Fireworks in Minnesota: Sheriffs & Jail Healthcare Vendor Battle Mental Health Reform

Highlighted Stories

Editor's Note

This week’s highlighted stories come from Minnesota, where the state passed the Larry Hill Medical Reform Act earlier this year. Named for the son of a former corrections officer who died in 2023 at the Hennepin County Jail after not receiving his mental health medications, the law requires jails to continue providing medications prescribed prior to incarceration—though with certain exceptions. The first set of articles below detail how the Minnesota Sheriffs' Association and the state’s largest proprietary healthcare vendor, Advanced Correctional Healthcare, have filed suit against the law. A temporary restraining order now blocks the act from going into effect until August 1, with a court hearing scheduled for July 25.

COCHS tracks stories like this closely because they highlight the persistent tension between correctional institutions and community healthcare standards. Nested within the black box of correctional health is another black box: prescribing and dispensing medications. Most correctional systems operate under formularies—lists of preferred medications that might reflect cost constraints and institutional biases, such as avoiding medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) due to concerns about diversion. One challenge that might be posed by this new law is that jails may need to support dual formularies: one for medications typically prescribed in the facility, and another to accommodate prescriptions initiated in the community. Often, it is the correctional healthcare vendor who defines these lists, shaping access to care behind the scenes. (For more, see COCHS’ Prescribing and Dispensing Medications within Correctional Environments: The Role of Health Information Technology.) But the lawsuit brought by the sheriffs and Advanced Correctional Healthcare doesn’t focus on formularies. Instead, they argue the law could endanger lives, suggesting medications safe in the community might be harmful in jail.

In the next set of articles, mental health advocates strongly dispute the reasoning behind the lawsuit. NAMI points out that the law includes provisions for withholding or substituting medications when medically necessary. The Mental Health Work Group of CUAPB ridicule the claim that these licensed healthcare professionals would prescribe harmful or fatal medications for their patients and adds, perhaps touching upon the formulary issue, that the law does not preclude jail healthcare practitioners from providing generic versions of the medications, especially given that most providers already prescribe generics.

As COCHS has frequently noted, correctional institutions often resist external oversight—an issue echoed in this week’s Follow Ups from Oklahoma County. Some observers worry that the court will defer to sheriffs on how their jails are run. That may be exactly what the plaintiffs are banking on.

If one were naïve, it might seem unclear why Advanced Correctional Healthcare would oppose a law aimed at promoting continuity of care. Earlier this year, the Weekly Update featured the story of a man in Olmsted County who had been prescribed Suboxone in the community, only to be denied it in jail by Advanced Correctional Healthcare providers. He died in his cell in agony from an untreated ulcer. Continuing his original prescription might have prevented both a tragic outcome and a costly lawsuit for the company.

But resistance to the Larry Hill Medical Reform Act may point to deeper, systemic issues within Advanced Correctional Healthcare. A 2024 Weekly Update article reported that registered nurses were fired from the Anoka County Jail after raising concerns about substandard care that contributed to three inmate deaths in a single year. The nurses alleged that the company’s practices placed patients at risk of serious injury or death.

The irony here is hard to ignore. Week after week, sheriffs appear in Weekly Update articles lamenting the fact that their facilities have become de facto mental health institutions. They’re right. But when legislation is passed to reduce that burden and prevent further lawsuits, resistance begins to look less like a policy disagreement and more like an effort to protect the black box.

Sheriffs' & Advanced Correctional Healthcare's Lawsuit

A new law that requires Minnesota jails to give people access to their previously prescribed medications has been temporarily suspended in response to a lawsuit from the Minnesota Sheriffs Association. The lawsuit seeks an injunction, arguing that the Larry R. Hill Reform Act would require medical professionals to use medication that “could be harmful or fatal to inmates.” Sheriffs, counties, companies that provide health care in jails and doctors they employ also signed onto the suit.

Part of the Larry R. Hill Medical Reform Act includes a requirement for jails to administer medication that was prescribed to inmates outside of jail, but just a day into the new law, it’s already causing controversy. The Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association (MSA) is leading the lawsuit against the Department of Corrections, claiming this law needs to be halted and readdressed. James Stuart, Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association, executive director and chief executive officer, says jails have their own medical staff that prescribe what medication is best for the inmate and safest for the jail.

The Minnesota Sheriff's Association and Advanced Correctional Healthcare are suing the state over a new law that requires jail staffers to provide inmates with any drugs they have prescriptions for. Minnesota Sheriff's Association Executive Director Jim Stuart said the law requires health care providers to give inmates medicine even if they think it could worsen their health.

Mental Health Responds

NAMI Minnesota is deeply concerned by a lawsuit filed last week by the Minnesota Sheriffs Association and Advanced Correctional Healthcare. It claims that the new law forces jails to administer medications that could be harmful or fatal to inmates and “places the medical professional plaintiffs in the position of being unable to provide medical care to inmates that ensures the federal and state constitutional rights of inmates.” “Reading the lawsuit makes me wonder if the plaintiffs read the law,” said Sue Abderholden, executive director of NAMI Minnesota, “since the law clearly provides exemptions.” NAMI Minnesota highlights the contradiction between this lawsuit and statements often made by sheriffs, who have repeatedly expressed concern over the mental health crises in their jails and the lack of resources available.

We denounce the lawsuit filed yesterday by contract jail medical provider Advanced Correctional Healthcare, Inc. and the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association. Their goal is to prevent the implementation of an important piece of legislation that was passed in the last legislative session and that went into effect today. The Larry R. Hill Medical Reform Act, which reforms Minnesota Statute 241.021, was crafted by our organization to require jails to provide people with the medications they were prescribed before they entered the jail, with certain exceptions. The need for this reform became obvious as we heard from many people who have suffered serious consequences from being denied their prescribed heart and blood pressure medications, anti-seizure medications, HIV drugs, mental health medications and sometimes even insulin.

Follow Ups

Editor's Comment: This week’s Follow Ups revisit several recent stories, starting with Oklahoma County, which—as noted in the Editor’s Note—takes top billing. The Oklahoma County Criminal Justice Authority (OCCJA) is now considering disbanding. This follows its unsuccessful fight to block unannounced inspections by the State Department of Health—a battle the OCCJA lost when the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld the department’s authority. It’s worth recalling that the Oklahoma County jail has repeatedly failed inspections (see the June 24, 2025 Follow Ups).

Next, we return to Arizona, a hot topic in the July 1, 2025 Follow Ups. At that time, we reported that bipartisan legislation to create an independent oversight office had been blocked by the governor’s office and the Department of Corrections. That turns out not to be quite right. The governor did sign the bill—however, the office was not funded. One could hazard a guess that no money means no oversight.

And once again, we turn to New York’s troubled correctional system. In the aftermath of the killings of Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi and the subsequent wildcat strike by correctional officers, there are now concerns about the continued operation of the Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs. The center, which monitors solitary confinement and mental health care in prisons, has reportedly been non-operational for five months. It has now been reorganized—moved out of the governor’s executive portfolio and into public protection. Critics worry this shift signals a more law enforcement oriented approach.

Whether through lack of funding or quiet restructuring, Arizona and New York both seem to be well-practiced in the art of governance legerdemain.

Oklahoma County

Facing increasing pressure to dissolve, the Oklahoma County Criminal Justice Authority voted unanimously to launch a formal review of its performance. The evaluation will examine whether the authority is effective and sustainable, as demands persist for jail operations to be handed back to the county sheriff’s office. In the five years since the jail trust was created, it has been the subject of near-constant criticism and controversy. Under its purview, the Oklahoma County jail has repeatedly failed health inspections, faced chronic understaffing and poor living conditions and 58 people incarcerated there have died.

Arizona

Two Republican lawmakers are blasting Gov. Katie Hobbs for agreeing to some independent oversight of the prison system — but only after refusing to actually fund the program, something one of them compared to buying a car “and not putting anyone in the driver’s seat.” The Democratic governor signed legislation earlier this week crafted by Sen. Shawnna Bolick and Rep. Walt Blackman to establish the state’s first-ever Independent Correctional Oversight Office. Only thing is, the bill Hobbs signed contains no funds to hire a director or anyone at all to do that research. The original version of Senate Bill 1507 included $1.5 million to get the agency started, with the intent of similar future funding.

New York State

The state agency responsible for monitoring the use of solitary confinement and the quality of mental health care in prisons has been kept out of state correctional facilities for about five months, according to three sources. The site visits to prisons by the Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs were stopped in February – around the time of a mass work stoppage in the prison system – and came at the direction of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office. A spokesperson for the governor acknowledged that site visits by the Justice Center were paused following illegal strikes by prison guards all over the state. Behind the scenes, the Hochul administration has shuffled oversight of the Justice Center, moving the agency out of the portfolio of an executive chamber liaison with a focus on the so-called “O agencies” and into the public protection arena. The move has raised eyebrows from stakeholders that work with the center, as they’re worried it indicates a law enforcement emphasis that could be counterproductive to their mission.

Proprietary vs In-House Correctional Healthcare

Editor's Comment: Iowa and Provincetown, Massachusetts (Barnstable County) aren’t often mentioned in the same breath. Yet both are confronting a familiar dilemma: how best to provide healthcare within their correctional facilities. Iowa is currently weighing the privatization of healthcare across its prison system, while Provincetown has gone in the opposite direction—abandoning its proprietary vendor, Wellpath (a frequent presence in the Weekly Update), in favor of a public, in-house model.

In Iowa, the proposal has sparked a political and labor firestorm. The unions representing healthcare providers within the Department of Corrections are alarmed. As outlined in the articles below, there are no assurances these workers would retain their positions if a private company is brought in—and they risk losing access to Iowa’s public employee retirement system. Todd Copley, president of AFSCME Council 61, has called the move a "slap in the face" to frontline workers. And State Rep. Timi Brown-Powers has framed the plan as a case study in partisan mismanagement, where Republican budget priorities come at the expense of working people.

By contrast, in Provincetown, Sheriff Donna Buckley has called her decision to drop Wellpath and shift to in-house healthcare one of the best she's made. Mental health responses have improved. Suicides—three during Wellpath’s tenure—have fallen to zero. It's not all rosy: the article notes that grievances have gone up, though this may be due to an influx of individuals transferred from another jurisdiction.

Returning to Iowa: Weekly Update readers know we haven’t been shy in pointing out the perceived shortcomings of proprietary correctional healthcare (see Deadbeat Proprietary Correctional Healthcare Vendors, Weekly Update: September 24, 2024). We have no inside knowledge of the Iowa Department of Corrections’ internal deliberations, and we doubt they’re Weekly Update subscribers. Still, we’ll hazard two hypothetical reasons why the department might be considering this shift.

First, private vendors often market themselves as a legal firewall—promising to shield public agencies from the costs of lawsuits. This can sound attractive. But in practice, lawsuits over medical care in corrections frequently name both the vendor and the public agency. In COCHS’ view, the claim that privatization insulates jurisdictions from legal risk is more myth than reality.

Second, and more subtly, there may be a cost-benefit logic at play. About 18 years ago, COCHS was invited to consult with a county considering a community clinic model to provide care inside its jail. After we acknowledged the model would be more expensive upfront, the room went silent—until the general counsel spoke. He acknowledged that the care would likely improve under the proposed model—but added that, from the county’s perspective, even when lawsuits did arise, the financial impact tended to be less because of insurance than the cost of implementing higher-quality care.

Perhaps that’s the quiet calculus in Iowa.

Iowa Going Proprietary?

The privatization of health care in Iowa’s prisons would hurt the care providers currently working for the DOC, Todd Copley, president of AFSCME Council 61, said. “This is a slap in the face to the public employees who’ve kept Iowa’s correctional health system running through crisis after crisis,” Copley said. “Instead of investing in the frontline workers already doing the job, the state wants to hand it off to a private contractor. That’s not a solution, it’s a mistake.” Under the proposal outlined in the email to staff, all health care workers in the DOC system would be employed by the company contracted to provide care should the department decide to award a contract. Copley said this is cause for concern because current DOC workers could see pay cuts if they are offered to keep their position, and because these health care professionals would no longer have access to Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System (IPERS).

Nurses and other health care staff in Iowa’s state-run prison system would be employed by a private company under a request for proposal that the state will release soon, according to an email sent by the Iowa Department of Corrections to its medical staff. The email says the “exploratory RFP” will be released “soon,” and if a company is selected, there will be “a planned transition period.” If the state contracts with a private company to provide health care in its prison system, current Iowa DOC health care staff would be subjected to “retention interviews”. This privatization would potentially impact roughly 200 nurses, psychiatrists and other corrections health care workers.

AFSCME Council 61 has raised concerns about the Iowa Department of Corrections’ plan to privatize correctional healthcare. The council said it has concerns with the plan to replace the current electronic health record system and outsource multiple services. “This is a slap in the face to the public employees who’ve kept Iowa’s correctional health system running through crisis after crisis,” said Todd Copley, President of AFSCME Council 61. “Instead of investing in the frontline workers already doing the job, the state wants to hand it off to a private contractor. That’s not a solution, it’s a mistake.”

The Iowa Department of Corrections is exploring privatizing correctional health care, potentially employing nurses and other medical workers under a private contractor in a move intended to provide "long-term financial sustainability.” State Rep. Timi Brown-Powers, D-Waterloo, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, criticized the potential change in a statement, calling it a "costly mistake" to shift the correctional health system to a private company "instead of supporting the frontline workers already doing the job." “We shouldn’t be surprised that Republican leaders are once again making Iowa workers pay the price for their poor budgeting decisions by privatizing healthcare at the Iowa Department of Corrections," Brown-Powers continued.

Going In-House, Provincetown MA

Barnstable County Sheriff Donna Buckley says one of the most important changes, she said, has been ending the jail’s relationship with the prison health-care company Wellpath. Buckley ended that contract in August 2023, saying that Wellpath had actually staffed only 20 percent of the providers it had promised. In the nearly two years since then, the jail has shifted to providing medical care with in-house staff. Since ending the Wellpath contract, Buckley said, there have been significant improvements in the jail’s response to medical and mental health needs. Three people committed suicide while in custody in the two years before the end of Wellpath’s contract, she said; since then, there have been no suicides at the jail.

Medicaid

Nineteen states, including California, Kentucky, and Montana, have secured federal approval for their own versions of the program. Several others, including New York, have waiver requests awaiting review. But New York hasn’t updated its request in years. It would need to be rewritten to align with 2023 federal guidelines that require a minimum of pre-release services, like case management, addiction medications, and counseling. The health department declined to explain the delay or to say whether it will submit a revised petition.

On June 30, 2025, Maine submitted a request for a five-year extension of the Maine Substance Use Disorder Care Initiative Section 1115 Demonstration, including its current services. Additionally, the state seeks to change the name of the demonstration from “Maine Substance Use Disorder Care Initiative” to “Maine’s Whole Person Care Waiver” and to include additional services which would provide for Pre-Release Medicaid Services for Justice-Involved Individuals.

Opioid Settlement Fund

Cuyahoga County will allocate $7 million from the Opioid Settlement Fund to support the construction of a new behavioral health crisis center. A first-of-its-kind facility in Cuyahoga County, the facility will provide urgent mental health and addiction care in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood. The investment, pending Cuyahoga County approval, represents a key milestone in a partnership between Cuyahoga County, the Alcohol, Drug Addiction & Mental Health Services (ADAMHS) Board of Cuyahoga County, and The Centers.

West Virginia will receive an estimated $980 billion over the next 17 years from a global settlement, agreed to in federal court, of a class action lawsuit brought by states, counties and cities across the country against opioid distributors, manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and others, in the wake of the country’s opioid epidemic. How state, county and city leaders can spend their opioid settlement funds is guided by an MOU that former Attorney General Patrick Morrisey — now governor — helped to establish in 2022. The MOU outlines that funds can be spent in several areas: prevention, treatment, recovery, law enforcement and EMS.

A jail program in Perry County (KY) is helping inmates deal with substance abuse and mental health challenges. Through this program, participants receive structured treatment and support that includes: Counseling, both one-on-one and in groups is offered to help with addiction, mental health, and emotional well-being.The Perry County Fiscal Court received almost $800,000 in opioid settlement funds (See: Perry County looking to address substance abuse with opioid settlement funding).

BOP

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the nation’s largest prison system, has faced a “long-standing crisis” for over a decade, with issues ranging from crumbling infrastructure to staff abuse, according to a 2024 inspector general report. Experts and incarcerated individuals say the Trump administration has worsened the situation in just months—cutting pay, issuing confusing directives, targeting vulnerable populations, and slashing key programs. Staffing shortages remain critical: by late 2023, 16% of correctional officer roles were vacant, with similar gaps in health services. New BOP director William Marshall has responded by freezing most hiring through September to “avoid more extreme measures.”

ICE

The new immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades, visited by President Trump, is being promoted by Republicans as a model for ramping up detention and deportation. Nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” the facility sits at an isolated airfield 45 miles west of Miami, surrounded by swamps with mosquitoes, pythons, and alligators. To Gov. Ron DeSantis and other officials, its harsh location is intended as a deterrent—echoing the notorious Alcatraz to send a strong message. It reflects the Trump administration’s continued use of scare tactics to encourage voluntary departures.

With federal immigration detention facilities around the country packed due to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, the private prison industry is experiencing a boom. Stock prices of companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic soared as they gained scores of contracts. But when CoreCivic applied earlier this year for a permit in Leavenworth to reopen a prison with a troubled history to hold immigration detainees, city officials balked. And local residents – including some former prison employees – pushed back. Many locals remember what happened when CoreCivic previously ran the detention center, housing mostly pretrial detainees for the US marshals from 1992-2021. They recall guards who were permanently injured by prisoner attacks and understaffing that undermined security, according to a federal audit.

An immigration attorney representing one of 41 men in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement custody — who were held temporarily at the Anchorage Correctional Complex in June — said his client was hospitalized for tuberculosis upon returning from Alaska to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington. The American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska released a statement Wednesday claiming ICE detainees from the Lower 48, who were temporarily held at the ACC last month, were told upon returning to the Northwest ICE Processing Center that they were exposed to tuberculosis.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and contractors who have camped out at Glendale Memorial Hospital for nearly a week, allegedly waiting to re-apprehend a woman with a serious medical condition, are intimidating and hostile and interfere with patient care, nurses and patient advocates say. The patient, Milagro Solis Portillo, was taken from her Sherman Oaks home by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on July 3. While in transit, Portillo had a health emergency — a nature of which was not specified — and was eventually taken to Glendale Memorial Hospital and admitted for care, but only after she was left “handcuffed and covered in vomit” for more than eight hours, according to a statement written by Portillo’s family. National Nurses United, a major nurses union, has posted guidance on social media for nurses dealing with ICE in medical facilities, stating “Hospitals should be a place of healing, not fear. We have rights to protect our patients.”

Resources

Outbreak Behind Bars: Spider Bites, Human Rights, and the Unseen Danger to Public Health, by physician and epidemiologist Homer Venters, adds to this literature by focusing on the negligence, indifference, and malfeasance that characterise responses to infectious disease threats in US carceral facilities. Venter's stories about the pain, morbidity, and mortality resulting from lack of sound public health practices are accompanied by detailed and practical prescriptions for preventing, assessing, and treating infectious disease in these facilities.

Incarcerated Women

Research shows that between 77 and 90 percent of incarcerated women report experiences of past trauma. These traumatic experiences often include high rates of childhood abuse, intimate partner violence, and sexual assault. The incarceration experience itself can also be retraumatizing, as the conditions and procedures within correctional settings may trigger memories or feelings related to past trauma, further impacting women’s mental and physical health.

Given the lack of transparency from jails about pregnancies, birth outcomes, and other facets of reproductive care, a team of student researchers is drawing attention to this data blind spot. The Birth in Jails Media Project, which draws entirely from local news coverage of jail births, provides a rich picture of how some pregnant people experience incarceration, labor, and childbirth, with more detail about jail conditions and staff responses than a national dataset can typically provide

Data & Statistics

It is tough to get nationally-representative, individual-level data on incarceration’s health impacts. But researchers are increasingly providing evidence that the criminalization of poverty, addiction, and mental health issues has sharp harmful consequences. Jailing in general is associated with higher mortality (death) rates. At the community level, higher levels of jailing causes more communicable and noncommunicable disease, mortality, and harms maternal health. For individual people, jailing has major impacts on mental health and maternal-child health.

State Roundup

California

Conditions in Men’s Central Jail are hardly a secret. In fact, if there is one topic that politicians, advocates and law enforcement unequivocally agree on in Los Angeles County, it is that Men’s Central Jail should no longer exist. For half a decade, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has agreed that closing Men’s Central Jail is critical, though how exactly that would happen and what — if anything — would replace it have been debated to exhaustion. Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna, who describes Men’s Central as the largest mental health institute in the nation, openly calls the facility his department runs “horrible.” He is pushing for the county to build a modern replacement instead, but a majority of the supervisors are adamant they will not build more jails.

Unit 5C inside the George F. Bailey Detention Facility, San Diego’s largest jail, resembles a typical jail module: white walls, concrete floors and two levels of cells with sea foam green doors. The unit’s large dayroom is dotted with bolted-down metal tables and stools. But the dayroom is largely unused. State regulations require jails to offer every person in custody at least 10 hours of weekly out-of-cell time — seven in a dayroom and three in a rec yard. In 5C, which houses people who’ve been placed in “administrative separation” due to a propensity for violence, each person spends their dayroom time alone in a small cage-like metal enclosure. Critics say the enclosure — and the broader system of isolation — constitutes a form of solitary confinement that exacerbates mental illness and makes the jail less safe overall.

In an op-ed, Dr. Corrine McIntosh Sako writes: State Assemblymember Stephanie Nguyen, D-Elk Grove, introduced Assembly Bill 46, seeking to derail an existing life-line for incarcerated people with mental health diagnoses (a process called mental health diversion). This bill would make it harder for these people to get the mental health care that they need and make it easier to simply punish them. Now is not the time to double down on a broken system. The jail is Sacramento County’s largest mental health service provider, and instead of progress toward better care, this legislation threatens to make things worse

Santa Clara County leaders are struggling with how big the new jail should be when the incarcerated population has starkly declined since the pandemic. The county has started gathering community input on the needs of its crumbling jail system while simultaneously assessing the facilities’ conditions. Those efforts could lead to the construction of a new jail — the cost of which has historically ballooned the longer officials wait, from $390 million at one point to $689 million, then $747 million.

Florida

People struggling with mental illness and homelessness pose persistent problems for the Orange County Jail. Now county leaders are making a hard push for solutions, mindful that incarceration is often an ineffective response to broader economic and societal challenges. It estimated county taxpayers spend $4.5 million a year treating people in jail affected by homelessness and mental illness. A report suggested the county consider creating a program to divert individuals with serious mental illnesses, sometimes compounded by a substance-use disorder, away from the criminal justice system into community-based treatment and support services.

Mississippi

For nearly two years, the embattled sheriff of Rankin County, Miss., has tried to distance himself from brutality in his department, saying he was unaware of assaults like those carried out by deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad. But department records and interviews with a former F.B.I. agent reveal that the sheriff, Bryan Bailey, had evidence of his deputies’ violent acts going back to his earliest days in office.

North Carolina

Twenty-one percent of the North Carolina's total prison capacity — 8,579 beds — still don’t have air conditioning. Family, friends and advocates for incarcerated people are increasingly concerned for the health of their loved ones during the sweltering summer months. The heat affects correctional officers, too, who work in the same conditions as the people they’re charged with monitoring. Like many places around the United States, periods of extreme heat have intensified in North Carolina. On average, July is the warmest month of the year, with average high temperatures nearing 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pennsylvania

The Allegheny County Jail Oversight Board approved county officials completing a study determining whether it would be better for the county sheriff’s office to handle medical transports of inmates from the jail to medical facilities — and not jail staff members, who currently do so. A medical transport takes two correctional officers out of the jail for up to 10 hours. Given staffing shortages at the jail — there are 82 correctional officer vacancies as of late May, according to county jail data — there is a need to see if the sheriff’s office can handle taking inmates to medical facilities.

Vermont

The Corrections Monitoring Commission, established in 2022 after allegations of sexual misconduct in Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility came to light, quietly expired on July 1 without fulfilling its mandate. The articles described instances where Department of Corrections employees preyed on current and former incarcerated women, female officers endured sexual harassment, and those who raised concerns were disregarded or faced retaliation. The Corrections Monitoring Commission was supposed to provide advice to the commissioner of corrections in monitoring reporting of sexual misconduct. The commission was also tasked with drafting annual reports that would provide insights on the work of the Department of Corrections. But the reports were never produced.

Washington State

A King County Correctional Facility (Seattle) jail health audit uncovered key issues in how the jail provides behavioral health care, including racial disparities and effects of policies that could increase the chances of reoffending. According to the auditor’s office, the audit’s three key findings were: 1) Some people don’t receive their psychiatric medicine for weeks after being admitted; 2) Some get medication changed without consultation; 3) Less than 20% of released inmates receive a seven-day supply of their medication upon release. The audit focused on jail health processes for providing inmates behavioral health care in 2023.

West Virginia

Four former corrections officers at a West Virginia jail were sentenced this week to prison terms ranging from three years to more than two decades for their roles in the fatal beating of an inmate there three years ago, prosecutors said. The former officers were among eight who have been convicted in connection with the death of the inmate, Quantez Burks, 37, and an attempt to cover up the assault at the Southern Regional Jail in Beaver, W.Va

Water service been restored at a West Virginia correctional facility following several days of disruption. Crews were alerted of a main line leak affecting a public service district near the Mount Olive Correctional Complex, according to a news release from the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security.

Technology & Communications

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has temporarily waived the deadline for correctional telecommunications providers to implement the regulations poised to make phone and video calls more accessible to incarcerated people across the country. Private contractors that provide incarcerated people’s communications services (IPCS) like Securus Technologies and ViaPath Technologies were required to come into compliance no later than April 1, 2026.It’s pretty clear that the FCC is laying groundwork to make the regulations optional for any provider claiming financial hardship. At one point the order references what appears to be a rumor (floated by “commenters”) that some prisons and jails, pushed into a corner by the FCC regulations, have begun doing business with “noncompliant” providers.

Assisting Families of Inmates (AFOI), a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting families and children impacted by the incarceration of a loved one, announced that the cost of video visitation within the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC), previously 15 cents-per-minute, will further decrease to 12 cents-per-minute effective July 1, 2025.

Whether or not to have a third party scan all mail addressed to inmates at the Dane County Jail (Madison, WI), and have them read letters on their tablet rather than the handwriting of someone they know on paper is a step Sheriff Kalvin Barrett is contemplating. The county is now looking at mail scanning in a new communications contract submitted by Smart Communications Holding, Inc. Currently, all mail to inmates is opened by jail staff first — to make sure it doesn't contain anything illegal. But Sheriff Barrett said some mail has come through jail walls laced or "soaked" in illegal substances.

The Chelan County Regional Justice Center recently completed the installation of 44 additional medical sensors, bringing its total to 68 sensors now installed in single-occupancy cells at the facility. The county jail started installing the medical sensors, which detect sudden changes in heart rates and breathing, last year to better serve a population that has become increasingly sick with chronic conditions as well as drug and alcohol addictions.

Correctional Healthcare Vendors

Centurion

The estate of a Black man who died in a Vermont prison more than five years ago has agreed to accept $1.5 million to resolve a lawsuit brought against the state’s former medical provider alleging that racism, medical malpractice and negligence led to the man’s death. The lawsuit filed in December 2021 alleged that Johnson died in the prison infirmary after workers for Virginia-based Centurion Health failed to diagnose and treat a tumor that led to Johnson’s death by asphyxiation.