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Brush
Correctional Facility
Brush, Colorado
GRW
June 27, 2005
CHEYENNE -- Scarcity of space and a recent sexual misconduct scandal have
prompted state officials to move the 54 prison inmates Wyoming currently houses
at private facilities in Colorado to Texas by the end of the summer. But
by the end of 2007, Wyoming expects to have all of its prisoners housed within
the state's borders, according to Wyoming Department of Corrections spokeswoman
Melinda Brazzale. Brazzale said a lack of available private prison space in
Colorado prompted Wyoming officials to begin consideration of moving state
inmates out of Colorado. Contributing
to the decision were allegations of sexual misconduct between prison guards and
inmates at a private prison in Brush, Colo., where Wyoming had been housing 38
female inmates. Those inmates have since been moved out of Colorado.
June
21, 2005 Rocky Mountain News
Three states could pull their inmates from Colorado's private prisons by the end
of the summer, spooked by a recent sexual misconduct scandal and squeezed by
Colorado's own rising prisoner population. The state's five private facilities
house about 2,700 Colorado inmates. They also contract with three other states -
Hawaii, Washington and Wyoming - to hold prisoners those states can't, due to
overcrowding. The private prisons have lost or stand to lose nearly 400
out-of-state inmates, which would be an approximately $20,000 per-day hit spread
between two Tennessee firms who run them. State officials say they can fill the
gap with 400 Colorado inmates waiting for prison beds - contradicting warnings
the private firms sounded earlier this year - and suggest that facilities filled
only with Colorado prisoners could prove easier to control. Corrections
officials say it's easier to manage prisoners from one state, because they are
all used to the same rules. Some states, for example allow cigarette smoking or
conjugal visits, which Colorado does not. "It is always easier to manage a
single jurisdiction population," said Alison Morgan, a corrections
department spokeswoman. Later, she said the loss of out-of-state inmates
"is not a bad thing." Officials also have said out-of- state
inmates may have fueled or contributed to two riots in the past decade,
including one at the Crowley County Correctional Facility last July. Washington
once sent more than 200 prisoners to Colorado. The state has moved all but a few
to other states, a Washington corrections official said Monday. Wyoming will
move its 54 male inmates - already down from a high of 300 - from Colorado by
summer's end, a corrections spokeswoman there said. Wyoming has already moved 38
female inmates from a private prison in Brush, in part because of alleged sexual
misconduct between prison guards and inmates that surfaced in February. Hawaiian
officials are rebidding their contract to house 80 women who are in Brush.
Twenty- one state lawmakers urged their governor in April to move those inmates
"immediately," the Honolulu Advertiser reported.
April 17, 2005 AP
Lawmakers are petitioning Gov. Linda Lingle to move
dozens of female Hawaii inmates out of a Colorado prison where staffers were
allegedly involved in sexual misconduct with prisoners. Twenty-one members of
the Women's Legislative Caucus want Lingle to increase state monitoring of the
Brush Correctional Facility in Colorado and ultimately move the 80 Hawaii
inmates to another facility. House Judiciary Chairwoman Sylvia Luke, D-Pacific
Heights-Punchbowl, said she is concerned about reports that prison staff may be
retaliating against Hawaii inmates following allegations that guards were
involved in sexual misconduct earlier this year with inmates from Hawaii,
Colorado and Wyoming. Kat Brady, coordinator of the Community Alliance on
Prisons, said Hawaii inmates have faced unfair administrative punishments and
had legal records confiscated. The inmates believe these are examples of
retaliatory acts, Brady said. GRW chief executive officer Gil Walker has said he
expects Colorado to increase its number of inmates in Brush, so the company
won't take a financial hit when Wyoming removes it's inmates. "I don't
think it will hurt us at all," Walker said.
April 14, 2005 Honolulu Advertiser
Wyoming will remove its women inmates from a privately run Mainland prison that
also houses Hawai'i women inmates, the same prison where staff members were
accused of sexual misconduct involving Hawai'i, Wyoming and Colorado inmates.
Melinda Brazzale, spokeswoman for the Wyoming Department of Corrections, cited a
recent series of problems at the prison in the decision to remove the Wyoming
inmates from the Brush Correctional Facility in Colorado. Those problems
included criminal charges filed against staff members and the former warden in
connection with the sexual misconduct allegations, and revelations that the
prison allowed five convicted felons to work there because their background
checks had not been completed. Investigations by Colorado state prison officials
concluded prison staff had been involved in alleged sexual misconduct with two
Hawai'i inmates, two Colorado inmates and four Wyoming inmates. Two other
members of the prison staff were charged in an alleged cigarette smuggling ring.
March 24, 2005 AP
Colorado prison officials are reviewing background checks
for employees at five private prisons run by Tennessee companies after
discovering that some employees at one of them had criminal records. State
Corrections Department spokeswoman Alison Morgan said Thursday that five
convicted criminals and three people whose backgrounds "merited further
investigation" had been hired at the Brush Correctional Facility, a
privately run women's prison where several guards face charges of having
consensual sex with inmates and smuggling tobacco into the facility. Morgan said
a former warden for GRW Corp., a Brentwood, Tenn.-based company that has held a
state contract to run the prison for 18 months, failed to complete background
checks for some employees. The failure was first reported by KCNC-TV of Denver.
She said it appears that fingerprints for the guards that were sent to the
Colorado Bureau of Investigation were smudged or otherwise unreadable. The
prints were sent back to the prison, which did not follow up, Morgan said.
Morgan said the Corrections Department's Private Prisons Monitoring Unit does
not have the staff or funding to regularly conduct its own background checks of
private-prison employees.
March 23, 2005 Rocky Mountain News
People with criminal records were hired to work at a Brush
prison where several employees are facing charges for allegedly having sex with
inmates, according to a CBS 4 News investigation. The Brush Correctional
Facility is a medium-security prison that holds 250 women. GRW Corp., a private
company headquartered in Tennessee, runs the prison and hired several employees
with criminal records to watch over the inmates, according to CBS 4 News. The
company has fired six employees with criminal histories so far. Four guards have
resigned from the prison, and one has been put on administrative leave. The
warden, Rick Soares, resigned Feb. 18, a month after the Department of
Corrections first received reports of sexual misconduct. Three prison guards are
facing criminal charges for allegedly having sex with seven inmates. Two other
guards and an inmate are accused of smuggling contraband cigarettes into the
facility. The list of the prison employees with questionable backgrounds
includes 28-year-old Angela Gallegos, CBS 4 News said. A prison guard, she was
arrested on a felony charge three years ago and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor
harassment. Heather Henry, 24, was also hired as a guard. Her record includes
arrests for harassment, domestic violence-assault, violating protective orders
and child abuse. Richard Fairchild, 42, was convicted of domestic violence and
violating a restraining order. Gil Walker, president of GRW, said these are the
last people who should be working in a prison and should have never been hired.
"We don't hire questionable people, and that's the embarrassing part,"
Walker told CBS 4 News. Walker said the company never finished its background
checks on potential employees and didn't know their full histories.
March 10, 2005 Fort Morgan Times
Morgan County District Attorney Bob Watson filed
additional charges Wednesday in connection with the prison sexual misconduct
scandal in Brush. The new indictments include a charge of unlawful sexual
conduct in a penal institution lodged against a second guard, charges of being
an accessory to a crime against the former warden and charges against another
nine current or former prison employees related to introducing contraband
cigarettes into the prison and conspiracy to commit introduction of contraband.
According to Watson, the new charges are not necessarily all that will result
from his office's ongoing investigation of the GRW-owned private prison.
According to case filings made Wednesday in Morgan County District Court,
corrections officer Fredrick Henry Woller, 32, of Brush is charged with unlawful
sexual conduct in a penal institution, a class five felony. Specifically, Woller
is alleged to have engaged in sexual conduct with prisoner Cristie Maez. Also
charged Wednesday was former Warden Richard "Rick" Soares Jr., 57, of
Sterling, who was allegedly an accessory to the crime of unlawful sexual conduct
in a penal institution, also a class five felony. He is accused of hindering the
investigation. The pair joins corrections officer Russell Rollison, 31, of
Brush, who was charged last week with unlawful sexual conduct in a penal
institution. Other charges resulting from the criminal probe to date regard
prison food service and other prison employees allegedly conspiring with inmates
to bring cigarettes into the prison. Cigarettes have been banned from Colorado
penal institutions since 1999. Those charged with introducing contraband in the
second degree, a class six felony, and conspiracy to commit introduction of
contraband, also a class six felony, are: Pania Akopian, 31, Pisa Tuvale, 35,
Annette Cummings, 38, Janice Crockett, 47, and Jeannette Dillon, 38, all of whom
have the Brush Correctional Facility listed as their address; Gail Guerrero, no
age listed, and Maria Ramirez, 46, both of Brush; Charmayne Kalama, 28, of
Kapolei, Hawaii, and Stannie T. Muramoto, 46, of Honolulu, Hawaii. According to
Gil Walker, CEO of Tennessee-based GRW, which owns the 250-bed private prison,
an internal investigation uncovered only consensual sex between the guards and
prisoners. Alison Morgan, a state corrections department spokeswoman, said the
DOC investigation revealed at least some of the sex as having been initiated by
inmates. She said inmates from both Hawaii and Wyoming admitted to initiating
the encounters either so they could be returned home or in an effort to sue the
prison. However, a Hawaii attorney representing two of the inmates has alleged
his clients were raped. The case was referred to DA Watson's office by the state
corrections department's inspector general's office. The Brush prison, which
became the first private prison for women in Colorado, opened in August, 2003.
It houses 80 inmates from Hawaii, 73 from Colorado and 45 from Wyoming. Colorado
pays $50 a day to GRW to house its prisoners.
March 10, 2005 The Denver Channel
The former warden and 10 other people at the privately run Brush Correctional
Facility for Women face felony charges for conduct ranging from having sex with
inmates to smuggling tobacco into the prison. Filings released by District
Attorney Robert Watson show 32-year-old Fredrick Henry Woller faces a felony
charge for allegedly having sex with an inmate. Former warden Rick Soares, 57,
faces charges of being an accessory for allegedly hindering the discovery of
Woller's conduct. Earlier this month, two correctional officers and seven female
inmates were charged with several offenses, including introducing contraband in
the form of tobacco. Watson said other investigations are pending. Soares last
month resigned from Tennessee-based GRW, which owns the 250-bed prison in Morgan
County, after a month-long investigation implicated several officers. The
department's inspector general's staff reported to Watson last month that three
officers had sex with four inmates from Wyoming, two from Colorado and two from
Hawaii. Some of the women alleged they were raped, but investigators concluded
the sex was consensual. Having sex with an inmate is a felony for guards. The
facility became the first private prison for women in Colorado in August 2003.
March 4, 2005 Star Bulletin
Female inmates from Hawaii will remain at a privately run women's prison in
Colorado where five officers face sexual misconduct and contraband charges,
Hawaii officials said yesterday. A visit to the prison by state monitors last
month shows Hawaii does not need to transfer its inmates to an alternate
facility, said Richard Bissen, interim director of Hawaii's Department of Public
Safety. "Incidents like this happen at facilities," Bissen said.
"But that place is being more closely monitored than ever, and the women
themselves say they are safe." Three prison officers had sex with a total
of four Hawaii inmates, two Colorado inmates and one Wyoming inmate, according
to Alison Morgan, a spokesperson for the Colorado corrections department. Two of
the officers have resigned, and a third is on administrative leave.
Investigations show the sex was consensual, said Gil Walker, founder and chief
executive of Tennessee-based GRW, which owns the Brush Correctional Facility for
Women, located in Colorado. One case involved two Hawaii inmates and a guard,
who admitted to engaging in sexual activity in January in the prison library.
Some civil rights advocates argue that there is no such thing as consensual sex
between an inmate and an authority figure. "We have a law that says it's a
felony. It's not consensual when someone is in custody," said Kat Brady, an
advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii. Myles Breiner, a
Honolulu lawyer who is representing the Hawaii inmates, has said the women were
forced to perform a sex act for Rollison. Morgan said some Hawaii and Wyoming
inmates admitted they believed having sex with the guards would help them get
transferred to their home states, where they would be closer to relatives.
February 25, 2005 Denver Post
The warden resigned and five correctional officers at the privately run Brush
Correctional Facility for women face sexual misconduct and contraband charges in
the wake of a criminal probe. Warden Rick Soares resigned from Tennessee-based
GRW, which owns the 250-bed prison in Brush, on Feb. 18 after a month-long
investigation implicated the five officers, said Alison Morgan, state Department
of Corrections spokeswoman. The warden was not implicated in the wrongdoing. The
department's inspector general's office referred contraband allegations
involving two staff members and one inmate and sexual misconduct allegations
involving three staff members to District Attorney Robert Watson on Thursday.
Three officers who were not named had sex with four Hawaiian inmates, two
Colorado inmates and one Wyoming inmate, Morgan said. Two of the officers
resigned, and a third is on administrative leave pending the outcome of the
criminal case. Some of the women alleged they were raped, but investigators
concluded the sex was consensual, sometimes initiated by inmates, Morgan said.
It's still a felony offense for correctional officers, she said. She said some
Hawaiian and Wyoming inmates acknowledged they had sex with correctional
officers because they believed they would be returned home, where they would be
closer to relatives. Others hoped to file lawsuits against the prison. Two
officers and an inmate were caught sneaking tobacco into the prison, Morgan
said.
Casper Re-Entry
Center
Casper, Wyoming
Community Education Centers
October 19, 2007 Rocky Mountain News
A convicted murderer who fled a work-release program and was captured in Canada
two weeks later has pleaded guilty to an escape charge. Shannon Parazoo, 44,
faces up to a 10-year prison sentence. On Feb. 9, Parazoo and his stepson,
Alonzo Durgin, walked away from the Casper Re-Entry Center, where both inmates
were in a work-release program. Along with Parazoo's wife, two of her children
and several pets, they traveled to Montana and then Canada, Parazoo said. The
escape prompted a search that spanned the northwestern U.S. and Canada. Canadian
police arrested the fugitives in British Columbia on Feb. 23.
February 13, 2007 KGWN TV
Authorities are on the lookout for a convicted murderer who walked away from a
Casper halfway house last week. His name is Shannon Parazoo, and he's serving a
20- to 30-year sentence for second-degree murder back in 1985. He's also got a
conviction for an escape attempt in 1986. Authorities say he checked out of the
Casper Re-entry Center on Friday, but didn't report to work that night. They
realized he was missing Saturday morning. Also missing is Parazoo's son, Alonzo
Durgin, who was at the center for aggravated assault and aggravated robbery.
Durgin left Friday night on a pass to spend time with his mother, but never
returned. Law enforcement agencies were notified Saturday, but did not notify
the public until yesterday. Bill Palatucci is the spokesman for New Jersey-based
Community Education Centers Incorporated, which runs the center. He says it
appears the staff at the facility followed all the proper policies and
procedures.
October 5, 2005 Casper Star-Tribune
A 48-year-old man who was on the run for 21 years after escaping from prison in
1978 has gone missing again, according to a Natrona County Sheriff's Office
report. Thomas Lee Russell was serving a 45-day sentence at the Casper Re-Entry
Center when he apparently left the facility early Monday morning, according to
Melinda Brazzale, spokeswoman for the Wyoming Department of Corrections. He was
due to return to parole status Oct. 10 -- a status he first enjoyed two years
ago when his prison sentence on three burglary charges from the 1970s was
commuted. It is not clear how Russell left CRC, which is operated by a private
corrections company out of New Jersey. He was reportedly present at one head
count at the facility and then later noticed missing, according to Sgt. Mark
Sellers of the sheriff's office.
Crowley
County Correctional Facility
Olney Springs, Colorado
CCA (formerly Dominion)
August 25, 2005 Westword
Slow burn: The 2004 Crowley riot caused extensive fire damage. When all hell
broke loose last year at the Crowley County Correctional Facility, a private
prison on Colorado's eastern plains, Vance Adams stayed very, very quiet. From
his cell door, Adams could see prisoners armed with weight bars running in and
out of his unit, smashing windows, busting up plumbing, setting fires and
raiding offices and vending machines. "They looked like they were having a
good time," Adams says. "But I wasn't." After a confrontation in
the yard on July 20, 2004, the understaffed guards evacuated quickly, leaving
the inmates free to rampage for hours, causing millions of dollars' worth of
damage. Adams, serving a five-year sentence on drug and escape charges, soaked
some towels to try to block smoke and tear gas from his cell. Prison and state
Special Operations Response Teams (SORT) arrived in the unit around midnight and
ordered everyone to put their hands on their heads and crawl backward, face
down. When Adams tried to sign the orders to his cellmate, who is deaf, the
officers became more belligerent, he says. "I screamed back at them, 'My
roommate is deaf!'" he recalls. "They calmed down a little bit, but I
guess I wasn't crawling fast enough." Adams says he was tightly cuffed,
dragged by his ankles through the water flooding the unit, hauled outside and
thrown on the grass of the prison ball field, where he remained until
mid-morning. Older prisoners around him were passing out; others cried out for
medical attention after being sprayed with birdshot, pepper gas or rubber
bullets. "When the SORT officers cuffed me, they broke my wrist,"
reads the affidavit of inmate Terry Borrowdale. "They left me cuffed with a
fractured wrist for four to five hours, until I was taken by ambulance to a
hospital in Pueblo.... When I told the SORT officers that I am almost sixty
years old and had no part in the riot, one officer answered, 'This is what you
all deserve for what you have done.'" Bad as the riot was, many prisoners
say they suffered greater injuries from the aftermath of the disturbance, as
officers from the Colorado Department of Corrections and Corrections Corporation
of America, the private prison operator, regained control. A group of more than
eighty inmates is filing a lawsuit against CCA this week, claiming the company
let conditions deteriorate before the riot, then brutalized men who didn't
participate in the uprising. Prisoners claim they were assaulted by officers,
shot (with live ammo, in at least one case) while fleeing burning buildings or
trying to surrender, denied medical treatment, forced to strip in front of
female staff and denied showers for up to a week after the incident. Trial
Lawyers for Public Justice, a Washington-based public-interest group, has joined
Boulder attorney Bill Trine in representing the inmates. The attorneys have
obtained thousands of pages of the state's investigation of the riot and are
seeking access to videotapes made by staff. "There's absolutely no question
about what happened during the riot," Trine says, "and there's a lot
pointing the finger at CCA. They had to get the riot under control, but what
they did afterward was to punish everybody, whether they were involved in the
riot or not." The Colorado
DOC's after-action report on the riot blasted CCA management for ignoring state
inspectors' recommendations before the riot, for inadequate staff training and
for pitiful emergency-response procedures. The report noted that SORT teams
fired hundreds of rounds of buckshot, birdshot and rubber bullets -- as well as
slugs, smoke grenades, "stingballs" and pepper-spray canisters -- but
concluded that "reasonable force was used" to regain control of the
prison. But since that report was released, the DOC has also come under fire
from state auditors for failing to adequately monitor the private prison. As
first reported in Westword last year, visits by DOC monitors were often shorter
than required and suffered from a lack of followup on critical issues such as
poor food, skimpy portions, chronic staff turnover and abysmal inmate morale
("Going Off," December 23, 2004). Investigative files obtained by the
prisoners' attorneys indicate that DOC and CCA staff received more warnings from
inmates of an upcoming disturbance than previously acknowledged. One counselor
told investigators that several staff members had turned in reports on the
matter but "the administration seemed more concerned about who the [source]
was than about the information on a potential riot." At the time of the
riot, Crowley held 1,122 inmates, including some from Washington and Wyoming as
well as Colorado, but had only 47 employees on duty. Although the riot was
triggered by an alleged misuse of force on a Washington inmate, investigators
found that inmates had a wide array of grievances, from the disparity in
treatment of inmates from different states to rotten food. Investigators sampled
the food in the dining hall and "found it to be of very poor quality and
distasteful." After the riot, prisoners say, they were kicked and struck by
guards while cuffed, dragged face-down through vomit or feces-tainted water, and
threatened with more violence. An inmate named Arnold Wyrick claims he was
denied access to a bathroom, had to defecate in his pants, and was forced to
wear the soiled clothing for eight hours while guards called him "Mr.
Shitty Pants" and asked, "Does the little baby need a diaper?"
The investigative files also indicate that some prisoners performed heroically
during the riot. Inmates in one honor pod repelled rioters who tried to enter
their house and manned a bucket brigade to put out fires. Afterward, they were
shoved into overcrowded cells with no mattresses or shipped off to more
restrictive prisons or county jails. The prison was locked down for nearly a
month after the riot. Recently paroled inmates say that conditions at Crowley
are no better than before, and possibly worse, with limited access to recreation
and to the DOC's monitors. "I rarely saw a monitor around," says
Adams, who's now in a Denver halfway house. "They'd have us cleaning the
place a day before any inspection." Inmate Oscar Barron, who left Crowley
last spring and is now on parole on a robbery charge, says staff training is
still a sore point. "They've got guys right out of high school and old
ladies," he says. "Come on. Are they going to protect you if something
happens?" The DOC did not respond to questions about its officers' alleged
mistreatment of handcuffed inmates. CCA spokesman Steve Owen hadn't seen a copy
of the complaint and declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit. "CCA
will aggressively defend the complaint," he says. "Beyond that, we
believe the most appropriate venue to respond is through proper court filings
rather than by way of public comment." Adele
Kimmel, staff attorney for Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, says her group
became involved in the case because of a lack of "significant reform"
in the way CCA manages its four prisons in southeastern Colorado. "We think
the lawsuit is the best mechanism for holding CCA accountable and preventing
future riots," she says.
August 25, 2005 Rocky Mountain
News
Vance Adams had been worried for weeks that something was going to happen at the
Crowley County Correctional Facility, the privately run prison where he was
incarcerated, and on the night of July 20, 2004, those fears were realized when
fellow inmates went wild. First he saw prisoners smashing glass inside the
prison. Then he looked out the window of his cell and saw flames - one of
several blazes lit that night by rioting inmates. "We were scared," he
said. "We didn't know what to do." But as frightened as he was of
marauding inmates, the treatment he and other prisoners endured at the hands of
guards was similarly stressful, he said Wednesday. Those guards, he alleged,
dragged him and another prisoner out of their cell by their ankles, cinched
their wrists tightly with plastic bands, left them for hours with no water, and
told them to urinate in their pants when they asked to use a restroom. Adams is
among 86 current and former inmates of the Crowley County Correctional Facility
in southeast Colorado who have sued its operator, Corrections Corp. of America.
The inmates allege negligence on the part of prison staff leading up to the
riot, use of excessive force during and after the violent outbreak, and inhumane
treatment of prisoners who had nothing to do with the fracas. Bill
Trine, a Boulder attorney representing the inmates, repeatedly charged
Corrections Corp. of America with ignoring warnings in the days leading up to
the riot. For example, he said, the transfer of 198 inmates from Washington
state to Crowley County heightened tensions. He said that happened, in part,
because the out-of-state prisoners resented the corresponding loss of
privileges. Also contributing was resentment among Colorado prisoners who were
paid substantially less for the work they did - $18.60 a month vs. $60 a month
for Washington prisoners. Trine also made public documents compiled by the
state's Office of Inspector General that showed prison officials were warned in
the days before the riot that trouble was likely. Among the documents was a
report from an addiction counselor who said she had been alerted by inmates that
tensions had escalated and that "people were going to get hurt." The
counselor filed a report with a superior and later told investigators that
others also had alerted prison staff "with information from inmates who
told them that there was going to be a riot." Those warnings, Trine said,
were ignored. "The net result," he said, "was the riot did
occur."
October 13, 2004 Rocky Mountain
News
The staff of the privately operated Crowley County Correctional Facility was
severely undermanned and too undertrained and inexperienced to control inmates
on the evening of July 20, when hundreds erupted into a nightlong riot. So said
the state Department of Corrections in a searing report Tuesday on the prison in
Olney Springs, owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America with a
contract to house inmates from Colorado and other states. The
prison had a uniformed staff of only 33 officers for its 1,122 inmates on the
evening of the riot, a ratio of 34 inmates per officer. That compares with a
ratio of five inmates per officer in Colorado's state-operated prisons.
Corrections Corporation of America has not released a damage estimate for the
prison, which it owns and must repair with its own funds. Repairs have not been
completed and 30 percent of the prison remains closed. CCA must also reimburse
the state $385,000 for the prison system's Special Operations Response Team and
other state personnel and expenses in quelling the riot. Not even basic prison
operational procedures were maintained at the prison, the report charged. The
prison had failed to satisfy state prison officials' demands to create an
emergency plan or maintain an emergency response team, the report stated. On the
night of the riot, the prison was "not fully staffed," and some of its
staff had been "on the job for two days or less." Once
the riot erupted, chaos reigned. Prison supervisors reported that the entire
staff was accounted for, although two corrections officers were trapped inside
the prison and sought safety in a segregation cell. The female librarian was
stranded in the library with 37 inmates, who did not join the riot. A
private prison corrections officer's pay is about two-thirds that of state
prison officers - $1,818 per month, compared with $2,774 per month, and staff
turnover is about twice the rate as in state prisons. CCA has told the state it
maintains an approximately 8-to-1 inmate to corrections officer ratio, but it
was far off that staffing strength on July 20. CONCLUSIONS • Turnover: High
staff turnover and inexperience hampered response to emergencies. • Staff:
Prison was not fully staffed at the time of the riot, and some employees had
been on the job only two days or less. • Response: Prison staff's response to
the initial incident was indecisive and failed to comply with orders from a
state Department of Corrections official. • Drills: Emergency drills were
rarely conducted. Prison staff failed to maintain a recommended percentage of
emergency response team members. • Prisoners: Prison staff did not respond to
inmate grievances in a timely manner. • Security: Fundamental security
measures were not consistently followed.
October 13, 2004 Pueblo Chieftain
Administrators of the privately run Crowley County Correctional Facility
knew or should have known about potential problems that led to a July 20 inmate
riot, a new report revealed Tuesday. The Colorado Department of Corrections
report on the riot said the 1,130-inmate facility, one of five private prisons
in the state, lacked state-required equipment, failed to follow DOC regulations
at times, had insufficiently trained guards and no adequate plan to deal with
crisis situations. The 179-page report to Gov. Bill Owens revealed that: Prison
management failed to comply with deficiencies and recommendations that DOC
inspectors told them about before the riot. High staff attrition and
inexperience contributed to a lack of ability to respond to emergencies. The
prison failed to adhere to DOC-mandated menus. Fundamental security measures
were not consistently followed. Construction materials used to build cells were
too easily destroyed. The prison's initial response to the riot was indecisive.
The report noted that the riot, which left scores injured but no deaths, was
sparked by a number of factors, at least one of which was not the fault of the
prison operators. Because the prison housed inmates from other states - Wyoming
and Washington - there was a disparity in the monthly wage out-of-state inmates
earned over Colorado prisoners."
Buying power is strongest, therefore, among Washington and Wyoming
inmates," according to the report, written by DOC prisons director Nolin
Renfrow, legislative liaison Cherri Greco and prisons operations manager Anna
Cooper. Additionally, in the six months before the riot, DOC inspectors - known
as the private prison monitoring unit - cited numerous issues with the prison
operators, including food preparation programs, accuracy and timeliness of
reports and inadequate tracking of security threat intelligence. At one
point during the riot, Renfrow ordered the prison to use chemical agents to
disperse the inmates, but the prison delayed doing so because it was seeking
approval from its corporate headquarters in Nashville. The report also revealed
that the prison's level of emergency preparedness was lacking in several areas:
It wasn't fully staffed. Some employees had been on staff for two days or less
when the riot broke out. Because it had not developed an emergency preparedness
plan to DOC standards, some prison guards and managers were unsure what to do. It
rarely conducted riot drills. When one was conducted, a staff member unaware
that a drill was under way "drew a weapon" on an inmate, the report
said. "The prison riot of July 20 at the Crowley County Correctional
Facility began with a disturbance which, in retrospect, was not responded to as
quickly and efficiently as possible, thus developing into a riot. Some dynamics
among the inmate population, perception that inmate complaints were not being
heard, and use of force by CCCF staff likely all contributed to the onset of the
incident."
September 22, 2004 Pueblo
Chieftain
Part of the problem in managing rioting inmates at a private prison in Crowley
County in July was that the facility had a 45 percent turnover rate in
employees, state corrections officials told lawmakers Tuesday. A day after a
Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman told The Pueblo Chieftain that
DOC doesn't routinely track employment matters at private prisons, the DOC's
director of prisons, Nolin Renfrow, told the legislative Joint Budget Committee
that one of the things under investigation is the prison's high turnover rate. DOC
wants to know if that high rate contributed to the riot among 500 inmates July
20 at the Crowley County Correctional Facility in Olney Springs, which is
operated by Corrections Corp. of America. "We know that it was 45 percent
at this particular facility," Renfrow told the six-member panel that
requested a review of DOC's investigation of the riot. "Over the past few
years, we have monitored their turnover as a whole. I think ours is around 8 to
10 percent. I think they have averaged 20 to 25 percent turnover in the past few
years across CCA (in the state)." At one point
before he arrived at the Crowley prison, Renfrow said he ordered staff workers
to spray crowd-controlling chemicals into the main yard where many prisoners
were rioting. "The word we received back (after giving the order) was that
CCA was trying to get authorization to do that from their headquarters,"
Renfrow said. "Over the next two to three hours, I continued to repeat my
orders as I was driving to the facility from Colorado Springs. Eventually, when
our staff arrived, we did do that and the inmates were brought under
control." "The (high turnover rate) generally
means that tenured staff is generally low, and when tenured staff is very low,
sometimes they have difficulties dealing with situations that are not typical of
everyday operations." He said CCA's policy in dealing with riots is to
"stand down and wait" for DOC officials to arrive to handle it.
"I'm really concerned with what the counties are going to
have to do with private prisons, what's expected of them and whether or not they
really know what they're getting into when they get into a private prison
situation," said Sen. Abel Tapia, D-Pueblo, who sat in on the briefing.
"I know that (DOC) has the ability to get a team together to react to a
violent situation. Shouldn't private prisons have that same capability to
control their own facility?" Renfrow agreed, saying one of the
recommendations he expects to make to the governor is to ensure that private
prison guards are better trained and equipped to handle riots.
September 21, 2004 Pueblo Chieftain
Colorado Department of Corrections officials don't routinely keep records of
staffing levels, turnover rates or salary information for private prisons
housing state inmates, says DOC spokeswoman Alison Morgan. The staffing issues
were raised following a July 20 inmate riot at Crowley County Correctional
Facility in Olney Springs, where 400 to 500 prisoners held control at the prison
for five hours, until DOC and law officers from several local and state agencies
used tear gas and rubber pellets to regain control of the medium-security prison
run by Corrections Corp. of America. Following the riot, The Pueblo Chieftain
questioned Morgan about the private prison's staffing ratio, number of uniformed
staffers on duty when the riot began and salary ranges for CCA employees. Morgan
replied: a.. CCA's uniformed
staff-to-inmate ratio was 1 to 7.9, while DOC's average staff-to-inmate ratio is
1 to 4.7. b.. CCA had 33 uniformed
staffers on duty when the riot began and the prison housed 1,125 inmates at the
time. c.. A Crowley County correctional
officer's pay averages $1,818 per month plus benefits.
d.. DOC's monthly beginning correctional salary is $2,774, plus state
benefits; (no average was given). Morgan provided the information to The
Chieftain on July 23. But when private prison critic Ken Kopczynski of the
Private Corrections Institute Inc., asked Morgan in August for the same
information, along with some backup information such as shift logs, Morgan told
Kopczynski that DOC did not have information on the staffing levels at the time
of the riot, annual turnover rates or average salary ranges. Staff longevity was
raised, according to Kopczynski, because one female Crowley employee stated on
television that she was working in the central control center despite being on
the job for only two days. Morgan, asked Monday about the discrepancy in her
responses to Kopczynski and The Chieftain on staffing issues, said she obtained
responses for The Chieftain in July from CCA, but added that DOC does not
routinely keep staffing or other information on the Crowley prison as part of
its ongoing monitoring of CCA. The reason, she said, is that DOC's contract with
CCA requires the company only to maintain sufficient staffing; no specifics are
spelled out.
August 8, 2004
As inmates at Crowley County Correctional Facility grew restless and agitated in
the exercise yard on the evening of July 20, officers of the private company
charged with managing the prison withdrew to regroup. "They ran,"
said inmate Robert Horn, serving five years for passing bad checks. "They
just abandoned the place." All but one. As a peaceful protest
devolved into arson and riot over five hours, prison librarian Linda Lyons kept
sole watch over 37 male inmates. Although she radioed her location, her
supervisors from the private Corrections Corporation of America made no move to
retrieve her. They then failed to notify an elite anti-riot team from the
Department of Corrections that she had been left behind. While up to 500
inmates in a prison full of 1,100 killers, rapists, thieves and drug dealers
brought their riot within one building of the library, Lyons was never harmed.
She said the men with her talked, played chess and stayed clear of the melee
while she maintained a calm demeanor. "Showing fear would have upset
the inmates," Lyons said. A Department of Corrections review of
Colorado's most destructive inmate uprising has found that the official response
was dogged by slow decision-making and a lack of communication. A senior
department official said CCA officials failed to respond promptly and with
enough force, ignored an offer to negotiate, then left the librarian behind as
they retreated to safe positions. Beyond the questions about the response,
inmates and a corrections officer from CCA say the company's managers had also
failed to heed weeks of warnings about growing inmate unrest. That unrest
- over such typical inmate complaints as poor food, inequitable treatment of
prisoners and a lack of access to prison officials - blossomed into a riot after
corrections officers disciplined one unruly inmate. Officials with CCA, which
manages the Crowley County prison through a contract with the department,
dispute much of the department's criticisms. They insist they mounted an
organized response to the rebellion, deployed chemical agents promptly and never
ignored inmate grievances or a request that night to see the warden. On the
contrary, said spokesman Steve Owen, company officials tried to negotiate an end
to the uprising before the riot but were forced to withdraw as inmates grew
increasingly angry. "If there are things we didn't do right, we're
going to own up to it," Owen said. "We're going to fix all
that." The company has already placed one Crowley County captain on
administrative leave because his statements about the riot were "very
inconsistent," Owen said Saturday. "There is a concern about the
truthfulness of his statement," he said. The department's investigation is not yet complete, but interviews with inmates,
department officials and a guard at the prison provide an outline of the events
that nearly killed one inmate and left the prison smoldering and partly
uninhabitable. Inmate allegedly beaten In the weeks before the riot, about
200 inmates from Washington state had been moved to Crowley County as CCA sought
to maximize profits by filling every bed. At 10 a.m. the day of the riot, one of
the Washington inmates refused to go to work, according to the department's
director of prisons, Nolin Renfrow. When the inmate struggled with an
officer taking him to a disciplinary unit, several officers jerked the inmate to
the ground, said inmate Fredrick Morris, 47, who is serving a life sentence for
murder. Horn also witnessed the inmate's treatment. "These other
guards started pummeling him and kicking him," Horn said. "We'd just
had enough, you know? To treat someone like an animal is not going to fly
anymore." CCA and the department are both investigating the complaint
about the alleged beating of the inmate, whose name was not released. The
department's inspector general says a videotape of the incident does not appear
to show excessive force. But neither the department nor CCA has reached a
conclusion on whether the corrections officer went too far. Inmates
thought he did. The boiling point CCA is a Tennessee-based for-profit
corporation with contracts to manage prisons and jails across the United States,
including four here. Colorado pays the company $49 per inmate per day and
requires the company to comply with all state and federal rules for inmate
care. The company and its supporters say they can profit from
incarceration by employing efficient techniques lost on state
bureaucracies. Inmates at Crowley County said that quest for profit went
too far at the prison. Morris, who had worked as a cook at the prison,
said he quit his job of three years because of the facility's poor food
preparation practices. Staff were ordered to grind hot dogs for spaghetti sauce,
use muffin mix in meatloaf, combine instant potatoes with pinto beans for
burritos and put pork in soup intended for Jewish inmates, Morris said. He
said he complained about the practices to a CCA supervisor in March but nothing
happened. "The food has gotten worse," Morris said. CCA
officials said they had received no formal grievances about the food. The most
recent inspection by the department, on June 29, found that the food served to
inmates at Crowley County was considered "good" by department
standards in nearly every category. In volunteer prison surveys for the
department, Crowley County inmates in October rated food they received to be
lower in quality across the board than prisoners at department prisons.
But Owen said CCA by contract serves the exact same menus as the
department. Prisoners have not filed any grievances about food quality, he
said. Inmates had a variety of other complaints against Crowley
County. Colorado inmates were upset that they were paid only 60 cents a
day for doing the same work as inmates transferred to the prison from Washington
a week earlier. Washington pays inmates $3 per day for work, and CCA is bound by
contract to follow Washington policies when keeping that state's inmates, Owen
said. Colorado lets CCA pay local inmates less. All of that boiled over
July 20. A Crowley County correctional officer said inmates had been talking for
weeks about an uprising. "I was told about it," said the
officer, whose name is being withheld. "They said it wasn't going to be
more than two months, at the most. It wasn't even that long. I was told this by
several different inmates." "They took off running" On
the night of July 20, correctional officers opened a gate connecting the east
recreational yard with the west about 7 p.m. so inmates could play softball in
the west yard. Instead of a handful, hundreds streamed into the west yard,
said inmate Terry Poole, serving life for kidnapping. Several Washington
inmates asked correctional officers to speak with Warden Brent Crouse about
their grievances, Renfrow said. Crowley County security chief Richard
Selman said he never heard about the requests. Owen, the CCA spokesman, said the
company's investigation has determined that an inmate asked to speak with a
"supervisor" - not the warden. After the request was relayed to
supervisors, a shift captain was unable to locate the inmate who made the
request, Owen said. At that point, the captain became concerned for the safety
of the prison staff and they withdrew from the yard - effectively relinquishing
control to the inmates. "They took off running, and they left the
female employees behind," said William Morris, another Crowley County
Correctional Facility inmate. CCA reported the prisoner rebellion to
department officials, and Renfrow said he urged CCA to immediately use chemical
agents to push inmates away from the living units and put down the
uprising. But, Renfrow said, CCA officials told department monitors that
they needed approval from their Nashville headquarters before deploying tear
gas. CCA spokesman Owen says the company's officers did not need approval
from Nashville and did respond promptly. In a written response to questions, he
said "chemical agents had already been disbursed by facility staff at
approximately 8:20 p.m." That would be before Renfrow said he asked for its
use. Regardless of when the first gas was used, it came much later than
inmates expected and gave ringleaders an opportunity to organize real
mayhem. "If they would have just went back, sat on the towers and
shot tear gas from up there, there probably would have been less of a
riot," William Morris said. "Everybody would have went home. They
would have dispersed." Librarian kept her cool As inmates began
setting the prison facilities ablaze, librarian Lyons, 56, ordered the men in
the library back to their cells. They implored her not to force them out into
the yard, where other inmates were clearly gearing up for a fight. Before
long, fires were burning in front of each living unit and the greenhouse was
burning. In the yard, scores of inmates used filing cabinets and doors as
shields as they approached officers. They barricaded doors with soda
machines they lit on fire. Unbreakable windows were blown out, and inmates were
using shards of glass as shanks. The amount of damage still has not been
calculated, but it may approach $1 million. Renfrow said he asked CCA if
all employees had made it safely out of the prisoner-controlled grounds. He said
he was mistakenly told they had. If he had known Lyons was still in harm's
way, he said, he would have immediately ordered officers to get her. Inmates
broke into the shop next to the library, said Nathan Walter, commander of the
department's Special Operations Response Team, or SORT. Still, Lyons, a
second-year CCA employee, didn't fret, and she said she is not upset with CCA
for failing to dispatch a team to rescue her. In her mind, she didn't need
rescuing. "I felt safe where I was," she said. It was 10
p.m. before the SORT team had moved in to retake the first of the dorms.
Outnumbered by dozens of prisoners to each one, SORT members used rubber pellets
and "triple chaser" tear gas bundles that separated and exploded to
push back inmates who were hurling rocks, sticks, furniture and flaming Molotov
cocktails. In the aftermath, they learned that while Lyons was unharmed, a
group of as many as 15 inmates had gone on the prowl in the prison to attack sex
offenders and men suspected of being snitches. The man hurt worst during the
riot, burglar Rudy Lujan, was attacked by a mob of maybe 15 inmates who believed
he had snitched on inmates to the guards, Horn said. They beat him, stabbed him,
threw him over the railing of the second-floor tier of cells and tossed a
microwave oven onto his limp frame. He was hospitalized in critical
condition, and officials have not offered an update since. The prison can
be repaired, but if CCA's policies don't change, it will happen again, Horn
predicted. "Those people (in Olney Springs) need to understand that
this is going to occur over and over again," he said. "The population
in that area is seriously lucky. At any point, (the inmates) could have just
turned to that fence and mowed that fence down. Imagine five or six hundred
crazed individuals running into Olney Springs." (Denver Post)
August 4, 2004
Family members of inmate Rudy Lujan sat around his mother's dinning room table
recently, looking at pictures from his childhood and worrying about his
well-being now. Oh, the stories Juliana Lujan has about her 32-year-old
son who was beaten nearly to death after a riot broke out two weeks ago at the
Crowley County Correctional Facility east of Pueblo. Rudy Lujan of Greeley is
still hospitalized from the injuries. His parole hearing is today. Lujan
was stabbed, beaten with a cinder block and forced to jump from the second floor
by a gang of men on July 20 when inmates rioted, torched and broke pipelines
that flooded the prison. Juliana said in the past year her son has
repeatedly asked for protection, but no one took the convicted felon seriously.
He told his family that he had been jumped, "cheap-shotted" from
behind and threatened several times. He was at an undisclosed hospital in
Pueblo where guards watched over him as he recovered from a coma, a bruised
body, blackened eyes, stiff neck, several stab wounds and carnage torn from his
arm by the cinder block beating. It took him nearly dying to be taken seriously,
Juliana said. Lujan was recently moved to an infirmary, she said. (Greeley
Tribune)
July 30, 2004
More than two dozen Airway Heights inmates currently housed at a Colorado
corrections facility will remain there until the Washington State Department of
Corrections completes its investigation into last week's riot. Criteria for
selecting inmates to send out of state include time left to serve, health
issues, behavior and how often they are visited by relatives. Ultimately though,
the private out-of-state prisons get to choose which inmates it wants to bring
in. (KXLY News 4)
July 29, 2004
For more than two hours, Tammera Bravo's son, an inmate at Crowley Correctional
Facility, delivered "minute-by-minute terror" over the phone as
prisoners smashed their surroundings. "He said, 'It's on Mom. Those
prisoners from Washington are refusing to come out of the yard.' "
Washington inmates at the private prison in Olney Springs, about 80 miles
southeast of Colorado Springs, had reached a boiling point because of their
recent transfer and because they didn't like their new cells, Bravo said.
Five and a half hours later, it was over. All in all, as many as 400 of the
prison's more than 1,100 inmates had been involved. Two of five cellblocks were
trashed, at least one control room had been breached, fires had burned, and 13
inmates were injured. Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the
Tallahassee, Fla.-based Private Corrections Institute -- which has been
extremely critical of privatized prisons -- said the transfers hurt inmates'
ties to family and friends. Many families, he said, are too poor to afford
regular visits and inmates are left with little to look forward to and no life
outside prison walls. Kopczynski says it was no coincidence that, a day
after the Crowley County prison incident, 28 Colorado inmates rebelled at a CCA
private prison in Tutwiler, Miss., setting fire to mattresses and
clothing. "You're importing inmates from Washington and Wyoming to
Colorado, and then you're shipping Colorado inmates off to Mississippi,"
Kopczynski said. "Does anyone see the irony here?" In 2002,
former state Sen. Penfield Tate, as he had in years prior, introduced
unsuccessful legislation that would have prevented Colorado inmates from being
transferred out of state. Tate became worried after incidents occurred in the
1990s similar to the one in Crowley County. "We've seen a history of
it," Tate said. At CCA-owned private prisons, the guard-to-inmate
ratios are far lower than at state-operated Department of Corrections
facilities. The state's average ratio is one guard for less than five inmates,
while the for-profit CCA averages one guard for nearly eight inmates. Morgan
said the vast difference in ratios is justified because the state tends to deal
with more difficult inmates. However, critics like Kopczynski note that
salaries for private prison guards tend to be much lower. At the Crowley County
prison, guards make an average of $1,818 a month, compared to state guard
salaries that start at $2,774 a month. Because private prisons tend to pay
guards less, companies grapple with higher turnover, meaning fewer experienced
guards are available to handle complex inmate issues, Kopczynski said. Some
guards, he said, don't last long enough to complete their training, which can
take months. Others stay just a few years, he added. (Colorado Springs
Independent)
July 29, 2004
The state Department of Corrections will accept no more out-of-state prisoners
at Colorado's four private prisons while an investigation unravels the cause of
a riot at one of them, an agency spokeswoman said Tuesday. (Rocky Mountain
News)
July 28, 2004
State Sen. Ken Kester on Tuesday defended the private operators of Crowley
County Correctional Facility, rocked by a riot last week. Kester, R-Las
Animas, questioned statements made by Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, in
the wake of a riot that caused major damage to the prison, and praised
Corrections Corp. of America, which operates Crowley and three other private
prisons in the state. The day following the riot, McFadyen told The Pueblo
Chieftain her attempts to require the state to reveal the actual state cost of
housing prisoners at private prisons was rejected during the latest term of the
Legislature. She said that on three different occasions, she asked for a
breakdown of the cost - not just the per diem rate paid to private prisons, but
also cost for medical care for inmates, transportation, escapes, riot control,
case management and some training of private prison staff, which the state
pays. "I am not trying to be belligerent. I am just trying to assess
the information in a format that can be compared side-by-side with the state
numbers. If that information is available it has not been made available to
me," McFadyen said. Kester defended private prisons, saying that they
save the state an estimated $50 million in construction costs per private
prison, and it also costs taxpayers less to maintain inmates in private
prisons. Kester, who was a Bent County commissioner when the county
negotiated a deal with CCA for the Bent County Correctional Facility, said that
the Bent County prison has been helpful to the community. (Pueblo
Chieftain)
July 27, 2004
A riot that injured more than a dozen inmates and caused millions of dollars in
damage to a prison run by a Tennessee company last week prompted the state to
temporarily stop accepting out-of-state inmates, an official says. (AP)
July 25, 2004
Staffing and pay at the Crowley County private prison, where inmates rioted
Tuesday night, is roughly half of that at state prisons, a Department of
Corrections spokeswoman said Friday. The DOC's Alison Morgan worked with
the Crowley prison owner, Corrections Corp. of America, to produce the statement
in response to questions submitted by The Pueblo Chieftain. CCA's
uniformed staff-to-inmate ratio is 1-7.9. DOC's average staff-to-inmate ratio is
4.7-1. She noted that DOC's ratio is affected by the needs in DOC's high-custody
facilities and special-needs inmates. CCA has based its salaries on the
Crowley County area's prevailing wages. The range for a correctional officer at
Crowley County is $1,557 to $2,335 a year, with an average of $1,818 per month
plus benefits. DOC's beginning salary for a correctional officer is $2,774 per
month, plus state benefits. No average figure was stated. Colorado, like
most states, participates in the Federal Interstate Compact Agreement that
provides for the exchange of inmates between states. "For example, if DOC
has an inmate that cannot be incarcerated in a Colorado facility, we can
transfer that inmate to an accepting state. We then must accept an inmate from
that state in exchange." It was not clear whether DOC reviews the
backgrounds of prisoners before they're accepted into the state's private
prisons. Crowley County had 33 uniformed staffers on duty when the riot
began Tuesday night. The prison housed 1,125 inmates, according to DOC
officials. There have been reports that Crowley staffers feared there
would be strife with the arrival of Washington state inmates. Ninety-nine
Washington inmates arrived on July 2; another 99 on July 9. (Pueblo
Chieftain)
July 25, 2004
Details of a sexual harassment lawsuit settlement between an Edmond company that
once operated a Colorado private prison and three women who used to work there
aren't being released. The women, former guards, filed the federal lawsuit
seeking more than $10 million from Dominion Correctional Services and three
managers. The former guards alleged that female employees were coerced
numerous times in 2001 and 2002 into sexual activity by male managers who
condoned sexual misconduct among workers. Former guard Lucilla Gigliotti
alleged that she became pregnant after the prison's former chief of security,
Ronald McCall, went to her home and raped her. McCall, in court filings,
denied he sexually assaulted her and denied he "engaged in any conduct
which violated the constitutional rights" of Gigliotti and the other two
women, Pamela Johnson and Lt. Jennifer Stalder. McCall had been forced
from a previous job at the Colorado Department of Corrections because "he
had an extensive history of engaging in sexual discrimination and
harassment," the three women alleged. Johnson alleged a guard raped
her at the prison despite her having previously pleaded with Vigil not to assign
the guard and her to the same work area. (AP)
July 23, 2004
A man who suffered the worst injuries during Tuesday's riot at the Crowley
County Correctional Facility called his sister after fires broke out, saying he
feared for his life and that she should call police. Rudy Lujan, 32,
who is serving time for burglary and drug charges, had to shout because the
commotion in the private prison was so loud, said his sister, who would give
only her first name, Bonnie, citing fear of retaliation. "He said a
riot was going on, and all the guards were so scared they went on the
roof," she said. "The prisoners had already taken control. He was
scared. He told me, 'If anything happens to me, tell everybody I love
them."' A prison official called Lujan's family in Greeley on
Wednesday to tell them that he had been hospitalized with multiple stab wounds,
said his other sister, Debbie Segura. On Thursday, prison officials reported
that Lujan was breathing on his own and was in serious but stable condition,
according to the family. Lujan had been having problems with gang members
in the private prison in Olney Springs, his family said. He had told them
stories of being jumped from behind and "cheap-shotted" more than
once. His family believes Lujan had been refusing gang members' attempts
to recruit him. (Denver Post)
July 23, 2004
Prison officials at the Crowley County Correctional Facility foresee a complex
repair project after the prison was rocked by a riot Tuesday night. The
prison is one of four in the state owned and operated by Corrections Corp. of
America. At least one-third of its 1,147 inmates rioted Tuesday and two of the
five housing units were rendered uninhabitable. Inmates set three fires,
damaged three other living units and destroyed the vocational greenhouse.
They also smashed furniture and televisions, destroyed desks and bunks, ripped
sinks and toilets from the walls and intentionally triggered fire alarms to
drench everything in the buildings. (Pueblo Chieftain)
July 23, 2004
Inmates at the Crowley County prison began telling their families as long as a
month ago that tensions at the facility were high and that an uprising was
imminent, two parents said Thursday. One Denver mother said her son told
her that in early June word began to spread that the Crowley County Correctional
Facility was going to accept prisoners from Washington state. When the imported
inmates began arriving about three weeks ago, several inmates began complaining
to the guards, she said. Colorado inmates complained that some of the
out-of-state prisoners were being mixed in with them, which was creating a lot
of tension, she said. Residents and officials from nearby Olney Springs said
guards who visit the town's businesses or live in the community had told them in
recent weeks that they expected violence at the prison. (Rocky Mountain
News)
July 23, 2004
Although state lawmakers have carried out four audits of state prison programs
since 1999, they have never audited the private company in charge of the
southern Colorado prison engulfed by a riot Tuesday. The Crowley County
prison that erupted in flames is run by Corrections Corporation of America. A
state senator said Thursday the state might want to take a closer look at its
finances. "We can follow the state's money and audit that," said
Sen. Norma Anderson, R-Lakewood, a longtime audit committee member.
"Perhaps we should do more along that line. We have looked at the bank
accounts for the prisoners that are held in the private prisons, but we have
never audited security there." No one could estimate the damage from
Tuesday's melee, but state officials insisted those costs would be borne by CCA.
The state also intends to bill the company for its costs in rushing more than
100 correctional officers and other help to the scene to help quell the
uprising, as well as the expense of the investigation - a cost that could run as
high as $150,000. And at a news conference in Pueblo, Frank Smith of the
anti- private prison group Private Corrections Institute said that "Olney
Springs came apart at the seams, and it was no big surprise." Smith,
along with Brian Dawe, executive director of Corrections U.S.A., a nonprofit
group that represents the nation's public corrections officers, said private
prisons do not protect the public. "This isn't about public safety
for the private prisons, it's about the money," Dawe said. Smith said
he talked to some of the corrections officers at Crowley and they expressed
concerns about understaffing, low pay and inadequate training. Dawe said private
prison guards receive 30 percent less training than those at federal
facilities. Smith said he was also told that Colorado prisoners might have
started the riot because they were not happy about what they considered special
treatment that prisoners from Washington state were receiving. Dawe, a
former prison guard, said moving inmates out of state and away from their
families is bad for the prison and the public. "I guess Colorado doesn't
have enough problems, so they need to import some more," he said.
(Rocky Mountain News)
July 22, 2004
After an inmate's being denied a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich helped sparked
a riot at the medium-security Crowley County Correctional Facility in 1999,
state prison officials concluded that guards at the private prison had not been
properly trained. John Suthers, head of the Colorado Department of
Corrections at the time, later vowed that the state's future contracts with
private prisons would emphasize "proper training." Five years later,
after another riot at the prison - now run by a different company, Corrections
Corp. of America - some critics are raising the training issue again, though DOC
officials say they don't believe it's a problem. "The people that they're
getting employed there - people who have never been in law enforcement, people
who have never been in corrections - they put them through a training period
that they say is effective, but it's not," former Crowley County
correctional officer Jennifer Stalder said Wednesday. "You're dealing with
felons, and they don't play." Stalder recently settled a
wrongful-termination suit against Dominion Correctional Services, which ran the
prison before CCA. Stalder never worked for CCA, but she has friends and
relatives who work there who have told her the training programs have not
changed, she said. And though some wondered Wednesday if state budget cuts
could have led to Tuesday's riot, that is unlikely, said Republican Rep. Brad
Young of Lamar, chairman of the legislature's Joint Budget Committee. But
Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo, said she's concerned that privately run prisons
aren't cheaper than state-run prisons. She points out that the costs for medical
care, transportation, clothing, case management, escapes and riot control all
fall back on state and local government. (Denver Post)
July 22, 2004
State Department of Corrections officials said Wednesday that Tuesday's Crowley
County prison riot began with 100 to 150 inmates refusing to return from a
recreational yard to their housing unit. As a result of damage from the
uprising, more than half the inmates have been moved elsewhere. The Olney
Springs prison is privately operated by Corrections Corp. of America, but state
employees of the DOC and officers from several area sheriffs' departments helped
bring the riot under control about five hours after it began. DOC
officials said the investigation of the cause of the riot is ongoing. Department
spokeswoman Allison Morgan said, "one factor may be gang-related," but
Executive Director Joe Ortiz said later, "We have no special information
that this is gang-related." Morgan said the riot began at 7:30 p.m.,
turning into a scene of mayhem as inmates used weight-lifting equipment to tear
up housing units. They started three fires, leaving two of the prison's five
housing units uninhabitable from fire and water damage and another unit damaged.
Other property was damaged or destroyed, and there were a few instances of
inmates attacking one another. CCA staffers retreated until the DOC
special operations team and emergency response teams from five state prisons
arrived. Backup officers from Pueblo, Fowler, Rocky Ford and the Colorado State
Patrol also were sent to assist with the crisis. DOC will put a moratorium on
transferring out-of-state inmates into Crowley County for now. (The Pueblo
Chieftain)
July 22, 2004
A Colorado lawmaker whose district includes eight state-run prisons said
Wednesday the riot at the private Crowley County facility raises critical
questions about the safety and cost-effectiveness of private prisons. Rep.
Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, said she was alarmed when she first got word of
the rioting and the possibility that inmates and guards might have been
seriously hurt or killed. She intends to press her colleagues during the
2005 session to take a much closer look at the state's contracts with private
prisons. She had raised the alarm on the House floor this year during a
debate over a bill pushed by legislative budget writers that would make it
easier to seek competitive proposals from private prison providers.
"It's not just the cost," she said. "My concern also is for the
safety of the general public, as well as the people working in, and even those
confined in, these facilities. "This is the second riot at the same
facility since 1999. These prisons are built in rural areas, where there is
little law enforcement to help out. They may not have sufficient manpower
themselves, and they may be poorly trained and equipped." But Rep.
Brad Young, R-Lamar, chairman of the legislature's budget-writing committee,
noted that prisons - both state and private - are dangerous places. He said he
wants to see a full report on what happened. "It sounds like a
full-scale riot broke out really fast," Young said. "You do everything
you can to prevent that kind of thing. It doesn't mean they weren't doing a good
job." Young said constructing prisons is "a huge cost" and
added that with the economic downturn that occurred a little more than two years
ago, "the state couldn't afford to keep up with the inmate population
increases we've seen." "There definitely is some economy for
doing it through the private sector," he said.
But McFadyen said she hoped what occurred would help bring a better awareness of
the true cost to the state and local governments where private prisons are
located. "As a state legislator, I have frequently questioned the
hard cost of contracting with private prisons," she said. "No one can
give me an exact amount. The question is, are we risking the safety of the
public and is it really cheaper? We must have answers to those
questions." (Rocky Mountain News)
July 22, 2004
State prison officials sifted through a stunning swath of destruction at the
Crowley County Correctional Facility on Wednesday, still uncertain what caused
an overnight riot by more than 400 inmates. Officials on Wednesday
discounted reports that the riot was a "turf war" between Colorado
inmates and 190 prisoners who arrived from Washington state about three weeks
ago. But guards had privately confided to townspeople since the Washington
transfer that they feared something was brewing. The Washington inmates
were angry over their transfer more than 1,000 miles away from their
families. Whatever problem had been smoldering inside the privately
operated prison 40 miles east of Pueblo erupted violently about 7:30 p.m.
Tuesday. More than one-third of the prison's 1,147 inmates joined in the
51/2-hour riot. They set at least three fires, smashed everything in two
of the prison's five living units, damaged its three other living units, and
resisted more than 150 guards using tear gas and rubber bullets to quell the
outbreak. Thirteen inmates were injured. One suffered multiple stab wounds
in one of two inmate-on-inmate assaults. Four inmates remained hospitalized
Tuesday, none with life-threatening injuries, said Department of Corrections
Director Joe Ortiz. None of the prison staff was injured. On
Wednesday, the inmates were being held under 24-hour lockdown in cells and
improvised holding areas throughout the prison. At the height of the riot,
inmates set fires in two cell houses and the vocational greenhouse, and
proceeded to tear them apart, throwing and smashing furniture, destroying desks
and bunks, ripping sinks and toilets from the walls, splintering television sets
and setting off fire alarms to drench everything in the buildings. Some
inmates used steel weights and dumbbells from the exercise yard to smash doors
and windows, said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Alison Morgan.
"Living Unit 2 is not habitable. Living Unit 1 is not as severe, but it is
destroyed," Morgan said. The destruction ruined 600 inmate cells,
leaving prison officials to find other places to house them. About 300 were
being moved to a newly completed housing unit at the prison, but 300 were being
transferred Wednesday to other state prisons. (Rocky Mountain News)
July 21, 2004
Inmates at a nearby private prison rioted Tuesday, prompting law enforcement
agencies from around Southern Colorado to mobilize in an effort to quell the
uprising. Crowley County Commissioner Matt Heimerich told The Pueblo
Chieftain that local sheriff's department responded to the medium security
Crowley County Correctional Facility at about 8 p.m. with every available
officer from its force of nine people, along with all three ambulances in
Crowley County. By 10 p.m. the rioting apparently had escalated and
reached a threshold of serious concern, as the Pueblo County Sheriff's
Department's SORT team and up to 20 members of the SWAT team from the Pueblo
Police Department were deployed to join in suppressing the situation. The Fowler
Police Department, Otero County Sheriff's Department, Rocky Ford Police
Department and the Colorado State Patrol also joined the effort. Witnesses
said smoke billowed from three separate locations in the prison - one in the
yard and two inside structures - and the smell of tear gas was thick. Multiple
witnesses also reported hearing gunshots from inside the prison walls. A
female guard toting a rifle was stationed at the main entrance to the prison and
turned away several curious onlookers from the surrounding rural area. Heimerich
said he had been told the riot was being driven by inmates from the state of
Washington, who were recently transferred to the prison in Olney Springs. The
prison recently contracted to retain between 150 and 200 inmates from
Washington. (Pueblo Chieftain)
July 21, 2004
At least 100 inmates rioted Tuesday evening and set small fires inside the walls
of a privately run prison in Crowley County. Scores of law-enforcement officials
from all over the state raced to Olney Springs to help quell the
disturbance. The inmates rioted in the yard and in some portions of the
interior of the Crowley County Correctional Facility in Olney Springs, Allison
Morgan, Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman, said early this morning.
Morgan said she did not know where in the prison the fires were set.
(Rocky Mountain news)
Goshen
County Economic Development
Goshen County, Wyoming
Dominion
June 5, 2003
Goshen County Economic Development (GCED) is continuing its effort in reviewing
the process for a correctional facility to be built in Wyoming, possibly in
Torrington. GCED director Brad Sutherland found out that the Wyoming
Department of Corrections has been without director and that the state is
continuing its search for that position. The candidate highest on the list
declined the job when he learned that his wife might have cancer, according
Sutherland. As far as Sutherland knows, Dominion Correctional Services
LLC, is the only contractor out there that is serious about putting a bid in
right now. (The Torrington Telegram Online)
McKinley
County Detention Center/Adult Facility
Gallup, New Mexico
Management and Training Corporation
January 24, 2006 Casper Star-Tribune
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit against a New
Mexico detention officer, alleging he sexually assaulted two female inmates from
Wyoming at a Gallup, N.M., jail and photographed them in the nude. At the time
of the alleged incidents in 2003, the inmates were housed in New Mexico because
of overcrowding at Wyoming's only female correctional institution, the Wyoming
Women's Center in Lusk. The lawsuit claims sexual abuse and cruel and unusual
punishment by Detention Officer Brian Orr of the McKinley County (N.M.)
Detention Center. The complaint was filed on behalf of inmates Sheila Black and
Christine Herden. The ACLU alleges that Orr repeatedly sexually assaulted the
two women and photographed them in the nude, causing physical injury and severe
psychological and emotional distress. The complaint also alleges that the jail's
acting warden, Gilbert Lewis, the McKinley County commissioners and the
Centerville, Utah, company that managed the jail, Management and Training Corp.,
were negligent for failing to properly train and supervise Orr.
North Fork Correctional
Facility
Sayre, Oklahoma
CCA
February 22, 2008 The Denver Channel
The Colorado Department of Corrections has sent two investigators to an Oklahoma
prison to probe whether correctional officers staged ‘ultimate fights’ among
prisoners and rewarded the fight's winner with a cell phone, corrections sources
told CALL7 Investigators. The DOC inspector general's staff traveled this week
to the privately owned North Folk Correctional Facility at Sayre, Okla., about
130 miles west of Oklahoma City, to investigate the complaint of ‘ultimate
fighting,’ sources said. It was unclear Friday whether the details of the
complaint have been substantiated. DOC Executive Director Ari Zavaras, in a
phone conversation with CALL7 Investigator Tony Kovaleski, confirmed
investigators were sent out to Oklahoma. "There is an ongoing investigation and
we do not comment until the investigation is complete," he told Kovaleski. The
facility is owned and operated by the Corrections Corporation of America and
houses about 480 Colorado inmates on a contract basis. CCA also owns the Crowley
County Correctional Facility, which came under DOC scrutiny in 2004 after a
riot. The DOC report criticized the "lack of responsiveness" by private prison
operators to state corrections officials. CCA also owns about 70 facilities
nationwide, including four in Colorado. The Colorado facilities are Bent County
Correctional Facility, Huerfano County Correctional Center, Kit Carson
Correctional Center and the facility in Crowley County. DOC spokeswoman
Katherine Sanguinetti declined to confirm any details but said introducing a
cell phone into a correctional facility is a federal offense if it happened. CCA
spokesman declined comment and directed questions to Sanguinetti.
February 19, 2008 Casper Star-Tribune
A state investigation determined Wyoming had no policies in place last year to
track violence against inmates being housed in out-of-state prisons. The probe
also found that the beating of a state inmate by other inmates at a private
prison last year in Oklahoma was not thoroughly investigated. The investigation
by Maj. William Moore of the Wyoming Department of Corrections found "no WDOC
Policy, Procedure or Directive is in place that requires the tracking and
compliance of out of state incidents to ensure that these incident (sic) are
properly tracked for compliance." The investigative report, completed last fall,
was recently obtained by The Associated Press under the state's public records
law. The investigation was launched after an inmate was beaten last April at the
private Northfork Correctional Facility in Sayre, Okla. Wyoming houses 375
inmates there and has paid Corrections Corporation of America nearly $12.5
million from June 2006 through December 2007 for their housing and medical care.
An investigator with Corrections Corporation of America, which owns the Oklahoma
prison, looked into the inmate beating and concluded there was "no institutional
deficiency that may have contributed to the inmate on inmate assault." The
inmate, whose name was redacted from documents released to The AP, sustained
injuries in the beating and was airlifted to Oklahoma City for treatment. He
later returned to the prison that day. In his report, Moore found the CCA prison
investigator "conducted the most rudimentary of investigations regarding this
incident and what little was accomplished focused only on the assault." Attempts
to reach a spokesperson at the Oklahoma prison were unsuccessful. An official
with the Wyoming Department of Corrections said the agency has taken steps to
boost its monitoring of out-of-state inmates since last year's report. Wyoming
has a full-time contract monitor at the Oklahoma prison and routinely sends
investigative teams to the prison to look into inmate complaints, said Steve
Lindly, deputy director of the Department of Corrections. Lindly said he doesn't
doubt that Moore's report was accurate when it was written last year. But Lindly
said state corrections officials were already independently coming to the
conclusion that more oversight of out of state inmates was necessary. Lindly
said his department is satisfied the Oklahoma prison now is meeting its
obligation to ensure Wyoming inmates are protected from assault at the Oklahoma
prison. "The warden has been responsive to our insistence that we meet the
standard," Lindly said. Stephen Pevar, an ACLU lawyer, said he remains concerned
about the safety of Wyoming inmates at the Oklahoma prison. His lawsuit forced
security improvements at the state penitentiary in Rawlins. Last summer, U.S.
District Judge Clarence Brimmer of Cheyenne ended five years of federal
oversight of the Rawlins prison, which stemmed from the ACLU's lawsuit. The
lawsuit was called the Skinner case, named after inmate Brad Skinner who was
beaten by three other inmates in 1999. Although conditions have improved in
Rawlins, Pevar said he's received complaints about assaults against Wyoming
inmates at the Oklahoma prison. "All I can confirm is that there have been a
number of very egregious assaults at these facilities to which Wyoming is
sending its prisoners," Pevar said. There have been 14 confirmed
inmate-on-inmate assaults last year involving Wyoming prisoners at the Oklahoma
facility, according to Melinda Brazzale, spokeswoman for the Wyoming Department
of Corrections. There were 65 assaults in 2007 at the Rawlins state prison,
which holds about 644 inmates, Brazzale said. Pevar said he's written to the
Wyoming Attorney General's office about the state's contract with CCA. He said
he's told the state that it must insist on standards limiting inmate violence,
just as it requires inmates to be given adequate food, shelter and medical care.
Pevar said believes the state needs to ensure Wyoming prisoners, "will be
adequately protected from assault, and that the same procedures that the court
held in the Skinner case were constitutionally required should likewise be
adopted in these facilities that house Wyoming prisoners. And it's clear to me
that they're not." Pevar also said he doesn't feel Wyoming is doing an adequate
job investigating "the sufficiency of the facilities to which Wyoming is sending
its prisoners." "Those facilities are doing some things that I don't think would
be acceptable in Wyoming," Pevar said. Lindly said it was clear the CCA
investigations into inmate violence were not as thorough as the investigations
Wyoming's own staff members would conduct and noted the state is building a
700-bed prison in Torrington that will allow the department to house all its
inmates in state. "We're comfortable with the process right now," Lindly said.
"It's not as good as having them under your own wing, which is why we're having
another prison built."
Regional Juvenile Detention
Facility
Natrona County, Wyoming
Frontier Correctional System
April 19, 2008 AP
A Casper juvenile facility has been locking up youth in jail space that was
deemed unsuitable for adults years ago and in ways that increase the risk of
youths committing suicide or physically or sexually assaulting one another,
according to a report obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The report came
out three months before an assault and other alleged incidents at the privately
run Regional Juvenile Detention Facility prompted a Department of Family
Services investigation. "It is difficult to comprehend why the community permits
children to be treated worse than adult criminals," summed up the report by the
National Partnership for Juvenile Services. Overcrowding at the adult Natrona
County jail prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the county in
1992. The county opened a new adult jail in 1997 but then began using the old
adult jail to lock up juveniles. The Regional Juvenile Detention Facility is in
the same building as the Natrona County Sheriff's Office and houses youth from
several Wyoming counties. The alleged incidents there happened about six weeks
ago and included an assault between two boys and an instance of a group of boys
who, for unknown or undisclosed reasons, gathered around two other boys who were
naked. Department officials said this week they've been trying to learn why
staff of Cheyenne-based Frontier Correctional Systems, which runs the center,
didn't report the incidents right away. Department officials also have been
looking into whether lack of separation between bigger, more aggressive youth
and smaller, less aggressive kids may have played a role in the incidents. The
National Partnership report, dated Dec. 12, had warned about just that. The
report said the facility did not have a useful way of identifying and separating
"predatory youth" from "vulnerable youth." The report also said that the
facility's multiple-occupancy cells made physical and sexual assault among
youths more likely, and that the number of locked doors between staff and youth
reduced safety. In addition, the report said youth in the facility on the third
floor of the sheriff's office building aren't given time outdoors -- it's not
possible. "The reasons for declaring the third floor unacceptable for detention
seem obvious," the report said. "These factors are aggravated when detaining
juveniles." The report said the juvenile facility is "sadly inadequate for ...
advanced practice care" and putting youths there amounts to "little more than
warehousing" them. It's unclear what measures the county might have taken after
the report's release to improve safety at the facility. Sheriff Mark Benton and
Undersheriff David Kinghorn did not return messages left Friday; neither did
Frontier Correctional Systems CEO John Harrison. But Natrona County
commissioners said they were aware of the report -- they requested it -- and
feel that it underscores the need to build a new juvenile facility. "It's
indefensible, in my opinion, that we put kids in a facility that's inadequate
for adults. I can't defend that. I wouldn't want to," said Commissioner Matt
Keating. "But what I do want to do is move the project forward as best I can, to
have an appropriate facility, so that we end up with better adults."
Riverton,
Wyoming
Dominion
November 6, 2002
The Riverton Economic and Community Development Association has unanimously
endorsed looking into locating a 400-bed medium security prison in the area. The
Joint Judiciary Committee of the Wyoming Legislature indicated in October it
would recommend building two 400-bed medium security prisons in Wyoming, one in
the east half of the state and one in the west, rather than a single facility to
replace the Wyoming Business Council, told Riverton Economic and Community
Development Association, RECDA, members that two top executives of Dominion
Properties LLC, of Edmond, Okla., visited the city two weeks ago "to get
the lay of the land." A Dominion-operated correctional facility in Crowley
County, Colo., is holding about 500 Wyoming prisoners now. Jim Hunter, executive
vice president of Dominion Properties, the parent company of Dominion
Corrections, said company officials like what they see in Riverton. Hunter said
his company would only design, build and equip the new prison if it wins a state
contract. "It is our understanding that the state of Wyoming has every
intention of owning and operating the prison. We'll just find a location for it
and build it," he said.
Rolling Plains
Regional Jail and Detention Center
Haskell, Texas
Emerald Corrections
April 14, 2007 AP
The return of 40 inmates from Texas means that all of Wyoming's female
inmates now are being housed in-state, for the first time in eight years. The
women were transferred Tuesday to the Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk from the
private Rolling Plains Regional Jail and Detention Center in Haskell, Texas,
according to the Wyoming Department of Corrections. A recent expansion nearly
doubled the number of beds at the Women's Center to 294. The expansion increased
the prison's size by nearly half; it also built a commercial fish farm and
doubled the number of beds for substance abuse treatment. The project marked one
of the biggest steps yet in the state's goal of housing all of its inmates -
female and male - in Wyoming. Wyoming still has 457 male inmates at three
out-of-state prisons: 384 at the private North Fork Correctional Facility in
Sayre, Okla.; 45 at the private Rolling Plains facility; and 28 at the public
West Texas Detention Center, in Sierra Blanca, Texas. Corrections officials hope
to return all of the state's male inmates to Wyoming when a medium-security
prison is completed in Torrington in the summer of 2009. If that goal is met, it
would end a dozen years of housing inmates out of state.
April 18, 2006 AP
Two Wyoming inmates have been recaptured after escaping from a Texas jail
over the weekend, according to the Wyoming Department of Corrections. Joe
Wilkinson, 41, gave himself up about two hours after the escape Saturday and
didn't get very far from the Rolling Plains Regional Jail and Detention Center
in Haskell, Texas, corrections spokeswoman Melinda Brazzale said Monday. Robert
Dix, 25, was arrested Sunday night, about 34 hours after the escape. He, too,
didn't get far from the prison. Haskell is about 50 miles north of Abilene,
Texas. Wyoming keeps many of its inmates there because it doesn't have enough
room for them at prisons in Wyoming.
Wardle Academy
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Frontier Correctional Services
September 9, 2007 AP
Youngsters sentenced to jail time intermingled with -- and beat up -- youth
undergoing drug and alcohol treatment at a privately run facility, Department of
Family Services Director Tony Lewis told Gov. Dave Freudenthal's chief of staff.
Lewis told Chris Boswell in a July 30 e-mail that the department was about to
withdraw youngsters from the Jeffrey C. Wardle Academy in Cheyenne and was
ending its youth treatment contract with Frontier Correctional Services, which
operates the facility. The Associated Press obtained the e-mail Thursday through
an open records request with the governor's office and the Department of Family
Services. "Over the past year, a number of the treatment kids have been
victimized and beaten by short-term detention kids," Lewis wrote in the e-mail.
"We've also documented abuses by staff and numerous clinic and medical treatment
deficiencies. "These are well-documented in special investigation findings by
our child protection and licensing staff," Lewis wrote. Attorney General Pat
Crank was included in the e-mail correspondence, but his brief messages to Lewis
were redacted in the copy given to AP. The governor's spokeswoman, Cara
Eastwood, said the reason was attorney-client privilege, an exception included
in Wyoming's open records law. Department officials disclosed last week that, on
a judge's orders, 24 of 28 youths are being removed from the treatment center at
Wardle Academy and placed in other programs. All 24 are expected to be moved by
month's end. The rest were being allowed to stay because they were close to
finishing their stints. Frontier Correctional Systems CEO John Harrison said
that for seven years, the department issued licenses for the Wardle Academy that
permitted the mingled populations, and that no fights occurred. "In seven years,
we never had an assault between a residential treatment and a juvenile detention
student," he said. But he said fights had occurred within the last few months.
Lewis opened his e-mail to Boswell with "a political heads up" that Frontier
Correctional Services could be expected to tell judges and county officials
that, without the treatment contract, the company would have to close the Wardle
Academy. If the facility closed, Lewis pointed out, that would leave Laramie
County without a place to jail juveniles without resorting to putting them in
the county jail. The Wardle Academy jailed a total of 395 juveniles in 2006,
according to figures complied for the Department of Family Services by the
Wyoming County Commissioners Association. Lewis said the department's treatment
contract with Frontier Correctional Systems provides "half or a little more than
half" of Wardle Academy's income. The contract was for $281,881 a month,
according to department spokeswoman Juliette Rule. Harrison said the Wardle
Academy would not close. "We will continue to operate as a juvenile detention
and assessment and evaluation residential treatment center without the state
contract," he said. "We are in agreement that we do not want the contract under
the same terms and conditions that we had been operating under this pilot
project." As for allowing youngsters who were sentenced to jail to mingle with
youngsters undergoing treatment, Rule said that didn't violate department
policy. But she said such commingling isn't accepted as a "best practice" in
social services. In an interview with AP on Tuesday, Lewis detailed several
concerns the department has had with the Wardle Academy, including allegations
that youngsters in treatment had access to drugs and that medical care, meals
and laundry often were neglected. Lewis said much the same thing in his e-mail
to Boswell. He said there were "well-documented" abuses by staff and
deficiencies in medical treatment. He wrote that problems continued even after a
year and a half of meetings with Frontier Correctional Systems officials and the
company's CEO, Harrison. "While they have shown improvements in some areas, they
don't seem to be able to get over the hurdle of operating the institution as
anything more than a jail, which they do well enough," he wrote.
Wyoming
Department of Corrections
Correctional Medical Services, Prison Health Services, Wexford
April 14, 2007 AP
The return of 40 inmates from Texas means that all of Wyoming's female
inmates now are being housed in-state, for the first time in eight years. The
women were transferred Tuesday to the Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk from the
private Rolling Plains Regional Jail and Detention Center in Haskell, Texas,
according to the Wyoming Department of Corrections. A recent expansion nearly
doubled the number of beds at the Women's Center to 294. The expansion increased
the prison's size by nearly half; it also built a commercial fish farm and
doubled the number of beds for substance abuse treatment. The project marked one
of the biggest steps yet in the state's goal of housing all of its inmates -
female and male - in Wyoming. Wyoming still has 457 male inmates at three
out-of-state prisons: 384 at the private North Fork Correctional Facility in
Sayre, Okla.; 45 at the private Rolling Plains facility; and 28 at the public
West Texas Detention Center, in Sierra Blanca, Texas. Corrections officials hope
to return all of the state's male inmates to Wyoming when a medium-security
prison is completed in Torrington in the summer of 2009. If that goal is met, it
would end a dozen years of housing inmates out of state.
July 16, 2006 AP
A few weeks ago, the state of Wyoming paid $50,000 to settle a federal
lawsuit in which an inmate at the state prison at Rawlins charged he had been
denied adequate medical care. This week, another inmate has filed a federal
lawsuit claiming that he, too, was denied adequate medical treatment by the same
doctor and private medical services company at the Rawlins prison. In a federal
lawsuit filed Tuesday, inmate Craig Blumhagen, 50, charges that medical staff at
the Rawlins prison refused his requests for treatment of pain and vomiting he
suffered over several months in 2003. Blumhagen names Dr. John Coyle and
Correctional Medical Services, a Missouri company, as defendants in the case,
together with state corrections department personnel. Correctional Medical
Services held the contract to provide medical services at the prison for six
years before losing the contract to a competitor last summer. Blumhagen's
lawsuit charges that Coyle began prescribing Blumhagen daily doses of ibuprofen
for treatment of back pain in 1999, at which time Blumhagen weighed about 150
pounds. In May 2003, according to the lawsuit, Blumhagen told Coyle and others
that he was experiencing nausea and abdominal pain. The lawsuit states that a
nurse at the prison told Blumhagen in August 2003 that Coyle wasn't going to
treat his pain and that he should, "grieve in your heart and get over it." By
December 2003, the lawsuit claims, Blumhagen was down to 110 pounds and
frequently vomiting brown material that looked like coffee grounds. The lawsuit
states that Coyle noted that month that Blumhagen's request for narcotic pain
medication was evidence of "continued drug-seeking behavior." Blumhagen is
serving prison time on drug charges out of Laramie County. The lawsuit states
that Blumhagen collapsed in late December and that a guard in the prison
infirmary called for an ambulance to take him to the emergency room at Memorial
Hospital in Rawlins. A surgeon at the hospital determined that Blumhagen was
suffering from severe ulcer, the lawsuit states. Medical staff at the hospital
transfused Blumhagen with red blood cells to raise his hemoglobin level before
surgery to address the ulcer. The lawsuit says hospital staff told Blumhagen
that his long-term use of ibuprofen was the probable cause of his ulcer and that
he could no longer use such medications. Bruce Moats, a Cheyenne lawyer
representing Blumhagen, said Friday that prison inmates are incarcerated to
serve their time, "not to be denied proper medical care when they get sick."
"The care that my client has received did not live up to the standards of
humanity and decency required by the law, and adhered to by the people of
Wyoming," Moats said.
June 21, 2006 Billings Gazette
The State of Wyoming has paid $50,000 to settle a federal lawsuit brought by
a former Wyoming prison inmate who blamed the state Department of Corrections
and a private company that provided medical care to inmates for the loss of his
lower right leg. Salvatore Lucido, a diabetic, filed the lawsuit in April 2004
charging that he developed sores on his feet when the staff at the state prison
in Rawlins refused to give him appropriate shoes. Diabetics often have poor
blood circulation in their feet, which means that injuries may be slow to heal
and prone to infection. Lucido contended that prison officials and Correctional
Medical Services, a private company that provided health care to inmates,
delayed taking him to a hospital where his foot might have been saved. The
lawsuit states that the officials hoped that if they delayed getting Lucido
medical care, "that his release date of April 23 (2003) would arrive before it
became too apparent that hospitalization could not be delayed any longer." The
lawsuit states that prison officials took Lucido to a hospital on April 18,
2003, more than three weeks after a nurse had noted that he needed emergency
surgery to try to save his foot. The lawsuit states that he was taken to the
hospital "after his foot literally exploded from the infection and swelling."
His lower right leg was amputated on May 2, 2003. U.S. District Judge Alan
Johnson has scheduled a trial to start Tuesday in Lucido's remaining claims
against Correctional Medical Services and Dr. John Coyle. The lawsuit states
Coyle provided medical services for inmates at the state prison. An independent
audit last year found that some inmates hadn't receive timely health care
because of record-keeping problems caused mainly by changes in the private
contractors. Correctional Medical Services, a Missouri company, had held the
contract to provide inmate health services at the Rawlins prison for six years
before losing the contract to a competitor, Prison Health Services, last summer.
Linda Burt, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Wyoming,
said Wednesday that her office continues to get many complaints from inmates at
the Rawlins prison about health care, particularly from inmates who are
diabetic. "I don't think you can do (prison) medical care privately and do a
good job, and I don't think you can do it for profit and do a good job," Burt
said. "It's extraordinarily difficult, and I haven't seen any success in that
area."
November 21, 2005 AP
A project that will nearly double the size of the Wyoming Women's Center
includes the construction of an aquaculture facility for raising tilapia. The
prison, which opened in 1984, was built for 84 inmates but now houses 106. The
$17.3 million expansion will add 140 beds, enabling the Wyoming Department of
Corrections to return to Wyoming 78 inmates it has been housing in a private
prison in Haskell, Texas. Because of overcrowding, nearly 600 prisoners, or
about 30 percent of the state total, are held at county jails in Wyoming or
private prisons in Texas.
September 19, 2005 Casper Star-Tribune
Wyoming Department of Corrections officials hope a new $10 million-a-year
contract with Prison Health Services will save them some health care costs in
the long run. Unlike the department's previous contract with Correctional
Medical Services, the new private health care provider will be an umbrella
entity responsible for all medical, dental and health services and other
programs for the state's four penal institutions. Prison Health Services of
Brentwood, Tenn., will subcontract for some of these services and also assumes
100 percent of the risk with no caps on catastrophic claims. PHS, like CMS and
another predecessor, Wexford, has its critics. The May 2005 issue of Prison
Legal News said PHS has been the target of lawsuits over inmate health care in
New York, New Jersey, Nevada and Florida. Linda Burt, director of the American
Civil Liberties Union for Wyoming, said the volume of health care complaints
from inmates has remained the same from Wexford through CMS and now to PHS.
"It's still one of our big concerns," Burt said. She said she looks
carefully at all private prison providers. "Nothing has ever shown me that
private providers in the prison system work well. It doesn't matter whether they
are private providers of the entire prison or just health care," she said.
She noted that both Wexford and PHS also were sued. "I
think the solution is an in-house solution," she added. "If you're
working for profit in that kind of system, you can't provide the appropriate
care and be a for-profit system. I think it's almost impossible to do
that."
November 25, 2003
Wyoming prison inmates being housed in Colorado could be heading for Texas in
coming months, Wyoming Department of Corrections (DOC) officials announced
Monday. DOC Director Robert Lampert said his agency is trying to negotiate
a contract for about 200 inmate beds in Texas, because Colorado's corrections
department wants to use the beds in its state to house its own inmates.
Due to a shortage of in-state prison space, Wyoming has 300 male inmates in
Colorado at two private facilities and 126 men being housed with the Nevada
Department of Corrections, according to Melinda Brazzale, DOC spokeswoman. The
department also has 55 women in a private facility in Colorado. "We
have been informed by the Colorado Department of Corrections that they will need
all male prison beds in Colorado (including those in privately run prisons) for
their own inmates by the middle of next year," Lampert said in a press
release. "We need to find good alternative housing for our inmates by early
2004." He announced the negotiations during a meeting of human
resources department heads in Gov. Dave Freudenthal's office. Freudenthal
replied that he and legislators are looking into exactly what it may cost
Wyoming to build more of its own prison space. Officials speak of $125
million as a placeholder for such a project, but Freudenthal said
representatives of the executive and legislative branches hope to refine that
number sometime soon. Lampert, who took the DOC helm two weeks ago, said
he has also met with community leaders who inquire about the possibilities of
siting new prison buildings in their towns. Wyoming is negotiating with
Correctional Services Corp. to house state inmates at a facility in Littlefield,
Texas, about 40 miles northwest of Lubbock, according to Brazzale.
(Star-Tribune)
June 3, 2003
The state is getting close to announcing the private provider that will furnish
up to 100 substance abuse treatment beds for Wyoming male prison inmates.
Les Pozsgi, who is monitor of the program for the Department of Corrections,
said the state is still in the negotiation stages for the final contract.
He said three private groups applied for the project and one was selected as
preferred after a review process. The treatment beds are a key part of the
comprehensive $25 million substance abuse plan embodied in House Bill 59, which
was passed by the 2002 Legislature. Another part of the bill expands drug
courts. Wyoming now has seven adult and six juvenile drug courts. Evanston has
the oldest drug court in the state. Also effective July 1 this year is the
Addicted Offenders Accountability Act adopted in 2002 to require judges to get
substance abuse assessments of defendants convicted of a felony. The law
gives judges the option of sending offenders for treatment rather than
prison. (Star-Tribune capital bureau)
November 22, 2002
The Department of Corrections can make money for the state by housing 205
inmates from Wyoming at the high Desert Correctional Center, legislators decided
Thursday. The Legislator's Interim Finance Committee approved the plan
under which Wyoming will pay $2.7 million, or about $60 a day per inmate, to
send its prisoners to Nevada for seven months starting in December. Jackie
Crawford, the Corrections Department director, said it costs the state about $39
a day to care for prisoners, including $8 a day for medical costs.
Crawford said if the prisoner-for-pay program works, Wyoming could ship as many
as 500 inmates to Nevada. "The contract will provide a good return to
Nevada," she said. "This is a great opportunity for us to get
revenue." Assembly members Morse Arberry, D-North Las Vegas, and
Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, voted against the program. They were
concerned because Crawford wants to hire five new correctional officers for the
program. Crawford said she told Wyoming that 21 correctional officers
would be assigned to the program. Because of a state hiring freeze and
budget cutbacks, Crawford said she does not have enough available
officers. (Review Journal.com)
September 25, 2002
The state might be forced to move its prison inmates elsewhere if Colorado's
prison population continues to grow, state corrections officials said. In
a letter to Wyoming Department of Corrections Director Judith Uphoff, Colorado
corrections officials said they expect to use all of the state's available
medium-security prison beds within the next 12 to 18 months. More than 500
Wyoming inmates are housed at Colorado's Crowley County Correctional Facility
and Kit Carson Correctional Facility. (AP)
Wyoming
Legislature
March 13, 2006 Star-Tribune
Wyoming’s legislators form a citizen’s legislature ordinary people, who like
yourself and your neighbors, work for a living and strive to do what’s best for
the people of Wyoming, within the confines of the state and United States
Constitutions. Because Wyoming legislators put on their pants (or pantyhose) one
leg at a time, they don’t necessarily come up with ideas for legislation all on
their own, out of their own fertile imaginations. Sometimes they get help, from
local and national sources, some of which might surprise Wyoming citizens.
According to Wyoming legislators and legislative staff, there are several
organizations out there that provide research, data and even model legislation
to legislatures and legislators throughout the country. • The American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a bipartisan membership association for
conservative state lawmakers, to advance the “Jeffersonian principles of free
markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty.” Headquarters is
in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, who also helped found the
conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, the Moral Majority and the Council
for National Policy. ALEC, which claims 2,400 legislator members, charges
legislators $100 per biennium to join (constituting less than 2 percent of the
annual budget), but then charges corporations (over 300) and associations
graduated memberships at $5,000; $10,000; $25,000 and $50,000 to sit at the
table with legislators and craft “model” legislation. Corporate funds underwrite
travel scholarships, by which legislators and their families can attend national
meetings. ALEC’s corporate members have a keen interest in the bills that they
craft. For example, model legislation for "three strikes" and "minimum
sentencing" -- laws to keep convicted criminals in prison longer was partially
crafted by the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest private
prison organization, when it sat on ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force. The odds
are fairly even, that if you ask your state legislator whether he or she is a
member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the answer will be “Yes.”
(Of course, every member of the Wyoming Legislature and Legislative Service
Office is a member of the National Conference of State Legislatures and the
Council of State Governments, by virtue of being elected to or employed by the
Wyoming Legislature.) The trouble is, ALEC itself and Rep. Pete Illoway,
R-Cheyenne (a member of ALEC’s national board of directors) won’t tell you who
is a member of ALEC. Illoway did say that of Wyoming’s 90 state legislators,
close to half are members of ALEC, but he refused to provide a list, though he
said he has both Republican and Democratic members. Interviewed earlier this
week in his office, Rep. Illoway said he took great offense of a letter that had
appeared that morning in the Casper Star Tribune, from Brett Glass. Glass, an
Internet access provider in Wyoming, charged that “ALEC drafts "model" bills
which favor its corporate sponsors. It then encourages state legislators to
introduce the bills in their home states. This year's concealed weapons bill,
for example, contains language from ALEC's "Concealed Carry Outright Recognition
Act," while the "duty to retreat" bill was based on ALEC's "Castle Doctrine Act"
(as in, "a man's home is his castle"). Both were drafted by a committee chaired
by a lobbyist from Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer of firearms and
ammunition. A bill which would have increased tobacco taxes, and used the
proceeds to fund substance-abuse prevention, was opposed strongly by legislators
and lobbyists involved with ALEC -- none of whom were registered as lobbying for
the group.” Illoway said he’s used model legislation from ALEC once eight years
ago n a bill against the Kyoto global warming treaty. “I haven’t used a model
bill since then,” he said. He said he didn’t know of any ALEC-oriented bills
introduced this session, although an ALEC Report Card said five such bills had
been introduced and one passed into law. (ALEC headquarters did not respond to a
request about what those bills were.) Illoway said that as a conservative and as
“an anti-tax guy,” he enjoys going to ALEC conferences mostly to interact with
other like-minded legislators from around the country.
January 19, 2003
The location of two
new medium-security prisons will be up to
the company that gets the contract, if the prison construction bill
passes the Legislature as written. That
will "de-politicize" the site selection process, said Sen. John Hanes,
R-Cheyenne, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Site selection and acquisition for the two new 400-bed
medium-security prisons will be part of the request for proposals for design,
and for total costs of construction, equipment and financing, the way Senate
File 16 reads now. Wasserburger
said the bill was drafted for two medium-security prisons rather than one big
one when the committee learned the two communities with enough population to
staff a large institution weren't interested. (The Star-Tribune)
January 18, 2003
The Senate Judiciary Committee began studying a bill Friday that calls for
building two medium-security prisons and adding to the state's existing
correctional facilities. The goal of the bill is to wean Wyoming from
relying on prisons outside the state, especially for the medium-security inmates
who have been shipped to Colorado and elsewhere since the north unit of the
Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins was closed in 2001. (AP)
Wyoming
State Penitentiary
Prison Health Services (formerly run by Correctional Medical Services)
April 10, 2007 AP
A Missouri company that was responsible for providing health care to inmates
at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins wants a federal judge to toss out a
lawsuit in which an inmate claims he was denied necessary treatment. Inmate
Craig Blumhagen charges in his federal lawsuit that medical workers with
Correctional Medical Services denied his requests for treatment of pain and
vomiting for several months in 2003. CMS held the contract to provide medical
services at the prison for six years before losing the contract to a competitor
in 2005. Back-pain prescription: Blumhagen, who is serving prison sentences for
drug offenses from Laramie County, claimed in his lawsuit that Dr. John Coyle, a
doctor at the prison, began prescribing him daily doses of ibuprofen for back
pain in 1999. At that time, the suit states, Blumhagen weighed about 150 pounds.
In May 2003, according to the lawsuit, Blumhagen told Coyle that he was
experiencing nausea and abdominal pain. Blumhagen's lawsuit states that Coyle
dismissed his requests for narcotic pain medication as "continued drug-seeking
behavior." In December 2003, the lawsuit states, Blumhagen was down to about 110
pounds when he collapsed and was taken to the emergency room at Memorial
Hospital in Rawlins. A surgeon at the hospital determined that Blumhagen was
suffering from a severe ulcer. Hospital staff told Blumhagen that his long-term
use of ibuprofen was the probable cause of his ulcer and that he could no longer
use such medications, the lawsuit states. Headed to trial: Blumhagen's lawsuit
is scheduled to go to trial next month before U.S. Judge Alan Johnson in
Cheyenne. Besides seeking damages from CMS, the lawsuit names state corrections
officials as defendants. CMS filed papers in February asking Johnson to throw
out the lawsuit. The company stated there were no issues of material fact in
dispute in the case. Johnson held a hearing on the company's request Monday in
Cheyenne but didn't immediately announce a ruling on the request. Lawyer Scott
Ortiz argued that the case against CMS, Coyle and Stephen Noyes, a physician's
assistant with CMS, should be dismissed. Ortiz said that Coyle had to consider
Blumhagen's past drug use and drug-seeking behavior in deciding what to
prescribe. "He's trying to be judicious in his use of narcotics at the same time
looking for other answers," Ortiz said of Coyle. Ortiz said Blumhagen told Coyle
that the pain centered in his lower back and sometimes his pelvis. Ortiz said
Coyle had no reports of pain in the upper stomach area, where the ulcer was
ultimately found. "They were being misled, honestly misled, by a disease
process," Ortiz said of the health care workers. Ortiz said that Coyle and Noyes
were responsible for knowing that long-term use of ibuprofen can result in
ulcers, but he said there's no evidence they were being deliberately indifferent
to Blumhagen's suffering. Megan Hayes, lawyer for Blumhagen, said there are
indeed factual disagreements in the case. She said Blumhagen disputes the
defendants' characterization of the lawsuit "as one of misdiagnosis." Hayes said
it's not a complicated medical case. "This is a case where Mr. Blumhagen was
prescribed high doses of ibuprofen for four years," she said. While Hayes said
the CMS officials didn't believe Blumhagen's complaints of vomiting, she said
they took no steps to verify whether it was actually happening. "It's just hard
to fathom why Mr. Blumhagen submitted so many requests for health care if he
hadn't been seriously medically ill," Hayes said.
December 7, 2005 Casper Star-Tribune
An independent audit of health care provided to inmates at the Wyoming State
Penitentiary blamed problems in timeliness and record keeping on the process of
changing private contractors. Prison Health Services took over medical and
mental health services for the Department of Corrections in July with a low bid
of $10.5 million per year. Correctional Medical Services had provided health
services to the state's penal institutions for the previous six years. In
October, two former Wyoming State Penitentiary nurses, Karran Bedwell and Debra
Long, claimed they were fired because they complained about inadequate staffing
and training by PHS at the Rawlins prison for men. They contended the standard
of care went downhill at the penitentiary since the Tennessee-based private
contractor took over. The independent audit team found that of 185 new
admissions for the quarter, only 63 -- or 34 percent -- were screened within the
24-hour required time period. For the remaining 65.9 percent, it took as long as
27 to 30 days before the intake screening was completed in some cases.
"This is unacceptable," the report said. The team also found
unacceptable delays in the physical assessments of new inmates by a physician's
assistant. While 142 or 76.8 percent of the new admissions received physical
assessments within the required seven days, it took up to 28 days for the
remainder, the report said. Because of poor record-keeping of the sick call
logs, the consultants could not determine how long it took from the time inmate
health care requests were received until the time they were seen by health care
providers, the report said.
October 31, 2005 Casper Star Tribune
Two former Wyoming State Penitentiary nurses claim they were fired because they
complained about inadequate staffing and training at the Rawlins prison for men.
Karran Bedwell and Debra Long said the Nursing Practice Act compels them to
report inadequate health care. "It's our responsibility to do that,"
Bedwell said in an interview. They said the standards of care have gone downhill
at the penitentiary since Prison Health Services, a Tennessee-based private
contractor, took over medical and mental health services for all the state's
penal institutions on July 1. Before that Correctional Medical Services held the
main contract for the past six years, and We |
