Louisiana Voice

Following is Sen. Kennedy’s response to the pandemic, given during one of his town hall meetings:

The news just doesn’t get any better for LaSalle Corrections.

The Ruston-based private prison company has been cited by authorities for failure to properly train its employees, for falsifying documents certifying that received training courses they never received, falsifying documents certifying that guards checked prisoners periodically when those prisoners ultimately died or had to be transferred to nearby hospitals after their physical conditions deteriorated after beatings or after being denied medications for conditions prison officials were aware of.

The company has also been the subject of numerous lawsuits by inmates, their families and former employees – lawsuits that have cost the company hundreds of thousand of dollars in awards and settlements.

A federal investigation was launched when a whistleblower at its facility in Georgia accused the prison of performing unwanted hysterectomies on female detainees.

More recently, LaSalle has taken down web pages for all 25 private prison it runs in several states, including 10 in Louisiana, as well as the web page for its corporate headquarters in Ruston.

Almost exactly two years ago, a Lafourche Parish resident was found dead in his cell at the LaSalle-run Catahoula Correctional Center, prompting a joint INVESTIGATION by the Catahoula and Lafourche parish sheriffs’ departments.

Kevin Percle, 50, of Chackbay, had been transferred to Catahoula Correction Center on Oct. 21, 2018 and during his stay he became involved in an incident with another inmate during which he suffered a blow to the head.

The incident was not reported at that time and he was transferred back to Catahoula Correctional Center on Nov. 4 for an impending court date. On Nov. 12, correctional officers found him unresponsive with labored breathing. He was later pronounced dead and an autopsy determined the cause of death to be homicide, the result of trauma to the brain.

At LaSalle’s ICE Processing Center in Jena in March of this year 79 female protestors were left in a room filled with PEPPER SPRAY.

When LaSalle took over the local jail in JOHNSON COUNTY, TEXAS, guards Marion Dahn, 65, and Chris Stevenson, 43, were fired. They sued and ultimately were awarded $795,321 ($222,846 for Dahn for harassment on the basis of his age and $572,475 for Stevenson for retaliation for reporting a sexual harassment claim).

Because Catahoula is a poor parish, it needs to remain in the good graces of LaSalle for jobs, according to SHERIFF TONEY EDWARDS.

LaSalle first approached the parish in the late 1990s with a proposal to build what Edwards described as a “turnkey operation” to house Louisiana Department of Corrections prisoners. The facility was at first managed by LaSalle but paid for by the parish. Within a few years, the parish handed ownership of the prison over to LaSalle, which agreed to pay the sheriff a “sponsorship fee” of $10,000 per month for the right to operate the prison.

Was that a good deal for LaSalle? With the influx of federal detainees under the Trump administration, the answer to that would be a resounding “yes.” The State of Louisiana pays private prisons about $24 per day to warehouse inmates while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has upped the ante to $65 to $75 per person per day.

Using conservative figures that indicate LaSalle houses about 2,800 federal detainees at its 10 Louisiana facilities and is being paid $65 per day per prisoner. That comes to more than $5.8 million per month. There is overhead to consider, of course, like employee salaries and splitting some of that income with the local sheriffs but you’re still looking at nearly $70 million per year gross for LaSalle – and it’s one of your smaller private prison companies.

Of course, LaSalle doesn’t overlook the help it gets from the local sheriffs. During the 2019 campaign, the company contributed $5,000 to Edwards’s reelection campaign.

And private prisons offer little, if any, rehabilitation or educational programs for prisoners, which helps keep costs down and profits up.

If you’re still not convinced that private prisons are big business, consider the numbers:

In 1980, there were 41,000 persons in state and federal prisons in the U.S. Today, that number exceeds a half-million. Has crime really increased that much over the past 40 years? Not likely.

State and federal governments spent $6.9 billion on jails and prisons in 1980 compared to $80 billion today. Private prison companies have shelled out millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences and keep more people locked up so they can earn more profits.

In 1980, the U.S. violent crime rate was 596.6 per 100,000 population. In 2019, the rate was cut by more than 38 percent to 366.7. During the same time period, the murder rate was cut by more than half, from a 10 per 100,000 of population to 4.9. Likewise, property crime was cut by more than half, from 6,353.3 to 2,565.3.

Make no mistake: It long ago stopped being about crime prevention. It’s all about profits now.

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).

“As I have long said, the success of a coronavirus vaccine would only be announced after the election.

“Pfizer and the others probably didn’t have the courage to make this HISTORIC announcement before November 3^rd, because they hoped it would keep me from WINNING BIG.

“The truth is, if Joe Biden were President, you wouldn’t have the vaccine for another four years, nor would the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have ever approved it so quickly.” —Email from Donald Trump today.

No, Tweet Thang, that’s not what you have long said. Let’s keep the record straight on this. What you said and what Donnie Jr. and Eric repeated on numerous occasions was that the virus would magically disappear on Nov. 4, that Covid was a hoax. That, in fact, is what the three of you repeatedly told the American people.

But it didn’t disappear, did it? In fact, new cases now exceed 150,000 every 24 hours. Covid deaths are climbing rapidly to 250,000 and will probably reach that number before Thanksgiving.

I know you have a propensity to lie through your teeth, but let’s not lie about something this important. You first predicted it would disappear by Easter. Then it was as soon as warm weather got here. Then it was Nov. 4. You were incorrect every. single. time.

You said it was no worse than a cold. But a quarter-million people don’t die of a cold in less than 10 months.

You said early on that everyone who wanted to be tested would be. Only problem was, there weren’t enough tests available.

You said we would have a vaccine very shortly. But even with the latest good news from Pfizer, it’s going to take the better part of a year – or more – to get it distributed.

But then you also promised to reveal your income taxes way back during the 2016 campaign but you didn’t, and you repeatedly promised a healthcare plan to replace the ACA would be forthcoming “within a couple of weeks.” That was right after your election and (again) repeated several times since then. But even as you go before the Supreme Court to try to abolish Obamacare, you still have not followed up with a replacement.

And now you claim – without any evidence to back it up – that you won the election. Even with the electoral votes as close as they are, it’s difficult to overlook a popular vote deficit of more than five million ballots.

Fact is, you are a bald-face liar and you just can’t help yourself.

And you’re a loser.

But America is a winner.

Okay, campers, we have a new game we’re going to play with Donald J. Trump.

As you may know, Trump has launched a fund-raising effort, ostensibly exclusively for Trump’s election defense fund and he is inundating people (including yours truly) with 20-30 emails per day begging for donations.

What he doesn’t tell you is that his defense fund receives only the remainder of any donation exceeding the maximum $5,000 allowed under campaign finance rules.

He also doesn’t bother to explain that 60 percent of all post-election donations are earmarked not for his legal fight over the election results, but to pay off his campaign debts.

The fine print on the campaign, according to THE NEW YORK TIMES, website reads:

60% of each contribution first to Save America, up to $5,000/$5,000, then to DJTP’s (Donald J. Trump for President’s) Recount Account, up to a maximum of $2,800/$5,000.40% of each contribution to the RNC’s Operating account, up to a maximum of $35,500/$15,000. Any additional funds will go to the RNC for deposit in the RNC’s Legal Proceedings account or Headquarters account, up to a maximum of $213,000/$90,000.”

Now, whenever you use your credit card, you are not the only one who pays. In addition to any interest charges that you pay, the merchant, or recipient of the payment, is hit with two separate charges: a percentage of purchase charge and a swipe charge.

It’s the second one, the swipe charge, that is crucial here. Rather than a percentage, it is a flat fee that is charged each time a credit card is swiped, or used, to make a payment. It’s not really important to know what the flat fee is – just that it exists and for the purpose of our new game, it’s a gift from heaven.

If you receive these emails from Trump, just contribute a penny.

Whatever that swipe fee is, it’s certain to result in a deficit transaction for Trump every time it’s used.

I’m suggesting that we go into each and every email and give a penny for each one we receive. Twenty or thirty cents, after all, isn’t going to break any of us and there’s a helluva lot more satisfaction than the contributions will cost us.

I also suggest that you pass this on to your friends in order to get as much participation as possible. I don’t particularly care about helping the credit card companies but any distaste for them will certainly be outweighed by our collective contempt for Trump and by the pleasure of wreaking havoc on his new leadership PAC, “Save America.”

If you haven’t received any of his emails, contact me at louisianavoice@yahoo.com and I’ll be happy to pass them along to you.

It’s the least I can do.