IV: GEO Group, Centurion allegedly mismanaged COVID-19 in Arizona prisons
According to records obtained by CREW, following the outbreak of COVID-19, the Arizona Department of Corrections and its contracted private prison company staff allegedly withheld masks and laundry access from prisoners and ignored rules for quarantining and social distancing. Whistleblowing inmates filed complaints against GEO Group staff for sustaining poor living conditions, while private correctional healthcare company Centurion faced backlash and a fine from ADOC for failing to follow proper safety procedures after assisting the transfer of potentially COVID-positive prisoners between facilities.
In addition to an abundance of serious complaints against ADOC staff, then-Arizona prisons Director David Shinn and other ADOC officials received concerns specifically about GEO’s facilities and their handling of COVID-19. In January 2021, director of the local organization Middle Ground Prison Reform Donna Hamm forwarded to Shinn and others an inmate’s complaint about the circumstances at the Huachuca GEO facility in Kingman, Arizona. The complaint alleged that all the buildings and countless inmates were infected after a prisoner had returned from an outside medical appointment and not quarantined.
The message also said that there was no attempt to cook or follow any menu at the facility, and so the inmates often ate uncooked food for breakfast and dinner at their bunks. There was allegedly no way to regulate shower or sink temperatures, and inmates were only permitted to wash one laundry bag of clothes twice a week. The operation was called “below low standards, even beyond GEO’s normal low everyday standards.”
“[T]he real issue is that GEO is not managing this quarantine well, or even passable,” the complaint said. Letters from inmates were also said to remain unchecked by staff despite being automated on tablets—the author of the complaint and fellow inmates assumed this was deliberate in order to ignore concerns over the lack of quarantining and distancing.
In December 2021, Shinn received a new complaint about how masks were being issued to staff instead of inmates at GEO—presumably at the GEO Group’s local facilities to which inmates were transferred—from an inmate’s family member: “[A]t GEO those masks were given to the staff, not the inmates. Many of the staff do not bother with masks, so not sure why that would have happened.” According to the documents, prison staff failing to wear masks was among the most prevalent and controversial problems across the Arizona prisons.
Issues arose in private between ADOC and its contracted healthcare company Centurion as well. According to the records, the Arizona Department of Health Services bought 65,000 COVID tests from correctional healthcare company Centurion of Arizona LLC for $4,028,900 on July 16, 2020. In December 2020, Centurion signed off the transport of eight COVID-positive prisoners to various facilities in the state alongside COVID-exposed prisoners, despite the latter inmates’ COVID tests still pending results. Then-ADOC Assistant Director of Medical Services Larry Gann wrote to other officials, “This is a repeat of the Tucson blunder… Unacceptable.” In 2022, Centurion received a sanction of $20,000 from ADOC for “failure to isolate” during COVID.
The month prior, Centurion statewide medical director Wendy Orm had expressed that since a certain staff member left, neither the presumably new occupational health nurse nor warden were sharing information on positive ADOC staff with Centurion’s site leadership anymore, preventing Centurion from properly contributing to contact mapping and containing potential exposures.
These issues added to the overflow of concerns and complaints from inmates and inmates’ families members about health safety in the prisons as ADOC staff failed to implement safety measures following the outbreak of COVID-19.
GEO Group is one of the country’s largest private prison companies, and previously housed those detained under Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy that separated children from parents at the border during his administration. Since then, private prison contractors like the GEO Group appear to have growing government contracts, despite President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order opposing the practice. GEO Group was also the first corporation to max out donations to former President Donald Trump’s campaign in late February, according to a CREW analysis of campaign finance records.
Summer Roberts contributed to this report.
Aerial photo by Prison Insight via a Creative Commons license.