The BOP notified one of the country’s leading private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America, on July 29 that a long-troubled federal prison the company had operated for 16 years will be closed down. The notice is exceptional in the BOP’s history of overseeing its privatized prisons—in the last decade, it has ended only three other private prison contracts before they were set to expire—and it follows reporting by The Nation and the Investigative Fund that documented poor medical care at the prison, including at least three questionable deaths.
This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation.
The minimum-security Cibola County Correctional Center, in Milan, New Mexico, holds 1,200 prisoners, all noncitizens convicted of federal crimes, who will be moved to other prisons before the facility is shuttered at the end of September.
Cibola is one of several facilities that have been the focus of a Nation and Investigative Fund series that has uncovered dozens of questionable deaths in 11 privatized federal prisons. Drawing from 30,000 pages of previously unreleased federal records obtained through an open-records lawsuit, we documented dozens of premature deaths following shoddy medical care in these federal prisons, which are used to hold noncitizens. The documents, as well as interviews with former BOP officials and contractors’ medical staff, reveal the BOP’s own oversight monitors issuing increasingly stern warnings about medical neglect, understaffing of medical units, and underperforming internal quality-control systems. Yet federal administratorsrepeatedly extended contracts at the same prisons that the agency’s monitors declared to be in trouble.
[For more of this story, written by Seth Freed Wessler, go to https://www.thenation.com/arti...ation-investigation/]
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