Big-time corruption in Mississippi's private prison business. Yesterday Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps abruptly resigned. Today he faces
49 federal counts of fraud, money laundering and more:
The 49-count federal indictment, unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Jackson, also charges Cecil McCrory of Brandon with paying Epps to obtain contracts for himself and other companies. They were scheduled to appear before U.S. Magistrate Keith Ball on Thursday. Epps is accused of receiving more than $700,000 from 2008 to 2014. [….]
The indictment said McCrory was paid by companies that received contracts from the Corrections Department to run private prisons, including Cornell Group, GEO Group and current contractor Management and Training Corp. The companies were named in the indictment but not charged.
Strange nobody from the highly profitable private prison business has been charged yet.
Of course, $700,000 in bribes to one official is
chump change for this industry:
…. while providing security, housing, food, medical care, etc., for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry, it's a $70 billion gold mine.
It remains uncertain whether anyone else is being investigated or will be charged. In the meantime, Mississippi faces several lawsuits which claim prison conditions in the state are
"barbaric":
This past March and April, former Washington State Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail, an expert for the plaintiffs, inspected the private prison over a period of several days.
"East Mississippi Correctional Facility is an extraordinarily dangerous prison," he concluded in his report. "All prisoners confined there are subjected on a daily basis to significant risk of serious injury."
He visited where some prisoners are kept in segregation, calling their conditions "barbaric," especially to those suffering from mental illness (more than 70 percent of the 1,200 inmates), he wrote. "They are the worst I have ever seen in 35 years as a corrections professional."