Recent Articles From The Weekly Update

The family of a 26-year-old man who died from drinking too much water at the Santa Rita Jail last year has sued Alameda County and Wellpath, accusing them of showing “deliberate indifference” to his medical needs. It is the latest of numerous lawsuits accusing Wellpath of neglecting inmate it supervises in jails across California. The illness, also known as psychogenic polydipsia, manifests in excessive consumption of water and is often associated with mental disorders. According to the suit, filed in federal court, jail and county officials have refused to provide the man's family with an autopsy or any records of his medical care. Wellpath, owned by the global investment firm H.I.G. Capital, provides health care at 34 county jails in California. Among the many lawsuits accusing the company of neglecting its duties cited in the current suit were two by families of Santa Rita inmates who committed suicide.

A federal judge on Aug. 1 ordered Wellpath, the County of Monterey’s health care contractor in the jail, to submit a report by Aug. 16 outlining how it is complying with the terms of a 2015 settlement. In 2023, a federal judge ruled that issues in the jail remained unresolved and the County and Wellpath were violating the settlement by not being in “substantial compliance” with most of the 44 requirements spelled out in the settlement agreement. Incarcerated people in the jail filed a class-action lawsuit over health care conditions in 2013.

Hudson County officials ignored a directive from the the Office of the State Comptroller. Now the state watchdog agency is hoping a lawsuit gets the county’s attention. The comptroller’s office filed a lawsuit in Hudson County Superior Court asking the court to enforce a directive that the county shall not renew a contract for medical services at the county correctional facility in 2025 without first putting it out to bid. In late March Hudson County defied the Walsh’s orders when it renewed a contract with Wellpath for $13.5 million for medical and mental health care management at the jail, as well as nurse staffing at the Kearny facility. Wellpath took over the task at the jail when the contract with the former provider, CFG Health Systems, was terminated in 2018 after multiple inmates died at the jail.

Here in Colorado, there have been more than 50 lawsuits filed since 2020 due to Wellpath’s deliberate indifference to the medical needs of the incarcerated population they are required to care for and are paid significant sums of money for those services. At Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California (Alameda County) since the implementation of the Babu Consent Decree (Babu, et al. v. Ahern, et al, Case No. 5:18-cv-7677), 10 inmates died; in Monterey County’s jail, also under a consent decree, many inmates have died at the hands of Wellpath. This list goes on and on.

A man who worked as a custody officer for Wellpath Recovery in Columbia is facing charges from the state. South Carolina Law Enforcement Division charged Jaquon Malik Benton, 27 with abuse of a vulnerable adult. While working as a custody officer, Benton is accused in a SLED warrant of shoving a resident at a medical facility into a counter.

The County of Monterey and the private jail health care provider Wellpath are settling with the families of three more inmates who died while in custody at Monterey County Jail. This is just the latest settlement. Five lawsuits between 2013 and 2019 resulted in $9 million in judgments and settlements. Wellpath is facing sanctions of $25,000 for each of the areas where they are out of compliance at Monterey County Jail. Fines could reach more than $1 million if Wellpath fails to fix the issues. Wellpath has until Aug. 1.

A federal judge in Scranton has been asked to approve a $5 million settlement with the final two defendants in the wrongful death suit brought by the mother and estate of a man who died in the Clinton County Correctional Facility. The proposed settlement with Wellpath and Dr. Karl Pecht is in addition to the $700,000 the county agreed to pay.

Our journalism and investigation continues to focus on the flawed and deadly Cost Containment Program utilized and implemented by Wellpath employees. It is relevant to mention that the jurisdictions which decide to contract with Wellpath agree to adopt their policies and procedures. Through my research, I have discovered that there are U.S. District Court judges and lawyers throughout the United States who are unaware or who feign ignorance about Wellpath’s common practices. Wellpath employees have established a common practice and policy whereby their employees typically neglect and mistreat incarcerated pregnant women.

Male prisoners at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California argued in federal court Wednesday afternoon that Wellpath Management, the contracted medical provider at the jail, was deliberately indifferent when it provided them substandard medical care to save money. 12 individual plaintiffs are suing Wellpath under the Monell doctrine, which allows an individual to hold a government agency responsible for violating their rights or causing harm. Plaintiffs say Wellpath operates its program based on a practice of cost-cutting rather than providing constitutionally sound medical care in the jail.

Monterey County officials have paid $1 million to the family of Carlos Chávez, the inmate who seemingly suffocated himself by stuffing toilet paper down his throat during 2022’s rash of deaths in the county jail. The jail’s healthcare provider, Wellpath, also agreed to settle out of court for an additional, undisclosed amount. Unlike the county, which is required to disclose its portion of settlements, the private company can keep its part confidential. In Monterey County’s case, Wellpath has repeatedly been found to be providing inadequate care and is facing up to $2 million in fines in August for violating as many as 43 provisions of its annual $15 million county contract in recent years.

Wellpath has a history of being sued for its work in North Carolina’s jails. The family of a 25-year-old Charlotte man who died inside the Mecklenburg County jail has alleged that detention officers were “nonchalant” as their son cycled through signs of fentanyl intoxication and opioid withdrawal days after being arrested. The lawsuit, which references jail documents and video, names McFadden and several on-duty detention officers. It also names Wellpath — the jail’s former healthcare provider — and several nurses.

An inmate at the Missoula County Detention Center has filed a lawsuit against the county claiming he has received deficient medical care during his incarceration. Medical care at the detention center is provided by Wellpath, a national healthcare provider that cares for roughly 300,000 inmates in 37 states. The county last month renewed its contract with the provider for five additional years for roughly $15.1 million.

A federal judge last month rejected an attempt by El Paso County and the former medical provider (Wellpath) for its jail to dismiss a lawsuit alleging deliberate indifference to a detainee's serious medical needs. Alexandro Duran, who is partially paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, entered the county jail in November 2021. While there, staff allegedly refused to provide accommodations that would prevent him from developing sores from his wheelchair or his bed. Ultimately, Duran experienced sores that reached into his bones and muscles. Duran alleged the county failed to accommodate his disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Every three months or so, the county supervisors host a carefully curated food fight with Sheriff Bill Brown over operations of Santa Barbara County’s two major jails. The supervisores wantto know how much money the county was owed by Wellpath — the private contractor providing jail health services — because the company failed to provide the level of staffing called for in its $13-million-a-year contract with the County of Santa Barbara, as reported by last year’s grand jury. The supervisors and county’s administrative staff have long made clear their seething impatience with Wellpath. The problem, they discovered, is that a small handful of companies dominate the prison health care field, and Wellpath faces no credible private competition.

Additional nursing and behavioral health staff, accountability measures, and continued compliance with a legal settlement surrounding jail health care are some of the amended measures baked into Santa Barbara County’s contract extension with jail health care provider Wellpath. In 2023, the Santa Barbara County grand jury highlighted deficiencies for the county and the company when providing behavioral health care in the jail system, like staffing shortages leaving gaps in mental health coverage and inadequate communication between agencies regarding an inmate’s mental illness history.

Chronic understaffing, inmates’ prolonged confinement to cells, and insufficient medical care and substance abuse treatment, among other issues, have left the Sonoma County jail ill-equipped to manage and care for its population, a civil grand jury report has found. Wellpath, the jail’s contracted medical care provider, too, has come under fire for failing to staff the Sonoma County facility with the workers necessary to provide adequate health services. The for-profit company, the country’s largest private health services provider in prisons and jails, faces more than 1,000 lawsuits and a number of federal investigations nationwide over its alleged failures to meet standards of care.

The sister of a Middletown woman who died in the Orange County jail last year has accused a medical vendor of medical malpractice. Layla Capaci claims that Wellpath NY and Orange County corrections officers ignored critical information about inmate Niki Capaci and failed to give her appropriate medical treatment, in a complaint filed on June 17 in U.S. District Court, White Plains.

In the shadow of a recent Civil Grand Jury report critical of jail mental health services, Santa Cruz County officials voted this month to move its private corrections health services contract to a new provider. The nearly $11 million one-year corrections department contract for private mental, medical, dental and pharmaceutical services — a spending increase of nearly $2 million above last year’s budget — was awarded to NaphCare Inc. after a request for bids. Predecessor Wellpath LLC, formed in 2018 from a merger between Correctional Medical Group Cos. and Correct Care Solutions, has served as Santa Cruz County’s jail medical service provider since 2012.

The Shasta County Sheriff's Office and the company hired to provide medical treatment at the county jail are not taking proper precautions to prevent and treat MRSA skin infections among inmates and staff who work there, according to the county grand jury. The grand jury issued a report this week that says Wellpath, the company hired to provide medical treatment at the jail, has not been properly screening people brought to the jail for MRSA, a staph skin infection.

For three days last year, as the outside temperature reached 90 degrees, Bryan Harris was deprived of drinking water. Harris, who’d been locked up in the San Juan County Adult Detention Center on drug charges, had complained for months about persistent stomach pain. He declared a hunger strike, hoping that would get someone’s attention. The response was almost immediate: Jail authorities turned off the tap in his cell and deprived him of water for the next three days. According to the sheriff’s report, the shut-off was instigated by a traveling nurse then employed by Wellpath, the nation’s largest for-profit health care provider for prisons and jails.

Niki Capaci died last year at age 40 while incarcerated at the Orange County Jail in Goshen, New York. Her family wants to know What exactly happened between May 3, 2023, when Capaci was first incarcerated, and the early morning of May 6, 2023, when she was found unresponsive in her cell and was later pronounced dead? The family is suing Orange County and the jail's health care provider, Wellpath, in federal court for damages for personal injuries, pain and suffering, emotional distress, wrongful death and economic damages.

After Adilah Patton's most recent trespassing arrest in 2022, jailers in the Marion County Adult Detention Center held Patton down while a nurse injected her with an antipsychotic drug. A federal lawsuit filed Monday alleges the sheriff's office and its healthcare contractor, Wellpath, violated the 28-year-old woman's constitutional rights by injecting her with drugs on multiple occasions against her will and without permission from her court-appointed guardian.

The mother of Andrew Little, a 34-year old man who took his own life while in custody at the Delaware County prison two years ago today, filed suit against the county as well as numerous other parties, seeking damages for her son’s death because of “deliberate indifference” and “medical negligence” to Little’s mental state. The federal suit, filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, also names Wellpath and the GEO group as defendants, as well as ten corrections “Jane” and “John Doe” officers.

Over the objections of mental health advocates and others two years ago, the state chose a private company that primarily works with incarcerated adults to provide psychiatric treatment to children at Hampstead Hospital. With that $52.5 million contract up, the Department of Health and Human Services is replacing Wellpath Recovery Services with Dartmouth Health, which has provided behavioral health treatment at New Hampshire Hospital and the Glencliff Home, a residential facility for people with developmental disabilities, for nearly 30 years.

A report release in March by the Disability Law Center condemns Bridgewater State Hospital —Massachusetts’s state psychiatric facility. The Disability Law Center, has been advocating for better conditions at Bridgewater for over a decade. The organization observes the facility and continuously calls for action to address the dubious practices perpetuated by the Department of Correction, which maintains oversight of the hospital, and its private health care contractor, Wellpath Recovery Solutions. Wellpath has a notorious reputation, including being sued over 1,000 times in federal court for poor or wrongful patient care across the country. The state announced that Wellpath’s contract will not be renewed and it will be replaced by another private health care provider at 10 state correctional facilities. However, Bridgewater was excluded from the shift, and instead remains under contract with Wellpath until at least mid-2025

A new lawsuit against Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden and health care provider Wellpath alleges negligence in a man’s death in the jail in 2021. Karon Golightly, 20, was found pulseless and not breathing in a pool of his own urine on May 14, 2021, according to the federal complaint. His death happened during a “blind spot” of about 90 minutes in which Mecklenburg County jail staff did not check on him, the lawsuit alleges. Wellpath ended its contract with the sheriff’s office effective immediately. It, too, is a defendant in the lawsuit.

The Santa Barbara County supervisors got another earful about the shortcomings of the mental-health care provided in the county jail and the extent to which the jail’s privately contracted health-care provider, Wellpath, has been allowed to violate the terms of its contract without consequence. Mental health advocates with the League of Women Voters exhorted the supervisors — and jail administrators — to keep Wellpath’s noncompliance front-and-center when negotiating a one-year contract extension. For Wellpath, this would be the second contract extension.

The state may be considering a change at Hampstead Hospital, two years after buying the youth mental health facility and tapping a private company to run it. That company, Wellpath Recovery Solutions, has faced criticism over its handling of safety issues and the continued waitlists for youth mental health care. Now, with the contract out to bid, state officials have indicated they prefer another vendor – Dartmouth Health – to Wellpath by most measures.

A federal lawsuit filed by the family of 18-year-old Dezaree Archuleta claims mental health providers at the El Paso County Jail repeatedly ignored her cries for help before she took her own life two years ago while in custody. The lawsuit was filed in April of 2024 against Wellpath, the jail's medical provider at the time, its parent company H.I.G. Capital and several Wellpath medical providers. The El Paso County Sheriff's Office (EPSO) switched healthcare providers at the jail starting Jan. 1 of this year, signing a new contract with VitalCore Health Strategies

A man is suing the Charleston County sheriff and jail staff who were working at the time alleging they wouldn’t give him insulin for his diabetes, and after more than a week without his treatment, he had to go to the hospital. The lawsuit also states that staff failed to take basic steps to verify Washington’s condition and help since they could have asked his outside doctor or done a variety of blood tests. At the time, the jail healthcare was managed by Wellpath, also named in the lawsuit. VitalCore Healthcare has since taken over the service, after multiple complaints and complications with treatment under Wellpath.

Brad Hensley was born with a potentially life-threatening condition and died after spending four days in a Virginia jail, where he wasn’t given his daily medications until it was too late, according to a new federal lawsuit. Hensley had congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which can send a person’s kidneys into a crisis if untreated. He needed two doses of two different prescription steroids everyday as prescribed. His family pleaded with officers and jail nurses to give him his medicine and warned he would die without it. Hensley’s parents are suing the jail’s medical provider Wellpath LLC. The suit also names several Wellpath employees, a Henry County Sheriff’s Office deputy lieutenant and former county sheriff.

The Santa Barbara County Grand Jury took further exception to the dispensation of medical care in the Santa Barbara County Jail this past week, especially for people suffering from mental health challenges. The Grand Jury found that Wellpath, the private company paid to provide such care since 2017, experienced so many vacancies for so many days running that the quality of inmate care was called into question. The Sheriff’s Office — charged with ensuring the contract is adhered to — was contractually entitled to as much as $135,000 in rebates because of Wellpath’s failure to maintain minimum staffing levels, but the Sheriff’s Office failed to take advantage of this.