From the Editor
by Paul Wright
The December 2024 issue of PLN reported on litigation payouts by New Mexico medical contractor Centurion and detailed the 13 prisoners who died at their hands as well as the dozens more who were seriously injured from denials of medical care. It took PLN almost 3 years of litigation to obtain those records. This month we are reporting on a similar tale of mayhem and greed by the current medical contractor in New Mexico, Wexford. Unlike Centurion, Wexford did not make us have to sue them to get the records which this story is based on.
Regardless of the contractor the story is pretty much the same: a business model based on getting as much money out of the government as possible and providing as little service as possible and then if sued paid out a pittance to keep the business model alive and rolling.
If you like this type of data based reporting and journalism, which PLN has excelled at for decades, you are in good company. However, politicians in New Mexico do not seem to like it and are currently considering gutting the state’s public records laws. Whether the law gets gutted remains to be seen, but few in government these days seem to like the idea of government transparency.
We have been reporting on these companies for decades and it tends to be the same, the only thing that changes are the names of the companies. Tellingly, no one can point to a single private, for profit prison health care company and claim they somehow do a good job at actually providing decent health care to prisoners, the job they are being paid hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to do. Which on its face seem incredible for an industry that has existed for around 40 years now. 40 years and not a single success story?
President Trump took office on January 20 and to say the news cycle has not recovered is an understatement. There are more criminal justice related stories since the inauguration than at any time in American history. This includes both outgoing President Biden’s pardons and commutations and those by incoming president Trump. Executive orders declaring only male and females exist has put the care and treatment of transgender federal prisoners in question. The director of the federal Bureau of Prisons has resigned.
While everyone was expecting the private prison industry to see a boondoggle of federal tax money related to immigration detention, on February 3 the president of El Salvador announced his country would be willing to cage American prisoners, both US citizens convicted of crimes and non-citizens facing deportation on non-criminal charges, for a modest fee. It will be ironic if the American private prison winds up undercut by the Salvadorian police state. For its part, Trump is vowing to redo the Clinton policies of the 1990s and expand the immigration detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
We will be reporting on these stories in greater detail as they develop in both Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News. And as seems likely, there is even more happening each day.
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