Louisiana Voice

The problems of LaSalle Corrections continue with the recent revelation that the U.S. Department of Labor had RECOVERED  more than $125,000 in back wages for 122 of its employees in Tullos, Louisiana.

This is just the latest in a long string of problems experienced by the Ruston-based company that operates 18 private prisons in several states, including nine in Louisiana. Total capacity for its 18 facilities is 13,000 inmates.

Following an investigation by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD), LaSalle paid $125,516 in unpaid fringe benefits to the 122 employees to resolve violations of the McNamara-O’Hara Service Contract Act (SCA).

WHD investigators found that LaSalle had failed to provide the required fringe benefits to employees at the Tullos facility. The employees had performed contract work with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). LaSalle failed to make required contributions to health and benefits plans on behalf of the employees from August 2019 through October 2019.

The McNamara-O’Hara Service Contract Act requires contractors and subcontractors performing services on prime contracts in excess of $2,500 to pay service employees in various classes no less than the wage rates and fringe benefits found prevailing in the locality (commonly known as prevailing wage), or the rates, including prospective increases, contained in a predecessor contractor’s collective bargaining agreement.

The dispute with the Department of Labor was just the latest in a continuing string of problems experienced by LaSalle that include charges that its Georgia prison performed unwanted hysterectomies on female detainees and the settlements or judgments against LaSalle for prisoner deaths and injuries.

Other FINDINGS revealed that LaSalle employees routinely falsified records on prisoner care, that employees received inadequate training and were even instructed to lie about receiving training that had not been provided.

Last year, an ICE detainee DIED at the Richwood Correctional Center in Ouachita Parish, a LaSalle-run facility, in October 2019. ICE officials claimed that Roylan Hernandez-Diaz, 43, died of “self-inflicted strangulation.” But with all the reports of ABUSES of detainees, one has to wonder at the accuracy of ICE’s assertions.

Hernandez-Diaz, of Cuba, had been in ICE custody since May 20, 2019 after he was apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol at a port of entry in Texas.

The Richwood facility has a capacity of 1,000 prisoners and it was holding 375 ICE detainees among its prisoners at the time of Hernandez-Diaz’s death.

In another inmate death, LaSalle used legal maneuvers to get the wrongful death lawsuit dismissed. The family of Derrick Williams filed suit in Lincoln Parish, where LaSalle’s headquarters are located, after Williams was found unresponsive at Richwood on Jan. 23, 2014.

LaSalle and Richwood, in July 2015, filed a motion of exception of venue, arguing that the lawsuit should have been filed in Ouachita Parish, where the prison is situated. The trial court granted the venue exception and ordered that the suit be transferred to Ouachita Parish on Nov. 16, 2015, a little less than 10 months after Williams’s death.

Following the suit’s transfer, Richwood and LaSalle filed a peremptory exception of prescription, alleging that prescription was not interrupted and that the plaintiffs’ claims were prescribed because they failed to serve any defendant with process before the one-year prescriptive period expired.

Prescription is the time allowed to file civil lawsuits. In Louisiana, that time is 12 months. The argument that prescription was not interrupted by the change of venue is a technical one at best, but one that was granted by the trial court and subsequently upheld on appeal.

Carl Lenard, 62, and Stanton Johnson, 51, were guards at Richwood in April 2020 when they died of the CORONAVIRUS after allegedly being instructed by management not to wear protective gear because of concern of spreading panic among the prison population.

There were 45 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among detainees at the time of the guards’ deaths.

A Richwood employee told Associated Press that guards were being ordered not to wear masks or gloves in order to avoid spreading panic among detainees. Two days after AP asked LaSalle about that policy, the order was rescinded, the employee said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center called on ICE to improve conditions at Richwood.

A year before the guards’ deaths, the Concordia Sentinel newspaper in Ferriday REPORTED that 510 asylum-seekers and other federal detainees were being held by ICE at LaSalle’s River Correctional facility in that parish.

The legislature’s criminal justice reform, spearheaded by Gov. John Bel Edwards, resulted in fewer state prisoners, which made space available for the ICE detainees which, conveniently, pay the local jails and private prisons like those run by LaSalle $65 average per diem per occupied bed for warehousing detainees compared to the state rate of $24.39. In all, there were 2,692 fewer state prisoners in December 2018 than in October 2017 to be immediately replaced by 2,790 better paying ICE detainees.

LaSalle signed contracts with the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office as well as the Jackson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

As of May 2019, ICE was also housing detainees in Jonesboro (1,000), Jena (1,160), Alexandria (400), Oberlin (50), and Pine Prairie (1,094).