper found: Chad's workers resorted to physical force at high rates - rates experts term excessive. By Chad's own count, filed with Tennessee officials, its workers used 104 holds in one month alone in 2006. Chad staff would on occasion hold residents down for long periods - even though experts warn that deaths can occur within six minutes of a hold. In May, Chad reported one floor-hold that lasted 23 minutes, and others that lasted 20 and 15 minutes. Tennessee repeatedly cited Chad for failing to tell its regulators about children who had been injured there. In one case, the state learned that three residents had tried to strangle another only when the victim's mother called police, records show. Philadelphia acknowledges it never reviewed Tennessee licensing documents about Chad, which would have revealed the center's heavy reliance on physical holds. No tour permitted -- Set in rolling hills about 40 miles west of Nashville, Chad was refashioned out of a former county nursing home. The 20-acre site is surrounded by horse farms and not far from Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne Division across the Kentucky state line. When a reporter drove up its 800-yard entranceway recently, John McDuffie, a top administrator at Chad, emerged from its offices before his visitor could reach the front door. He said no one at the facility would answer questions or provide a tour. Chad was founded in 1996 by a psychologist, Robert D. Glasner, who named it after a son who had died young in a car crash. It is owned by a King of Prussia for-profit corporation, Universal Health Services Inc. UHS, which owns 110 mental-health facilities in 33 states, bought Chad in the fall of 2005, paying $210 million for Chad and 29 other centers. Chad has a gym, a classroom building and three dorms, where residents live two to a room. Boys range in age from 7 to 17, girls from 13 to 17. When the youths arrive, they sign a form acknowledging that, if they misbehave, they may be put in a "protective hold." Leach signed his May 2, his first day there. During holds, staff members restrain children by locking the residents' hands behind their backs. Sometimes, the children are held upright, or against a wall. In more serious cases, they are put to the floor, face-down. Such holds are controversial. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Rendell's administration has been on a crusade to all but eliminate physical holds in psychiatric hospitals, mental-health centers, reform schools and the like. Instead, public welfare secretary Estelle Richman is pushing facilities to get control of unruly residents with conversation or by isolating them in a quiet space. In interviews, experts and advocates said the sheer number of holds Chad used on children appeared troubling. "I worry about the culture of the facility. Why is it so restraint-happy?" asked Michael Carter, a lawyer with the federally funded Disability Law and Advocacy Center of Tennessee. His staff has been investigating Leach's death. When presented with the "restraint logs" from Chad, DHS Commissioner Evans agreed. He said the data reflected a workplace culture with few alternatives for calming residents or gaining control. "That, to me, is just not acceptable," Evans said last week. "One thing I can't and will never tolerate is the mistreatment of children." Evans said DHS had failed to recognize Chad's problems soon enough. In response to recent reports about Chad's performance, he said, he reassigned the man who oversaw contracts for DHS, Steven C. Oakman. Oakman did not respond to requests for comment in telephone calls and a letter left at his house. In his statement, Chad spokesman Ragone disputed the data showing a high number of holds at Chad. He said the figures reflected a wide variety of "hands-on" contact by staff with residents, not just the most serious interventions. Kim J. Masters, a child psychiatrist who wrote the guidelines on restraints for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said he was struck by Chad's data showing as many as 100 holds in a month. "That's a lot," he said. When he took charge some years ago at one center - larger than Chad - Masters considered its tally of 100 restraints a year to be "out of control." Its staff now do about two per month. A high number of restraints, Masters said, reflects "a coercive environment that says, 'You have to do this or else.' " Such techniques rarely work and may backfire, he said. "Kids act out when they don't feel safe," Masters said. "And they don't feel safe when they're being restrained all the time." A litany of problems -- Regulatory files on Chad are publicly available in the state capital in Nashville and show a history of problems. In 2004, for example, Tennessee officials wrote: "Serious incident reports revealed that the agency uses what appears to be an excessive number of physical restraints." That year, Chad admitted that a worker had to be pulled off a resident after the staffer threw 16-year-old John T. Boy against a wall. The worker said he had "overacted" and apologized, records show. Chad acknowledged that the aide had had "problems like this two or three times in the past" and said he would be fired "once they found someone to take his place." In an interview in Tennessee, Boy's mother said she had been astounded that Chad kept the worker on. "They did not care about kids at this facility," Sharon Pruett said. "It needs to be shut down." The employee was finally dismissed, records show. Boy was shot to death last year, in a killing unrelated to his Chad experience. In 2005, when Tennessee staged a surprise inspection of Chad, a girl told the inspectors that a Chad supervisor "will try to hurt students during restraints and 'wants us to scream.' " Another youngster said she had seen "Big Mike slam kids down real hard on the floor. I don't want that happening to me, so I try hard to do everything they ask me to do." In March 2005, the anonymous caller, identifying himself as a Chad employee, called the DHS hotline to warn about force at the facility. In response, DHS dispatched an investigator to Chad - three months later. According to the investigator's report, just 14 Philadelphia youths were at Chad at that time. All had been restrained - some as many as five times, the investigator found. In one case, DHS staffer Haiying Xi reported, a youngster had been cut on the chin in a restraint, requiring stitches. Chad had not reported this to regulators, DHS learned. Finally, DHS official Stephen Rosenberg wrote to Chad. "The investigation could not determine any pattern for the use of illegal physical restraints," Rosenberg wrote. "However, the investigation did validate the allegations that some residents were being harshly and improperly restrained." In a reply, Chad administrator McDuffie assured DHS that Chad was a "nurturing and positive environment." He said the facility had hired more staff and made children's safety a priority. The former owners of Chad also said it was a safe and therapeutic place for children when they handed over the keys to Universal Health in October 2005. "Our goal was to effect treatment in as nonphysical a way as possible," former chief executive officer Michael G. Lindley said. Al Smith, another former top executive with Chad's former owner, said: "Did untoward events happen? Absolutely. But was it a culture? I don't believe so." After Universal Health purchased Chad, regulators continued to flag problems. In 2006, the state complained again that Chad wasn't reporting serious incidents to regulators. Another boy went to an emergency room for cuts sustained in a restraint. And a mental-health associate quit after she got into an argument with a youth and shoved her, records show. According to a Tennessee investigation, other youths were injured this year. On Jan. 2, Tennessee officials disclosed, staff broke the left arm of a 16-year-old boy during a restraint. Later in the year, Chad told regulators, another teenage resident was "taken to the floor" in a restraint that required four stitches for cuts on the lips. In May, Edith Ruland pulled her son, Dennis, 10, out of Chad after she found numerous bruises on him, she said. Ruland, who lives near Chad, took photographs of the bruises, which the boy said staff had inflicted in a restraint hold. Though Tennessee had stopped sending children in state custody, it still permitted families to use it. "They treat people wrong," Dennis said in an interview. "And they shouldn't be having a facility that would bruise people and stuff." In response, a spokesman for Chad said Tennessee had investigated and had been "unable to substantiate these complaints." Rob Johnson, a spokesman for regulators in Tennessee, agreed that investigators couldn't unravel the episode. "They know that the child got injured somehow," Johnson said. "They just don't know how." Out of sight, out of mind -- Experts and members of the commission appointed by Street to overhaul DHS say the city's heavy use of Chad exemplifies another key failing of the agency: its reliance on out-of-state treatment centers. At last count, 233 of Philadelphia's 1,554 children in residential facilities were outside Pennsylvania. Critics note that a main goal for social-service agencies is to eventually reunite troubled children with their families. Yet faraway locations make parental or guardian visits far more difficult. And as a DHS administrator noted in a 2005 report on Chad, such far-off facilities have an obvious weakness. It's hard for officials in Pennsylvania to regulate what happens in Tennessee. Philadelphia officials said they recognized the problem and were moving to solve it. They said they often had little choice but to lean on out-of-state facilities to care for the city's most troubled youths because many in-state treatment centers wouldn't take them. Smith, the former Chad executive, said kids who lashed out violently at authority figures were hard to place. "If a child has hit a teacher, you can be certain they'll have no problem going after staff," he said. So, each year, Philadelphia shops its most hardened cases to area centers, but ends up sending hundreds to Tennessee, Utah and Virginia for mental-health treatment. Child-welfare officials in other states, such as Illinois, and the second-largest child-welfare system in Pennsylvania, that of Allegheny County, say they have found ways to keep children closer to home. Marc Cherna, who heads the Allegheny child-welfare agency, studied DHS as a member of Street's reform panel. He said none of the children under his care were placed out of state. An agency task force makes sure that even the toughest cases are placed close to home. And money is no object, Cherna said. "We will pay extraordinary rates for people who are extraordinarily difficult," he said. "Our goal is to return these children back to the community." In 1995, Illinois was shipping 784 children out of state for care. Eventually, the state realized that counselors in far-flung treatment centers were abusing children. "We flew to facilities we used in a dozen states, and in every one it got worse and worse," said Ron Davidson, a psychologist who helped the state evaluate the programs. Today just a dozen children from Illinois are placed outside the state. "Children just perform better closer to home," said Kendall Marlowe, an Illinois child-service official. Philadelphia's acting DHS commissioner, Evans, agrees. He wants to reduce the number of children placed out of state. "It's a very high priority for me," Evans said. "We send too many kids away from Philadelphia." One of those kids was Omega Leach. A month before he died, a therapist placed a note in his file. "Omega is frustrated with being placed so far from home," the therapist wrote. "But he has expressed the desire to complete the program successfully so that he can return home and start working on getting his life together." A Key City Report, Uncensored -- In 2005, an investigator for the city wrote a detailed report focusing on the Chad Youth Enhancement Center in Tennessee. The city made the report public at The Inquirer's request. Before releasing it, however, city lawyers removed the most explosive section - pages with allegations that Philadelphia children were being abused at Chad. In redacting the document, the city cited an exemption in Pennsylvania's right-to-know law that allows governments to withhold investigations, even finished ones, from the public. The Inquirer later obtained a complete version of the report. In this version, the only information removed is the names of children.

August 5, 2007 Philadelphia Inquirer
Tennessee regulators have concluded that a center for troubled children needlessly provoked the confrontation that led to the death in June of a 17-year-old Philadelphia teen. The Chad Youth Enhancement Center in Ashland City "violated its own policy and procedures" in subduing Omega Leach, social-service regulators said. The state said a Chad staffer should have given Leach space to calm down June 2 when Leach had retreated to a dorm after a fight with another resident. Instead, the staffer, Randall D. Rae, 22, ordered Leach to leave the dorm, and Leach attacked him. The worker then forced Leach prone on the floor, face-down, and the teenager lost consciousness. Leach was pronounced dead the next day. Police say they think the hold cut off his air supply. In a response to the state, Chad officials did not directly address Leach's death, but said repeatedly that they would improve training of staff members and work to better teach them "verbal de-escalation." The confrontation began at 3:50 p.m. when Rae told Leach that residents weren't permitted in the dorm at that time of day. "His training should have told him this is not the time to approach this child," said Tracey Robinson-Coffee, head of licensing for the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities. Leach leaped on Rae, trying to choke him. Rae grabbed Leach - a slender 5-foot-9 and 152 pounds - and pulled Leach's hands behind his back and put him on the floor. Rae did that even though Chad's policies allow such holds only when at least two staffers are present, regulators say. At some point, Rae turned his grip on Leach over to another aide, Milton G. Francis, 31. A Chad nurse arrived and placed a block under Leach's head to help him breathe. While police and the state medical examiner are investigating, no criminal charges have been filed, and the cause of death is pending. But state regulators have already faulted Chad and frozen all admissions there until at least October. Rae hung up on a reporter Friday. Francis did not respond to a letter requesting comment. In its July ruling, the state also faulted Chad over its training of Rae and other staffers. So far, according to documents obtained by The Inquirer, investigators have been provided with at least three estimates for how long the hold on Leach lasted. Nursing staff said it had lasted 13 minutes. Other Chad officials said 11 minutes. In a third document, the duration was put down as seven or eight minutes. The timing is significant. In a 2006 policy statement, Pennsylvania social-service officials said that "most deaths occur within the first six minutes of a restraint," and "that in most situations a restrictive procedure should not last longer than 10 minutes."

July 22, 2007 Tennessean
As officials await results of a state toxicology report on the death of a troubled teen at Chad Youth Enhancement Center in Ashland City, a community group is calling for the center to be closed. Montgomery County Sheriff's officials said they had received reports of abuse and other problems at the facility and that state health officials had ordered a corrective plan for the facility after two other residents were injured while being restrained by staff. "Chad definitely needs to be shut down," said Terry McMoore, director of the Urban Resource Center. "Chad is a big corporation and has a corporate mentality when it comes to business, and you can't have that with kids." County and state agencies have been looking into Chad since the death of Omega Leach, 17, who had been placed at the center by the Philadelphia (Pa.) Department of Human Services. Leach died June 3 after being restrained a day earlier by Chad staff at the center. According to a report to the state from Mike Wallace, risk manager at Chad, Leach attacked staff member Randell Dale Rae Jr. after an argument over leaving his room. "The staff member and the resident struggled until the staff member was able to place the resident into a neutral protective hold," Wallace reported. State officials have said Leach was pinned to the floor, held down by staff members. Rae and staff member Milton Gerald Francis, 31, kept Leach in the hold for seven to eight minutes until he became calm — and unresponsive. Staff members tried to resuscitate Leach, Wallace wrote. Leach was pronounced dead the next day at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, where doctors reported he had suffered "significant" internal bleeding, a report says. Rae and Francis have been put on administrative leave, according to state officials. The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office is investigating Leach's death, and that investigation is awaiting the release of a state toxicology report.

June 25, 2007 AP
A teenager sent to a Tennessee facility for troubled youth died after a confrontation with the center's staff, prompting Philadelphia officials to consider relocating dozens of teens sent there. Omega Leach, described by Philadelphia officials as a 17-year-old whose many troubles included racing a stolen car, was sent last month to the Chad Youth Enhancement Center, a private 50-bed residential treatment center near Clarksville for children with a history of emotional and behavioral problems. Leach is the second student to die at the Chad Youth Enhancement Center in less than two years, and authorities and the Tennessee Department of Children's Services are investigating. Leach got into a physical confrontation with the staff June 3 and died the next day at a Nashville hospital. He tried to choke one counselor, and another staffer pushed Leach face down to the floor and pulled his arms behind his back, police said. Investigators are trying to find out whether he was restrained improperly, keeping him from breathing. Agency may move others: "There's no doubt that the kid had an attitude and probably needed to be locked up somewhere," Sgt. Brian Prentice, of the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department, told The Philadelphia Inquirer for a story Sunday. "It doesn't mean he has to be dead." Leach's care was the responsibility of Philadelphia's Department of Human Services. The agency was paying Chad $285 a day for Leach's treatment, even though questions had been raised about the center. In September 2005, Linda Regina Harris, 14, of Long Island, died there of heart failure as she was being escorted by a counselor. The Philadelphia agency has frozen admissions to Chad and said it is putting into place "a contingency plan" for relocating 45 city children, pending further investigation. Chad and its corporate owner, Universal Health Services Inc. of King of Prussia, Pa., declined to respond to detailed questions, instead issuing a statement to the Inquirer defending their record. "We have a reputation and history of being a high-quality provider of behavioral health and substance-abuse services to troubled youth and their families," said Duwayne Glaser, chief executive officer.

September 20, 2005 Tennessean
The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office yesterday was investigating the death of a 14-year-old girl who died while in the custody of a Montgomery County juvenile detention facility. According to officials, the girl, whose name had not been released, was being escorted by a staff member to another room of the privately owned Chad Youth Enhancement Center on Oak Plains Road near the Montgomery-Cheatham county line when she collapsed Sunday night. A press release from the Keystone Education and Youth Services in Nashville, which owns the Chad Youth Enhancement Center and 50 other facilities, said the girl was having trouble breathing and was immediately given CPR by the staff physician.

Con-Link Transportation
Memphis, Tennessee
November 25, 2003
After five days on the lam, a Tennessee prisoner was captured Sunday afternoon in a residential area a half-mile from where he escaped from custody, police said.  On Nov. 18, a private transport service was taking Robert L. South, 21, from Indiana to Blountville, Tenn., to stand trial on a bomb threat charge. The transport officers got off Interstate 64 at the Lewisburg exit about 11 p.m. and drove to a nearby Subway restaurant for a rest room break. Despite being handcuffed, South took off running across a parking lot and disappeared behind a construction site. Police later found his orange jump suit in the woods behind the Brier Inn and Conference Center.  Officers from the Lewisburg Police Department, the Greenbrier County Sheriff's Department, State Police and other law enforcement agencies scoured the area that night and warned residents to lock their doors. Despite the use of a tracking dog, they were unable to find South. Sunday at approximately 2:30 p.m., after receiving a 911 call from a resident, Lewisburg police officers J.C. Dove and D.W. Hedrick found South in the crawl space under a house on Village Road. They apprehended him without incident.  South apparently had been hiding under houses in the subdivision for several days. Earlier, he had stolen clothing from an unlocked vehicle.  South was charged with escape in Greenbrier County Magistrate Court and was taken to the Southern Regional Jail. Other charges are pending.  Lt. L.E. Reed of the Lewisburg Police Department said he is relieved South was captured without anyone being harmed. "That's the main thing, that we were able to do it without any problem," he commented.  As for South's escape, Reed said there will be an investigation of how he was able to run away from custody and later get free of his handcuffs and "belly chain."  "That never should have happened," he said. "Somebody's got some explaining to do."  The transport officers worked for Con-Link Transportation, based in Memphis, Tenn.  (The Register-Herald)

Corrections Corporation of America
Nashville, Tennessee
July 1, 2008 News Channel 5
A victim's advocate claims someone got away with murder at a Nashville detention facility. On July 5, 2004, Estelle Richardson died while in solitary confinement at the Davidson County Detention Facility operated by Corrections Corporations of America. An autopsy showed she died from blunt-force trauma to the head. She also had several broken ribs. Her file at the facility indicated that she died of "homicide ... unsolved murder." "She died a brutal, painful, vicious death," said Denver Schimming, a victim's advocate. Schimming, a reformed felon who served time for bank robbery, has turned his life around. He is determined to solve the Richardson case. "She did get the death sentence. Yeah, CCA was the judge, jury, and executioner in this case," he said about the mother of two. Schimming was among a small gathering of people standing outside the medium security prison Tuesday night to commemorate Richardson and keep the investigation open. "We're saying that justice has not been served. That we need to dig harder, work harder, and find out who it is," he said. "The question is not did it happen? It did happen. The question is who it is. Let's find out who murdered Estelle Richardson." Richardson was found unresponsive in solitary confinement 24 hours after cell extraction, which is described by some as a violent procedure to forcibly remove an inmate. Charges were dismissed against four former CCA guards indicted for her death because the district attorney general had "no definitive proof that (Richardson) died as a result of the actions of these defendants." The medical examiner, according to the district attorney, ruled "the blunt trauma that eventually killed Ms. Richardson likely took place several days before she was extracted from her cell." A key piece of evidence in the case is a videotape of Richardson's cell extraction. It no longer exists. Schimming said it's protocol to record such maneuvers, but CCA claims the camera malfunctioned. The district attorney general's office said the case isn't solved, but it's not being actively investigated either.

June 26, 2008 Nashville Scene
Regarding the Scene’s cover story on CCA, “Locked and Loaded” (June 19), when it comes to prisons—particularly private prisons—the devil’s in the details. While the article was informative and wide-ranging, it missed some important details, including these: It wasn’t clear that there was a cover up of the assault on inmate James Ingram at CCA’s Hardeman County facility. The assault by Warden Turner occurred on May 17, 2007, but the Tennessee Department of Correction wasn’t notified until July 19—two months later. Nor were they notified by CCA; they learned about the incident from Ingram’s attorney. CCA staff had tried to hide the incident from state officials. CCA employees apparently have problems following the law. From February 2003 to April 2008, at least 55 CCA employees at three prisons in Tennessee (Hardeman County, Whiteville and South Central) were charged with criminal offenses—or an average of one a month. That doesn’t include arrests of CCA staff members at the company’s 62 other facilities. Gerald Townsend, the inmate at the CCA-Metro facility who was beaten to death by his cellmate in January, was the brother of Judy Townsend—who, ironically, was present at the same CCA-run facility in July 2004 when Estelle Richardson was found “unresponsive” in her segregation cell and later died. Four CCA guards were indicted in connection with her death, but the charges were later dropped. A $35,000 reward has been offered for information related to Estelle’s murder: See whokilledestelle.org. Alex Friedmann Vice President, Private Corrections Institute (and former CCA prisoner)

June 19, 2008 Nashville Scene
Located in a bland, almost anonymous Green Hills office park of fake lakes and fountains is the headquarters of the nation’s largest private prison company, which, at the moment, may be the most disparaged corporation in the country. Since its inception in 1983, CCA has encountered legions of angry detractors who believe that the business of punishing criminals should not be—well, a business. But if the company has become accustomed to criticism over the years—like a best-selling author whose novels garner predictably bad reviews—it is now mired in a series of scandals, embarrassments and public-relations catastrophes that may tar its reputation for years to come. In the last 18 months alone, CCA has been the target of several stinging lawsuits supported by detailed affidavits and third-party reports alleging dangerous and inhumane practices that have put inmates’ lives at risk. Whistle blowers, once in positions of trust at CCA, have emerged from the shadows to tell vivid tales of corporate misconduct. Federal authorities have castigated the publicly traded corporation for operating an immigration detention facility in Texas on the cheap. And at that CCA complex—which at one point forced children of immigrant detainees to dress in prison garb—dozens of incarcerated women and children have come forward with gut-wrenching tales of anguish and neglect. Here in Nashville, CCA’s officers volunteer on the boards of noble nonprofits. But the company’s local detention center, far removed from the world of tony fundraisers and white-tie dinners, has been the setting for a string of grim events. One inmate beat his cellmate to death. A mentally ill man apparently went nine months without being allowed a shower. And another inmate lost his ear in a fight. So considering the company’s problems in its own backyard, not to mention its near-epic failings in Texas, it may seem odd to begin our story at a CCA facility in West Tennessee, where last May a few inmates brawled inside a prison chapel. The disturbance at the Hardeman County Correctional Center, located in the tiny town of Whiteville, was no different from any other jailhouse scuffle, and it’s not clear that anyone was even hurt. But an inmate who saw the fight—and maybe even threw a punch or two—got a lesson about the workings of CCA’s particular brand of law and order and its longtime penchant of avoiding scrutiny. On May 16, 2007, James Ingram, an inmate from Memphis who battled a drug problem, was serving a 17-year sentence for aggravated robbery at the medium-security prison. Clean-cut and not much older than 30, Ingram was walking to his pod at the time of the brawl and overheard a group of inmates fighting at the chapel. Ingram fell into a fetal position to demonstrate, in his lawyer’s words, “a spirit of surrender and cooperation.” If that sounds implausible, consider the next part of the inmate’s story. After prison officials quelled the fight, they took Ingram to a back room and demanded that he give up the names of the prisoners who squared off. Ingram saw who was involved, but he wouldn’t talk. So the warden, a 40-something man named Glen Turner and the brother of one of CCA’s corporate vice presidents, placed him in solitary confinement. Shortly after, Turner shoved him to the ground and Ingram fell on his back. The warden then punched him in the face, opening a 2-inch cut below his eye. Typical convict hogwash, right? The state didn’t agree. Ingram called a lawyer, who called the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) to look into what happened. Joined by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, TDOC investigated the incident and determined that Turner assaulted Ingram by “throwing him to the floor and striking him at least twice in the head with the closed fist of his right hand.” In August, Ingram resigned as warden. A month later, he pled guilty to a charge of official oppression. It’s not clear when CCA’s headquarters learned what happened at its West Tennessee prison. But state authorities hint that company officials were slow to act. In an email to his colleagues, Jerry Lister, then TDOC’s acting director of internal affairs, notes that it was only when his department learned of the allegations from Ingram’s lawyer that “anyone at the facility [began] to acknowledge the excessive use of force by Warden Turner.” As a private company, CCA doesn’t have to answer for what happened at its prison. It refused a request from the Scene to review Turner’s original résumé, job application and disciplinary file. Meanwhile, TDOC never issued a press release about the findings of its investigation. As a result, the publicly traded company escaped the rounds of bad publicity that a state-run prison would have endured had one of its wardens pummeled an inmate. Until now, the media has never reported the details of Turner’s attack on Ingram. But if CCA was able to dodge a PR nightmare last summer, its luck has since faded. Now it can’t seem to serve so much as a cold meal without landing in hot water. The well-heeled company finds itself embroiled in an array of ugly incidents, both in Nashville and throughout the country, that have been featured on the pages of national newspapers and magazines and in the bold type of heavy-hitting lawsuits. Taken separately, the company’s struggles may not seem extraordinary. The business of incarceration is a rough one, even for those who don’t view it as a business. But for CCA, which for most of the decade has been able to avoid criticism from everyone other than a thin cast of anti-privatization foes, there seems to be a growing series of corroborated accounts that sketch a new portrait: that of a reckless, callous enterprise that treats inmates—even those who haven’t been convicted of a crime—as if they were cattle. Maybe, then, it’s appropriate that we move our story to cattle country. Elsa is a sturdy woman in her mid-20s with soft, round cheeks and straight, black hair that she sometimes pulls behind her head. Before she found herself locked up in a dusty Texas town, she lived in Honduras with her two children, Richard and Angelina. Here is her story: Elsa was happy in her native country and “didn’t need anything from anyone to be well-off.” Then one day, while walking on a quiet road, a man grabbed her hair and put a gun to her head. He forced her to take off her clothes, and then he hit her. He called her a “perra” or bitch and laughed as he ran his weapon over her body. Elsa cried and screamed and then, after being raped, begged for her life. “Please don’t kill me. I have two children.” The man struck her again, but let her live so that he could haunt her once more, showing up on a whim at her friend’s place to let her know he could have her again whenever he chose. The man’s father worked for the local police department, and Elsa knew the only way to flee him was to flee Honduras with Richard and Angelina. When she arrived in the United States, an immigration agent took her and her family to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, 30 miles north of Austin. It would be anything but a safe haven. In 2005, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division (ICE), ended the practice of “catch-and-release”—which permitted undocumented immigrants like Elsa to remain free at-large while they awaited their day in court. Under catch-and-release, no-shows were common. So after 9/11, the specter of illegal immigrants from all over the world roaming the country became a security issue. Pilot programs sprung up that tracked immigrants with electronic bracelets, though Chertoff went with a draconian plan instead: Throw many of these men, women and children in Hutto, a former medium-security prison that was surrounded by a 15-foot fence topped with rings of barbed wire when it reopened in 2006 as a place for immigrant families. After she arrived in Taylor, Elsa and her family shared a tiny living area, where they’d be loudly awoken at 5:45 a.m. Elsa, Richard and Angelina then had 20 minutes to eat breakfast. When they didn’t finish on time, guards would just snatch their food and throw it in the trash. “When this happens, the children cry and cry,” Elsa later explained in an affidavit that chronicled her plight. The detention center was very cold, so much so that the guards walked around wearing gloves. But they’d yell at Elsa if she asked for a blanket. One time they came into her cell and confiscated two of her sweaters. “They don’t care that we are cold,” she said. “They don’t care if we eat or if we don’t eat.” Elsa and her children wore prison uniforms and spent hours in their pod, often with no toys or books for the kids. One day, Elsa and her family were in the doctor’s office, where all the kids were playing with crayons. Angelina drew a picture, but a guard grabbed the girl’s artwork. She cried a lot at Hutto, wondering what her family had done wrong. “Mommy, where is God that he doesn’t want to help us? Mommy, tell God to come and take us out of here and take us to our house,” Elsa recalled her daughter saying. “Mommy, why do they have us as prisoners if we have never killed anybody?” In March 2007, the ACLU helped bring suit against Michael Chertoff and the immigration officers who ran Hutto. As a part of that litigation, attorneys collected more than 20 affidavits from detainees like Elsa, nearly all of whom were bidding to receive political asylum from their home countries. The detainees hail from different continents—some are adults, others young children—but they all tell the same story because they lived it together. Raouitee Pamela Puran fled her home country, where her husband was kidnapped and murdered. Seeking political asylum in the United States, she and her daughter Wesleyann wound up at Hutto. The young girl, just 4 years old, had trouble sleeping. It was always cold, and it didn’t help that the guards kept turning the lights on and off in their living quarters. The food was awful too. When Wesleyann would talk to her aunt on the phone, she’d plead with her to cook her chicken curry and rice. That always stung her mom. Even worse, Wesleyann would hear the guards threaten the children who acted up. If you don’t behave, they’d tell them, we’re going to separate you from your parents. Wesleyann was terrified. A sixth-grader at a junior high school in Ohio, Aissha Ibrahim came to Hutto with his mother, brother and sister on Nov. 30, 2006. Aissha, whose family had fled war-torn Somalia, said in an affidavit that when his sister Bahja got in trouble, the guards threatened to take her away from her family. Another guard told Aissha that if he complained, he would never see his mother again. “I would be scared if I never got my mom back, and I would think of how she took care of me when I was a baby,” he said. Just about every affidavit from a child or mother portrayed Hutto the same way—as a rough and cold place, where kids lie awake at night hungry and crying in the dark. And if they act up, like children often do, a guard would threaten to remove them from their families. To hear the stories from inside the walls, Hutto seems more like a medieval dungeon than a 21st century facility run by a wealthy company. “The conditions were shocking,” says Barbara Hines, a University of Texas law professor who spent many hours inside the facility representing detainees. “There were children in prison garb dressed like their parents; it was like an adult prison system. Seven times a day parents and their children were required to stay in their pods so they could be counted. Laser beams shined through the cells at night.” Just about everyone else who walked through the gates at Hutto, including federal authorities, saw it as a deeply troubling facility. In March 2007, ICE inspectors visited Hutto and, in their own distinct bureaucratic language, corroborated the anguished accounts of the detainees. The inspectors noted that their “overall review of the facility can be accurately rated as deficient” and determined that the staff wasn’t following basic standards of detention. “The Review Team’s observation of CCA’s overall attitude is of disinterest and complacency in their work performance,” the agency noted in its report. A month later, an interoffice memo from ICE said that at Hutto, CCA is “losing staff as quick as they can hire them.” That’s because the company was only paying its detention officers around $10 an hour, nearly $4 less than what they could make at the county jail. “As long as CCA continues to hire employees at this rate per hour, they will continue to experience the problems they are currently experiencing on the floor,” read the memo. “The current problems CCA is experiencing are a direct result of what ‘they are paying their employees for.’ Unfortunately, it is at ICE’s expense.” Among other issues, the Scene asked CCA to address the portrayal of Hutto that emerges from both federal officials and the people who lived there. The company declined to comment on any and all matters in this story, instead emailing news clips and a U.S. magistrate’s report of the facility. That report, which came three months after the ACLU filed its federal lawsuit, depicted a more humane place than other earlier accounts and noted, “there have been attempts to ‘soften’ the feel of the building.” The magistrate observed that the staff removed door locks and hung murals on the walls, “although the building still retains a very institutional feel.” In August, the ACLU announced a settlement with ICE over the treatment of immigrant families at the Hutto facility. The settlement called for several common-sense measures, including installing privacy curtains around toilets in common areas and letting kids play with toys in their rooms. All 26 children and their parents who took part in the suit were released into the custody of family members who are legal residents of the United States. By all accounts, Hutto is no longer as oppressive as it was when Elsa and her family first arrived from Honduras. But why didn’t CCA get it right from the start? Or to put it more bluntly, why did a rich company—one with $388 million in revenues last quarter—have to be told by the ACLU to cease treating innocent children like criminals? “The point I’d like to make is that none of these changes were done voluntarily,” says Hines, the attorney. “When you look at CCA and ICE, the question is, how would this facility have been if no one found out about it?” The apathetic treatment of Hutto’s immigrants was hardly an anomaly. CCA also operates a detention facility in San Diego that drew a separate ACLU lawsuit last year. In the complaint, the group claims that CCA routinely denied basic medical care to immigrant detainees with hepatitis, diabetes and other serious illnesses. One man from Ghana died from heart failure after the center’s staff allegedly asked him to fill out some paper work—even though he was seen kneeling on the floor of his cell and complaining of chest pains. At jails and prisons across the country, inmates routinely die under dire circumstances; some commit suicide after nurses fail to fill their anti-psychotic prescriptions, others find themselves on the wrong end of a baton stick. And in fairness, CCA doesn’t have a monopoly on jailhouse horror stories. For every dark tale of cruelty at CCA, there is an equal travesty in a county jail or federal penitentiary. The difference, though, is that CCA can duck responsibility for what happens inside its walls, whereas a government-run facility can’t. CCA doesn’t have to turn over the disciplinary file of a disgraced guard or give a press conference when one of its inmates escapes over the fence. It has the luxury to operate in the shadows and turn a booming profit without having to explain how it runs the business. We don’t know a lot about Patrick Perry, a onetime captain for CCA’s Metro Detention Facility, located on Harding Road in South Nashville. But we do know that on the morning of Jan. 31, 2008, Perry arrived at the Metro Health Department to talk about his employer and offer a glimpse into some of its secret practices. Metro Health officials would later write a memo detailing what the captain told them. Perry was worried about a troubled inmate named Frank Horton, who was imprisoned on a drug conviction and had stayed in the same segregation cell since May 2007. Perry said that CCA’s policy dictates that an inmate has to leave his cell at least once every three days or else guards need to remove him by force. But at CCA’s Harding facility, the warden reprimanded the staff if they followed this policy. That’s because every time they had to escort an inmate against his will, it raised the facility’s “use of force” numbers. And that placed the Metro Detention Center in a negative light when CCA officials evaluated it against its other jails and prisons across the country. At first blush, the warden’s directive may not seem out of order. If an inmate doesn’t want to leave his cell, why should the guards care? But Frank Horton was a special case. As Perry told Metro officials, the 23-year-old inmate seemed disoriented and was speaking gibberish. At the very least, he needed medical care. (Metro Health Department officials say they made sure Horton received a psychiatric screening after their visit with Perry, but say they can’t divulge any more details due to privacy concerns.) Horton’s mother, Cytherea Braswell, had tried to visit her son before Christmas but says that a guard couldn’t find the necessary forms. She later had a lawyer, John Clemmons, drop in to see him in March, after she learned her son wasn’t well. When Clemmons arrived, a guard told him that Frank was just fine, that he’d received a shower and a shave. But when he went to see his client, what he saw troubled him. “He had a big, unkempt goatee, and some stubble on his face and lint on his hair,” Clemmons says. “He was completely naked except for a blanket draped around him, and when they walked me back there, they didn’t act like this was unusual.” Now contemplating a lawsuit against CCA, Clemmons says that his client went nine months without taking a shower, which dovetails with Perry’s account of how Horton went the better part of 2007 without leaving his cell. Even worse, Horton appeared as if he were completely oblivious to the outside world and lost in his own muddled thoughts. Brawell says that, as a child, her son was diagnosed with hyperactivity and mild to moderate bipolar disorder. As a young adult, he worked at a Waffle House and played basketball with his friends. With the right treatment, she says, he could live a normal life. “He was an average person,” she says. “He had a job, he went to work every day, he had friends. He knew how to take care of himself.” But when Clemmons went to visit Braswell’s son, he was talking in the same mysterious language that Perry described in his visit with Metro officials. It was an odd blend of broken Spanish and English, and Horton spoke it as if it were his native tongue, repeating the same incoherent phrases to identical questions. “When I saw him, he was in a state where he had no awareness of his mental capacity,” Clemmons says. With the help of the Metro Legal Department and the Davidson County Sheriff’s office, Clemmons was able to transfer Horton to a state facility for inmates with special needs. Now in the process of researching his case, Clemmons isn’t sure what kind of, if any, mental health treatment his client received behind bars. For that, he may subpoena Patrick Perry to discover whether the CCA facility risked Horton’s health to polish its internal data. “When I was there, the only medical staff I saw was a nurse who merely walked from window to window and looked at the inmates through a slot in the door,” he says. “It just looked like all they were concerned with was that their physical well-being was intact.” In his meeting with Metro Health officials, Patrick Perry also said that an alarm for inmates to trigger in the event of an emergency wasn’t working. He added that CCA knew the call system was a problem “but did nothing about it.” The former captain may find himself testifying about that observation as well. Two weeks before Perry came forward, Gerald Townsend, a 36-year-old inmate at the Harding facility who loved scary movies, died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center after being diagnosed with internal bleeding. His spleen was ripped open and blood had flooded his lungs. In his final hours, Townsend told a nurse that Ronnie Sullivan, his 22-year-old cellmate, assaulted him. Metro police later charged Sullivan with Townsend’s murder. Attorney Blair Durham is representing Townsend’s mother, Jackie, who plans to file a suit against CCA this week. Durham says he’s learned that inmates were banging on their cells as Sullivan began to assault his cellmate. But no one rushed to help. Durham also heard that the alarm, which could have saved Townsend’s life, wasn’t working. A month after Townsend’s death, an inmate fled the same jail through an air vent. At first, the company announced that the man, who had a history of escape attempts, was simply hiding inside the grounds. A day or so later, when the Scene called to see if he had been found, the company refused to comment. Earlier this year, after CCA endured a series of PR nightmares at the Metro Detention Center during which the company largely ducked interviews with the media, the private jailer reassigned the facility’s warden, Brian Gardner. For the Davidson County Sheriff’s office, which contracts with CCA to run the Harding jail, the company needed to reevaluate its management of the facility. “We are satisfied that CCA has responded with a policy change as well as the fact that they have changed their management since these incidents have occurred,” says Karla Wiekal, the sheriff’s spokesperson. “At some point, (CCA) recognized there needed to be a leadership change and at this point forward we will see if these changes are effective.” In June 2007, President George Bush nominated CCA corporate counsel Gus Puryear to a federal seat in the U.S. District Court of Middle Tennessee. Initially viewed as a safe bet to receive a lifetime appointment, Puryear faltered badly in his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, appearing to some as arrogant and unprepared. The 39-year-old nominee, who twice served as debate coach for Vice President Dick Cheney, struggled in particular to explain how his company handled the brutal 2004 death of Nashville inmate Estelle Richardson, at one point wrongly stating that the guards initially charged in connection with her murder were “exonerated.” Now Puryear’s bid has turned into an unofficial referendum on CCA, and it appears unlikely that the Senate will confirm him before the end of Bush’s presidency. It’s been that kind of year for the private jailer. Puryear’s struggles, playing out awkwardly on a big stage, make up just the latest bout of bad publicity for the Nashville company, which has also been battered in the national press. In February, The New Yorker reported the definitive story about the company’s Hutto facility in Texas. The magazine detailed how immigrant families shared a tiny cell with a bunk bed, thin mattress and an exposed toilet, while ill-trained guards rounded them up seven times a day for a head count. Then in March, Time.com detailed the accusations of a former high-ranking CCA official who claimed that the company repeatedly misled state and local authorities about the rate of violent incidents at the prisons and jails it had under contract. In May, The New York Times chronicled how an ailing detainee was treated at a CCA facility in New Jersey just before he lapsed into a coma and died. The paper uncovered records that show that the man, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who overstayed a tourist visa, was “shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit.” He vomited and moaned and then was dumped in a disciplinary cell for 13 hours, even though he was foaming at the mouth. Operating 65 facilities in the country with more than 70,000 inmates and detainees in its custody, CCA will never have a perfect record. But what may say more about the company anchoring a Green Hills office park is not the middle-aged detainee who died of a heart failure or the sinister warden who struck an inmate, but the 9-year-old boy who was forced to live like a common criminal. Kevin Yourdkhani, whose parents fled from torture in their native Iran, wound up at CCA’s Hutto facility on Feb. 9, 2007. There, he shared a small cell with his mother and had to climb a tall ladder to get to his bunk bed. He slept right next to an open toilet that smelled. The boy also complained about the food—he called it “garbage”—saying that all he was ever fed were beans. “We are lucky if we get 30 minute to eat,” he said an affidavit for the ACLU’s lawsuit against the place. “It is usually 20 minutes, and they are always rushing.” In his pod, a small living area that he shared with other detainees, the children were always sick. Lots of kids had eye infections. Kevin attended school but rarely learned anything. All he did was watch “Spanish movies” and color and draw pictures. One day his father, who was being kept at another part of the facility, came to visit Kevin. That infuriated a guard, who told Kevin that he would be placed in foster care if his dad ever dropped by to see him again. “I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy and went to sleep.”

June 17, 2008 AlterNet
Gustavus "Gus" Puryear, head legal honcho for the nation's largest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), isn't the kind of guy who's accustomed to sitting in the hot seat, much less showing visible signs of discomfort. The kind of discomfort, say, that Puryear might have felt when he heard that up to $35,000 in cash reward money had been announced for information leading to the conviction of Estelle Richardson's murderer(s). Ten thousand dollars will go to anyone who can recover "missing" cell extraction video footage from within the CCA-operated Nashville prison where Estelle was found dead in her solitary confinement cell. The cash reward announcement came a couple of weeks after AlterNet ran the two-part investigative feature I wrote about the Estelle Richardson, and what any of the events surrounding her life and death has to do with Puryear's bid for federal judgeship. This money's quite real, and the offer is quite legitimate, although the actual donor has chosen to remain anonymous. Check it out for yourself at WhoKilledEstelle.org. The grassroots organizing front has picked up steam, as well, especially after Amy Goodman took interest in the story and brought me on Democracy Now! to discuss some of the particulars. Many readers and viewers have followed up by going to AgainstPuryear.org, run by a man named Alex Friedmann. [T]he judicial nomination of CCA general counsel Gus Puryear is largely in the toilet," Friedmann wrote to me in a recent e-mail, referring to an article from The Tennessean. Wow. When President Bush nominated him to a lifetime federal judicial appointment last year, it seemed to most people paying attention that he'd be confirmed without much fanfare or fuss. Puryear had always been a staunch GOP loyalist, but he wasn't the kind to rock the boat with public, proclamations about controversial issues. Instead, he proved himself to be the behind-the-scenes guy; the kind of guy, for example, who got a kick out of prepping Dick Cheney for the 2000 and 2004 vice-presidential debates. By the time he was nominated for the U.S. District Court judgeship. Puryear also proved himself to be a relentlessly corporate litigator whose loyalty to CCA's bottom line had been (and still is) handsomely rewarded. If it weren't for the fact that CCA brought in a corporate commando in 2001 by the name of John Ferguson (and that Ferguson decided to bring Puryear in to create a new, formidable legal fortress), CCA's scandal-ridden, stock-price-tanking, shareholder-suing mess would have surely have brought the entire company crashing to the ground. (Yes, CCA scandals are now more prevalent than ever, but so are the number people cycling in and out of prison. Where federal and state governments have run out of options, CCA and other prison privatizers have made in their business to make themselves indispensable.) With a net worth of $13 million (and climbing), the 39-yr-old Puryear didn't just show up with an old-money pedigree and a seemingly skeleton-free closet; he was able to turn it up a few notches as a quick-witted, nattily-attired, blue-eyed whippersnapper eager to play his part to freshen up a stale party image. And what better way to do so than to slip on a nice, roomy judge's robe and decide on the fate of people's lives? He was riding in the slipstream of the most reprehensible driver of the American prison machine, Sure, he hit a few small speed bumps along the way, and Estelle Richardson was one of those. I'm grateful that Friedmann wasn't willing to let her memory fade away. "But the fight isn't over yet," he cautions. "Puryear can still be confirmed anytime from now until January 2009. Since his nomination is presently on the ropes, it's time for a knock-out blow. If you or your organization haven't already done so, now is the time to contact the Senate Judiciary Committee and object to Puryear's pending nomination. I'll second that. www.againstpuryear.org. Estelle, I hope that you can rest in peace.

June 13, 2008 Tennessean
A year ago today, Gustavus "Gus" Puryear IV was nominated for a federal judgeship in Nashville and appeared headed to an easy confirmation. Now Puryear's confirmation seems unlikely. In addition to questions raised about his qualifications and actions as general counsel for Corrections Corporation of America, Puryear's fate is now caught in intense election-year battles between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate over lifetime judicial appointments. Senate Democrats are looking to approve as few of Republican President Bush's appointments as they can before his term expires, hoping Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois wins the presidency. Republicans did the same during the final months of the Democratic Clinton administration. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., a longtime member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which vets nominees, said at a committee hearing Thursday that this practice is simply the "fact of the matter." "It is legitimate," Biden said. "These are lifetime appointments." Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., said at the end of the hearing, which included approval of three judicial nominees, that no more judges would be confirmed unless there is agreement among him and ranking committee Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate. Even Tennessee's two Republican senators, who signed off on Puryear's nomination, acknowledge his confirmation is in trouble. "Gus Puryear is a qualified nominee who deserves an up-or-down vote in the Senate, and we're continuing to pursue every option to that end," Sen. Bob Corker said in a written statement. "The current atmosphere in the Senate makes his confirmation more difficult — not impossible, just increasingly more difficult as we approach the fall elections." Sen. Lamar Alexander said he was still hopeful. "But the Democrats have slowed confirmation of President Bush's nominees to a ridiculous extent," Alexander said in a recent interview. CCA spokesman Steve Owen, responding to a request for Puryear to comment, said the company has "no way of knowing what the outcome of the confirmation process will be. We continue to believe that Mr. Puryear would make an excellent federal judge. He has served the company admirably and with great integrity as general counsel." The Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Puryear's nomination in February but has not scheduled a vote on whether to send his name to the full Senate for a vote. Reasons cited by opponents as to why Puryear should not be confirmed include: a lack of trial and judicial experience, his role as chief lawyer for the country's largest private prison company, and the company's handling of the 2004 death of Estelle Richardson while she was in the Metro Detention Facility in Nashville. Among those opposing Puryear's confirmation are: The Alliance for Justice, an umbrella group of national civil rights and other organizations, Private Corrections Institute Inc., which opposes prison privatization and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

May 19, 2008 Press Release
On May 19, 2008, Prison Legal News (PLN), an independent monthly publication that reports on corrections and criminal justice-related issues, filed suit in Davidson County Chancery Court against Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), the nation's largest private prison firm, which is headquartered in Nashville. Last year PLN's associate editor, Alex Friedmann, submitted a public records request to CCA under Tennessee's open records law. In 2002 the Tennessee Supreme Court had ruled that private companies which perform functionally equivalent public services must comply with public records requests to the same extent as government agencies. Although CCA performs an equivalent government function by operating prisons and jails through contracts that are funded with taxpayer dollars, the company refused to produce the requested records. CCA claimed it was not subject to the state's public records law despite the Tennessee Supreme Court's clear ruling to the contrary. PLN had requested records related to successful litigation against CCA, as well as "reports, audits, investigations or other similar documents which found ... that CCA did not comply with one or more terms of its contracts" with government agencies. The lawsuit filed by PLN is to ensure that records maintained by CCA as a private prison contractor are available to the public to the same extent as from government agencies, in order to ensure accountability and public oversight of CCA's prison and jail operations. "Public agencies cannot contract away the public's ability to review records that otherwise would be publicly accessible under the state's open records law. The public's right to know is not delegable to private corporations," said Paul Wright, PLN's editor. In a 2007 news article, Steven Owen, CCA's Director of Marketing, was quoted as saying prison privatization was "one of the most transparent industries out there." As CCA has refused to comply with Tennessee's public records law, PLN's lawsuit will put the company's self-proclaimed transparency to the test. The case is Friedmann v. CCA, Chancery Court of Davidson County, Tenn., Case No. 08-1105-I. PLN is represented by Andy Clarke of the Memphis law firm of Borod and Kramer, PLC.

May 7, 2008 Nashville Post
A series of articles by the New York Times have Washington, D.C. insiders saying that Gus Puryear should keep his day job. Puryear, executive vice president and general counsel for Nashville based Corrections Corporation of America, was nominated by President George W. Bush last year to serve on the U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee. Since the nomination, Puryear has been attacked here and in Washington for everything from his handling of CCA legal matters, his membership in the Belle Meade Country Club, to his lack of experience outside of corporate law. While the nomination of Puryear has not moved due to objections of U.S. Senators Ted Kennedy and Diane Feinstein, he still has had hope of being confirmed to the bench. Now, a number of NashvillePost.com sources are saying that hope is even in more jeopardy. Democratic insiders in Washington contacted by NashvillePost.com say that what hope Puryear had was effectively killed by a series of articles published this week by the New York Times. Republican insiders acknowledge that the articles have made Puryear's bid "more complicated" and there is no momentum to push him forward at this time. While the articles don't mention Puryear by name, CCA is sharply criticized for their handling of the death of Boubacar Bah and the labeling of his inmate file as "proprietary information - not for distribution." Bah was 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. While incarcerated, Bah had fallen and hit his head and became incoherent. According to the NYT, "documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth." He was eventually transported to a hospital, but his family was not notified of his whereabouts for five days. He died four months later. The Times also ran an editorial on this matter yesterday.

May 6, 2008 AlterNet
Until very recently, Puryear has enjoyed an easy climb up the political and corporate ladder. It hasn't hurt that the 39-year-old Republican Party loyalist has always kept the right company, starting with the day that he was born. Puryear's paternal lineage is flush with old money tied, in particular, to the Southern banking industry. (It's a tradition that Puryear has carried on by joining the board of the Nashville Bank & Trust Company.) Born in Atlanta, Puryear attended an exclusive Christian private school, Westminster. After high school graduation in 1986, Puryear received a full academic scholarship to Emory University, and then to the University of North Carolina School of Law. In 1993, freshly equipped with his J.D., Puryear landed a plum assignment as law clerk to Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale, Fifth U.S. District Court of Appeals. (Hawkins was appointed to the bench in 1990, by President George H.W. Bush.) In an odd twist of fate, clerking for Judge Barksdale brought Puryear close to the lives of prisoners, at least insofar as their legal paperwork. In an October 2005 feature in South magazine, "No more get out of jail free," Puryear noted that one-third of all the cases they dealt with were pro se prisoner cases: "In fact, when I got out of law school, I was appointed to represent an inmate in a Section 1983 civil rights action, and we took it to a jury trial," he told writer Greg Land, adding dryly, "We lost." Land made the apt observation that Puryear's district court experience was "fitting foreshadowing for the young lawyer who would eventually make 'no settlements' a key corporate goal at CCA." That case was to end up as one of only five federal cases Puryear has ever personally handled as practicing attorney, only two of which went to trial, in addition to one trial in Tennessee state court in the 1990s. This, despite Puryear's three years as an associate attorney at Farris, Warfield & Kanaday (now Stites & Harbison), a law firm to which his grandfather had longstanding ties. Perhaps Puryear had a sense all along that he was destined to use his legal mind for a different purpose, say, for the glory of the GOP and the size of his pocketbook. Puryear made the leap to GOP employment very quickly, serving as counsel from 1997-1998 for a legal team assembled by former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN), as part of the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. The Committee was busy investigating a major campaign finance scandal; 22 people were eventually convicted for fraud or illegally funneling foreign money to the DNC's federal election coffers. Puryear's work was duly noted. From 1998-2000, Puryear held the position of legislative director for Republican Senator Bill Frist, a former state deputy director for the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign. Frist, who served in Congress from 1995-2007, was also a Belle Meade Country Club member, although he (unlike Puryear) had the common sense to resign from the historically racially segregated organization before heading toward his political career. Puryear's close friendship with beltway insider and Republican attorney/lobbyist powerhouse, Philip Perry, also yielded convenient connections to the Bush administration. When he was asked to help Perry's father-in-law prepare for high profile, televised debates, Puryear set about filling up the father-in-law's tricky brain with facts, statistics, zingers, and parrying tactics. The father-in-law and VP-to-be? Dick Cheney. The occasion? The 2000 and 2004 vice presidential debates. Friends like these can come in handy when it comes time to search for nominees for a slate of empty federal court benches. With his connections to Frist, Thompson, Barksdale, Perry, and Cheney in place, Puryear has also had a knack for knowing when to write the requisite donation checks to GOP leaders: to date, he's donated at least $13,000 to state and federal Republican campaign committees since 2001, including $1,000 to Mitt Romney in 2007. When Puryear donates money, he seems to do so to with a special patriotic flare: on September 11, 2003, he donated $2,000 to George W. Bush's re-election campaign to emphasize his loyalty to the War on Terrorism. Puryear would hardly be the first person appointed to the bench despite overtly partisan political allegiances and/or paltry legal chops. There's really no question about either. Puryear's affiliation with the ultra-conservative echelons of the Republican Party has spanned the course of his entire career, and his connections in the party clearly run quite deep. Small surprise, then, when Sen. Frist rose to Puryear's defense in an April 13th opinion piece for The Tennessean about the mounting opposition to his confirmation. One could almost hear the tremolo in Frist's voice as he bemoaned his besieged former employee's plight: "The infusion of political posturing, fed by outside groups, into our nomination process means that nominees are sometimes subject to unfair attack …. The toll on nominees and their families cannot be underestimated. The confirmation process has become so brutal that people who want to serve the public no longer do so." It's unlikely that Puryear's going to wilt away, no matter how vocal the opposition. After all, he's still got the right friends, wealth, and business connections. Most importantly, the people behind him have a lot at stake. If Puryear were to be confirmed, he would help cement a GOP/Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) stranglehold in the State of Tennessee. Most of these ducks are already in a row: both of Tennessee's U.S. Senate seats are controlled by CCA-supportive politicians, Republican Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker (both of whom have received tens in thousands in donations from CCA's PAC, as well as company employees and their spouses), and former Senator Frist is rumored to be running for governor in the next election cycle. The House that CCA Built -- It's worth taking an even closer look at the ties that have made CCA the corporate entity that it is. CCA's press materials tout the company's expansive network of detention centers (and its subsidiary prison transport company, TransCor America), as "prison privatization at its best." The company's top brass have all enjoyed illustrious careers in high-ranking positions as state legislative aides, lobbyists, and influential legislators. Some CCA officials held cushy jobs in governor's offices, while others came to CCA from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the U.S. Marshals, or the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Chuck Kupferer, CCA's Senior Director of Federal Customer Relations for U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service, is a former L.A. cop who became a chief deputy in New Orleans, and then went onto be the chief inspector with the CIA's Counter Narcotics Center in Virginia. With annual earnings and compensation nearing $1.5 million, Richard Seiter is handsomely compensated as CCA's Chief Corrections Officer and Executive Vice President. Of all the major CCA figureheads, Seiter's background is the one most based in corrections. Seiter was formerly the Chief Operating Officer for Federal Prison Industries (also known as UNICOR, which is in the business of selling prisoner-made goods and services), as well as the warden of two federal prisons, and one-time director of the scandal-ridden Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. CCA board members are similarly loaded with connections to state and federal level offices and agencies, including Donna Alvarado, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the U.S. Department of Defense. Board member Anthony Grant was the Commissioner of Economic Community Development for Tennessee, while former Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), is perhaps best remembered as one of the Keating Five. (John McCain (R-AZ) was one of the lesser-implicated figures in the scandal.) These days, CCA's financial horizon looks quite splendid, even if the conditions in which the company's "customers" are housed are far from it. With projected 2008 revenue of roughly $390 million, and 4,000-6,000 new beds in development, CCA can generally report good news back to its shareholders (NASDAQ: CXW) -- as it is anticipated to do in its May 6th, first-quarterly report. Although CCA is hardly the only player in the facility operating-and-owning aspect of the private corrections industry (e.g., GEO and Corrections Corpo