Source: Gabriel Thompson, VICE, March 13, 2017
… Over the next three years, Johnathan [Namauleg] bounced from a Maui jail to two different prisons. … What his parents didn’t know at first was that in 1995, when Johnathan was just two years old, Hawaii had begun sending prisoners to the mainland. The policy was proposed as a temporary measure to relieve overcrowding. But more than 20 years later, 1,300 inmates—43 percent of Hawaii’s state prisoners—remain in the continental United States, inside a notorious private facility in the Arizona desert, midway between Tucson and Phoenix, nearly 3,000 miles from home. And that was where Johnathan’s prison odyssey would end in his mysterious death. It’s hard to know what happens behind the prison’s walls. The Saguaro Correctional Center—named after a cactus native to the Sonoran Desert and based in the small town of Eloy—is run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), recently renamed CoreCivic, the country’s largest private-prison firm. The company isn’t legally obligated to respond to public information requests, and, as I and others have discovered, Hawaii officials tend to follow CCA’s lead, putting up roadblocks to even the most basic questions. Publicly, Hawaii has released little more than this: On the evening of August 6, 2015, Johnathan was found in his Arizona cell, facedown and unconscious, and was declared dead later that night, several days before what would have been his 22nd birthday.
… The origins of the Hawaii-to-Arizona prison pipeline can be traced to 1985, when prison overcrowding and an ACLU lawsuit led to federal oversight of Hawaii’s prisons. … Hawaii’s solution to prison overcrowding brought new problems—chief among them oversight. … Between 2000 and 2008, Hawaii’s inmate population grew by roughly a fifth, to nearly 6,000. Hawaii’s relationship with CCA deepened with the opening, in 2007, of the Saguaro Correctional Center: Its 1,926 beds were contracted exclusively to handle Hawaii’s overflow. … Even those check marks are open to question. In 2010, staff from Hawaii’s state auditor tagged along as state contract monitors conducted a quarterly inspection of Saguaro. They watched as monitors accepted the testimony of CCA staff “without verifying their statements against documentary evidence” and concluded, in a lengthy report, that Hawaii “lacked objectivity” when monitoring CCA. The state has close ties to the company. Over the past four years, CCA has spent more than $450,000 to lobby Hawaiian politicians. …
Related:
Public Records on Hawaii Prisoners Held by CCA Will Cost You $23,000
Source: Rui Kaneya, Mother Jones, November 3, 2016
Each year, Hawaii spends tens of millions of dollars to house prisoners on the mainland, a practice that it has maintained for more than 25 years. But the state’s taxpayers are kept in the dark about much of what goes on at the Saguaro Correctional Center, a private Arizona prison where about 1,400 Hawaii prisoners are housed. … But we’re still waiting for much of the information we requested months ago. Now, the Department of Public Safety wants $23,000 to give us records that should be readily available. In February, we submitted a public records request, asking for a number of documents that would help us—and the public—better understand the Saguaro operation, which is handled by Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison contractor that owns and operates the Arizona facility. CCA’s problems at a number of its mainland facilities have been well-documented over many years. …
Secret Deals: Prison Operator Is Mum On Hawaii Court Cases
Source: Rui Kaneya, Honolulu Civil Beat, August 28, 2016
On Christmas Eve 2014, a high-profile lawsuit involving the brutal death of a Hawaii prisoner named Clifford Medina came to an official end: settlement out of court. It was an unceremonious, if predictable, finale to a legal saga that began two years earlier, when a team of attorneys sued the state and its mainland contractor, Corrections Corporation of America, on behalf of Medina’s family. … In the lawsuit, Medina’s family laid the blame squarely on CCA — and, by extension, the state. According to a 48-page complaint, Medina, diagnosed as moderately mentally retarded, was “particularly vulnerable to manipulation and violence by other inmates,” and CCA’s “pattern of greed-driven corner-cutting and short-staffing” failed to protect him. In the end, after many rounds of legal wrangling, the parties agreed to settle the lawsuit out of court. … But, to this day, much of the details surrounding the settlement — the amount of damages, as well as corrective steps, if any, that CCA promised to take — remain shrouded in secrecy. …
… In many ways, the case illustrates what typically happens when Saguaro prisoners and their families sue the state and CCA: settled quietly, with the terms kept out of the public eye. Kat Brady, coordinator of the Community Alliance on Prisons, says the practice flies in the face of “the principle of accountability and transparency.” … As a rule, when the state settles a lawsuit against any of its departments and employees, it must go through a vetting process: The Legislature has to sign off on the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for damages. … But the legislative scrutiny doesn’t extend to settlements involving Saguaro prisoners, thanks to a loophole: the indemnity clause in the state’s contract with CCA that requires the company to cover “all costs, attorney’s fees and other litigation expenses.” … In fact, under the state’s contract, the department is supposed to get semi-annual updates from CCA about news lawsuits filed by Hawaii prisoners and their families The department also required CCA to submit a five-year “history of the cases filed against it and/or its employees by inmates” as part of its bid for the state’s contract in 2011 and again this year. But, in its bids, CCA made it clear that the information is not meant for public inspection. “It is a unique compilation and is confidential and proprietary,” the company wrote. “Further, if vendors fear that reports of this nature will be released to public view, they would be reluctant to provide them via a procurement process, depriving the government of material that contributes to making an informed procurement decision in ‘frustration of a legitimate governmental function.’” …
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