Post by Origanalist on Aug 20, 2017 4:33:49 GMT -8
David Gambacorta / Staff Writer, DGambacorta@philly.com
Thursday, Aug. 17, 2017
Something was wrong with Thomas Bryant.
He couldn't eat or sleep. His body was drenched in a cold sweat, and he trembled and shook like a radiator on its last legs. The simple life he once knew in Chichester — one where he worked at a steel mill and provided for his two kids — was a faded memory, a snapshot from a stranger's photo album.
After breaking his back in a work accident, he became addicted to opioids and began a downward spiral that led him here, to a cell inside the 1,883-bed George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Thornton, Delaware County. He'd been arrested on a bench warrant over unpaid child support, but all he could think about was the unrelenting pain from withdrawal. Bryant, 38, asked prison guards for medical attention for three days, scrawling his pleas on scraps of paper. He was ignored.
“We have copies of letters he wrote, begging for Advil or Motrin because he was in so much pain,” said Sue Taylor, his sister. “They did absolutely nothing to help him.”
When the agony became too much, Bryant hanged himself with prison-issued linens on Nov. 16, 2007. He was one of 12 inmates who died at the facility between 2002 and 2008, according to a lawsuit Bryant's family filed in 2009 against the GEO Group, an international conglomerate that manages George W. Hill and 21 other facilities across Pennsylvania, including two halfway houses and a day reporting center in Philadelphia.
The George W. Hill Correctional Facility, 500 Cheyney Road, Thornton, Delaware County.
The company's problems didn't end there, though. GEO and other leading for-profit prison corporations have been plagued by health and safety issues for years, with prisoner and staff complaints and wrongful-death lawsuits piling up like mounds of unopened jail mail.
But the companies have enjoyed a lucrative relationship with the federal government. Since 1997, they’ve been paid billions by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to annually house more than 34,000 federal inmates. It was a convenient arrangement for a nation with the world’s highest prison population, underpinned by a belief that private corporations could do the job cheaper and better.
The government’s stance toward companies like GEO underwent a dramatic shift last summer. In early August, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a troubling report that showed contract prisons had far higher rates of violence and lockdowns, and poorer access to medical care, than comparable federally run facilities.
GEO officials contend the report painted a grossly distorted portrait of its prisons. Its facilities are “equally safe, secure and humane as government-run facilities,” Pablo Paez, a GEO spokesman, wrote in an email to the Inquirer and Daily News.
But a few weeks later, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates issued a memo that directed the Bureau of Prisons to phase out its use of private-run prisons altogether. This was a potentially fatal blow to the industry; the stock price of publicly traded GEO plummeted 40 percent that day.
Then history intervened. Since the election of President Trump, GEO — which donated $170,000 to a Trump political action committee last year, and $250,000 to his inaugural bash — has seen its stock price nearly quadruple. One of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' first moves after taking office in February was to rescind Yates’ memo.
So instead of being cut off, GEO is raking in the money. The company has signed $774 million worth of federal contracts so far this year, including a $110 million deal to build an immigration detention center in Texas.
Critics argue that all of the problems that made privately run prisons a poor investment are still present: the facilities are sometimes understaffed and unsafe — three inmates have died at a GEO-run detention center in California since March — and the companies are about as transparent as a cinder block, aided by the knowledge that few Americans will shed any tears if a bunch of prisoners claim they’re being mistreated.
A giant rises from Upper Darby
You won’t find the late George Wackenhut on any Philadelphia-area murals that celebrate famous local sons. But if the $5 billion private-prison industry had its own Mount Rushmore, Wackenhut’s thin-lipped face would've been carved into it long ago.
George Wackenhut, 1997.
Wackenhut grew up in Upper Darby and had an unforgettable brush with history after graduating from West Chester University. As a member of the Army Corps of Engineers, he witnessed hundreds of Japanese fighter planes launch a surprise attack on American battleships in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
He briefly joined the FBI at the height of its J. Edgar Hoover heyday in the early 1950s and went on to create a private security firm, the Wackenhut Corp., in 1954, according to a detailed account of his rise from the collaborative online news outlet MuckRock.
A separate arm called Wackenhut Corrections was formed in 1984 to tap into the growing world of private-prison services; it landed its first federal contract three years later to manage a processing center for federal immigration detainees. In the decade that followed, the company became publicly traded as demand for housing and transporting inmates soared. (It was renamed the GEO Group in 2003, a year before Wackenhut died at 85.)
Thanks in part to a nationwide embrace of tough-on-crime policies as part of the war on drugs, the overall number of federal inmates in the United States mushroomed from 25,000 in 1980 to a peak of 219,000 in 2012, according to the Inspector General’s Office. GEO, CoreCivic (formerly known as CCA), and companies like them were supposed to help the overwhelmed Bureau of Prisons safely manage a percentage of this ever-growing prison population — and for less money than it would have cost to simply enlarge the bureau.
continued.. www.philly.com/philly/news/crime/private-prisons-sessions-yates-geo-assault-death.html?mobi=true
Thursday, Aug. 17, 2017
Something was wrong with Thomas Bryant.
He couldn't eat or sleep. His body was drenched in a cold sweat, and he trembled and shook like a radiator on its last legs. The simple life he once knew in Chichester — one where he worked at a steel mill and provided for his two kids — was a faded memory, a snapshot from a stranger's photo album.
After breaking his back in a work accident, he became addicted to opioids and began a downward spiral that led him here, to a cell inside the 1,883-bed George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Thornton, Delaware County. He'd been arrested on a bench warrant over unpaid child support, but all he could think about was the unrelenting pain from withdrawal. Bryant, 38, asked prison guards for medical attention for three days, scrawling his pleas on scraps of paper. He was ignored.
“We have copies of letters he wrote, begging for Advil or Motrin because he was in so much pain,” said Sue Taylor, his sister. “They did absolutely nothing to help him.”
When the agony became too much, Bryant hanged himself with prison-issued linens on Nov. 16, 2007. He was one of 12 inmates who died at the facility between 2002 and 2008, according to a lawsuit Bryant's family filed in 2009 against the GEO Group, an international conglomerate that manages George W. Hill and 21 other facilities across Pennsylvania, including two halfway houses and a day reporting center in Philadelphia.
The George W. Hill Correctional Facility, 500 Cheyney Road, Thornton, Delaware County.
The company's problems didn't end there, though. GEO and other leading for-profit prison corporations have been plagued by health and safety issues for years, with prisoner and staff complaints and wrongful-death lawsuits piling up like mounds of unopened jail mail.
But the companies have enjoyed a lucrative relationship with the federal government. Since 1997, they’ve been paid billions by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to annually house more than 34,000 federal inmates. It was a convenient arrangement for a nation with the world’s highest prison population, underpinned by a belief that private corporations could do the job cheaper and better.
The government’s stance toward companies like GEO underwent a dramatic shift last summer. In early August, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a troubling report that showed contract prisons had far higher rates of violence and lockdowns, and poorer access to medical care, than comparable federally run facilities.
GEO officials contend the report painted a grossly distorted portrait of its prisons. Its facilities are “equally safe, secure and humane as government-run facilities,” Pablo Paez, a GEO spokesman, wrote in an email to the Inquirer and Daily News.
But a few weeks later, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates issued a memo that directed the Bureau of Prisons to phase out its use of private-run prisons altogether. This was a potentially fatal blow to the industry; the stock price of publicly traded GEO plummeted 40 percent that day.
Then history intervened. Since the election of President Trump, GEO — which donated $170,000 to a Trump political action committee last year, and $250,000 to his inaugural bash — has seen its stock price nearly quadruple. One of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' first moves after taking office in February was to rescind Yates’ memo.
So instead of being cut off, GEO is raking in the money. The company has signed $774 million worth of federal contracts so far this year, including a $110 million deal to build an immigration detention center in Texas.
Critics argue that all of the problems that made privately run prisons a poor investment are still present: the facilities are sometimes understaffed and unsafe — three inmates have died at a GEO-run detention center in California since March — and the companies are about as transparent as a cinder block, aided by the knowledge that few Americans will shed any tears if a bunch of prisoners claim they’re being mistreated.
A giant rises from Upper Darby
You won’t find the late George Wackenhut on any Philadelphia-area murals that celebrate famous local sons. But if the $5 billion private-prison industry had its own Mount Rushmore, Wackenhut’s thin-lipped face would've been carved into it long ago.
George Wackenhut, 1997.
Wackenhut grew up in Upper Darby and had an unforgettable brush with history after graduating from West Chester University. As a member of the Army Corps of Engineers, he witnessed hundreds of Japanese fighter planes launch a surprise attack on American battleships in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
He briefly joined the FBI at the height of its J. Edgar Hoover heyday in the early 1950s and went on to create a private security firm, the Wackenhut Corp., in 1954, according to a detailed account of his rise from the collaborative online news outlet MuckRock.
A separate arm called Wackenhut Corrections was formed in 1984 to tap into the growing world of private-prison services; it landed its first federal contract three years later to manage a processing center for federal immigration detainees. In the decade that followed, the company became publicly traded as demand for housing and transporting inmates soared. (It was renamed the GEO Group in 2003, a year before Wackenhut died at 85.)
Thanks in part to a nationwide embrace of tough-on-crime policies as part of the war on drugs, the overall number of federal inmates in the United States mushroomed from 25,000 in 1980 to a peak of 219,000 in 2012, according to the Inspector General’s Office. GEO, CoreCivic (formerly known as CCA), and companies like them were supposed to help the overwhelmed Bureau of Prisons safely manage a percentage of this ever-growing prison population — and for less money than it would have cost to simply enlarge the bureau.
continued.. www.philly.com/philly/news/crime/private-prisons-sessions-yates-geo-assault-death.html?mobi=true