Nashville-based prison profiteers Corrections Corporation of America have found a way to attract more negative attention to themselves. Not that they seem to mind.

Just last Sunday, a prison guard died in a riot at a CCA prison in Mississippi.

Now, the family of a Hawaiian prisoner murdered at a private prison in Arizona filed a lawsuit yesterday against CCA and the state of Hawaii. A similar suit was filed three months ago, when another Hawaiian prisoner was murdered at the same Arizona facility.

The new complaint cites CCA's "pattern of greed-driven corner-cutting and short-staffing" as a contributing factor in the death of 23-year-old Clifford Medina, a Hawaiian who was transferred to the CCA-operated facility in Eloy, Arizona. The complaint also contends that the state of Hawaii contributed to Medina's death "by abdicating responsibility to inmates in its charge" as part of a practice whereby the state sends prisoners to private, for-profit prisons on the mainland.

The full text of a press release announcing the suit, from the Human Rights Defense Center, Rosen Bien & Galvan and the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii — who are all representing the Medina family — appears after the jump.

• Lauren Wood/The Natchez Democrat, via Associated Press
• The Adams County Correctional Center on Sunday

According to The New York Times, the eight-hour-long riot at the Adams County Correctional Center grew out of a gang fight, and inmates took more than 20 people hostage and started a fire in the prison yard. Catlin Carithers, a 24-year-old prison guard, died of blunt head trauma, an official said. The prison was still on lockdown yesterday, when the Times story ran.

The prison's population is made up entirely of immigrants serving time for felonies before being deported, according to CCA spokesman Steve Owen. He also said the inmates were classified as low risk, which should raise a few eyebrows. One Mississippi congressman has already expressed concern:

Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, on Tuesday called for an investigation into the company, saying the riot “brings into question the effectiveness of privately owned and operated prison facilities.”

Read the whole story here.

In this week's City Paper, James Nix investigates the sex trafficking trade in Nashville and around the country. The cover story, titled "Faced with pervasive sex trafficking, law enforcement and nonprofits take aim," hit the stands this morning, just 10 days before the Trafficking in America Task Force begins its annual conference at the Holiday Inn Opryland/Airport.

An excerpt:

Nashville, with its central location as a crossroads of interstate traffic, finds itself firmly entrenched on the trafficking circuit, which links other nearby cities like Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis, Clarksville and Birmingham, Ala.

In August, police charged Prontiss Houseworth, who turned 19 this January, with trafficking sexual servitude after a detective answered an Backpage.com ad for a “two-girl special.”

At the Knights Inn motel on Spring Street, police said they found two women who told detectives that Houseworth had taken them from Atlanta and driven them to Nashville, with the safety locks on the car doors engaged so they couldn’t escape. They said Houseworth told them he was their pimp now, they were in his “game,” and threatened to use violence against them or their families if they didn’t do as he said.

Disclosure: Backpage.com has signed marketing agreements with a number of alternative weeklies around the U.S., including the Nashville Scene. The Scene and The City Paper are owned by SouthComm.

• Via

On a new interactive map over at the Guardian U.K. titled "Gay rights in the US, state by state," the more faint the color, the fewer protections afforded gays by law. Perhaps not surprisingly, Tennessee, along with the greater Southeast, looks awfully pale. Maybe we just should be glad there's no band on the graph for "mentioning the existence of homosexuality at all"?

View the full map at the Guardian.

Tom Humphrey has the strange story of lobbyist Dan Haskell, who somehow got seated at state Rep. Bob Ramsey's computer and was able to send an email from Rep. Ramsey's legislative account on behalf of legislation Haskell is in favor of.

It also led House Speaker Beth Harwell to speak with Ramsey, his assistant, Angela Brown, and lobbyist Dan Haskell.

"I heard his (Haskell's) side of the story," Harwell said. "I talked to Rep. Ramsey and his assistant, and made it clear that legislative equipment and email are for legislative staff and our members only."

What about state code 39-16-303? Haskell used Ramsey's identity to obtain the privilege of getting people to take more seriously legislation he supports, because they think Ramsey supports it. That looks like a Class C misdemeanor.

And look at 39-16-504. "a) It is unlawful for any person to: (1) Knowingly make a false entry in, or false alteration of, a governmental record; (2) Make, present, or use any record, document or thing with knowledge of its falsity and with intent that it will be taken as a genuine governmental record."

Legislative email is a part of the public record. Haskell certainly knew that he was not Ramsey, and yet he sent an email as Ramsey, and it's pretty obvious it was so people would take it as an email either from Ramsey or sent with the approval of Ramsey. That's a Class A misdemeanor.

And the only consequence is a talking-to? Nice. I'm glad the legislature is so busy making all these laws they then shield their friends from. We should all be so lucky to have a state legislator as our friend.

Two Nashville residents formally announced their class action lawsuit against the American Broadcasting Corporation's television programs The Bachelor and The Bacherlorette today, alleging that the objectively abysmal network shows avoid casting people of color.

From the downtown offices of Barrett Johnston, LLC, the plaintiffs — Nathaniel Claybrooks, an American Football League player, and Christopher Johnson, an aspiring NFL player — held a press conference with counsel this afternoon in which they delineated their charges. Chief among them: Out of a combined 23 seasons, not one episode has featured a person of color in either of the shows' lead roles.

"Any job opportunity you are given, you always look for equal opportunity," Johnson said. "When you feel you are treated unfair and unjust, you have to speak out. ... We all need a voice, and in those shows, we haven't had that opportunity."

Attorneys for the men seek compensatory damages for what they allege is a set of policies and practices that result in the exclusion of non-whites (African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, etc.) from being seriously considered for the shows' central roles. The net affect, they argue, is that the practices violate elements of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pertaining to the right of minorities to make and enforce contracts equal to whites, and that the absence of people of color on the programs suggests "to both white viewers and viewers of color, that interracial or non-white relationships are undesirable or unworthy of the nationally broadcasted platform of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette."

Specifically targeted is Michael Fleiss, creator of Bachelor-themed programming and president of Next Entertainment, which produces the shows.

According to Johnson and his attorneys, his entire casting call process lasted "a minute, at most" before he was routinely dismissed.

The attorneys plan to subpoena the producers of the show to discern the nature of these practices and determine if what happened to Claybrooks and Johnson is systemic. To that end, they anticipate the ongoing suit to bring more people forward who may have experienced similar treatment at the hands of ABC.

Pith reached out to the American Broadcasting Corporation for comment, and was redirected to a public relations flack for Warner Bros., who has not responded as of posting time.

A more detailed list of complaints (particularly Johnson's alleged treatment), after the jump.

The hearing began with an explanation of the proposed rules by Thaddeus E. Watkins, the department's attorney who rather enjoyed his first run-in with the Occupy protesters last October. Things took on a strange tone as Watkins went through the proposed rules one by one, asking various members of the panel to explain the rationale for them, as if he were a neutral overseer acting on spontaneous curiosity.

"Why could this be a problem?" he would ask, prompting detailed explanation's of the plaza's design, the specific dimensions of its granite slabs and the fragility of the "roof membrane" underneath them. These concerns, among others, they claim, were the primary impetus for the new rules, not the inconvenient presence of lefty protesters. Those concerns along with rampant defecation, which, of course, was mentioned.

The rules are available for public perusal here, in PDF form.

With the fate of the state's enforcer of jurisprudence, the much-maligned and woefully opaque Court of the Judiciary, on the legislative operating table, a Hawkins County general sessions judge is stepping down after the CoJ actually did its job and filed charges against him earlier this year for being a corrupt asshole.

Judge James Taylor will resign his post as general sessions judge effective May 1 following revelations that Taylor used his perch to bilk clients out of roughly $9,000 for services he allegedly never performed. In response to the charges, Taylor pleaded the Fifth.

From A Feb. 27, 2012 KnoxNews article:

"He is a charlatan, and his charlatanry is about to come to an end," said Morristown lawyer Paul Whetstone, who represents two clients who have filed civil lawsuits alleging the judge took money or assets from them when he was their lawyer. "A sitting judge who opts to plead the privilege against self-incrimination should subordinate his ego to his position, and summon the courage to resign."

The judiciary court complaint alleges that Taylor stole $9,000 from a client, billed the state for services that he never performed, and kept money raised to pay for a public "Citizen's Heritage Display." That display was to include the Ten Commandments and was to have been placed in the courthouse lobby.

The Kingsport Times-News has reported that the false billing allegations surfaced during a TBI investigation of a complaint by a Hawkins County commissioner that money was offered for votes to appoint Taylor to the bench.

Fire, rain, etc.

It's budgetary hearing season in Metro government, and that means media outlets are reporting on various cuts and belt-tightenings faced by city departments.

FOX 17's intrepid reporter, Sky Arnold, dusted off an old story about the Davidson County Sheriff Office's controversial 287(g) program and made it his own.

For nearly 90 seconds, Arnold says that the federal program that enables the DSCO to actively police immigrant communities, slap its members (such as pregnant women and overachieving high school students) with paltry offenses like traffic citations and deport them to their countries of origin is working for taxpayers because the sheriff said so.

In doing so, Arnold perpetuates the myth that the program actually saves taxpayers money because all of those deported illegal aliens aren't clogging up the county jail.

Inside the Davidson County jail something is missing.

1,100 beds are empty because there are no inmates to put there.

"It's not only the fact we're seeing empty beds we know we're having an impact on the community from a public safety perspective," said Sheriff Daron Hall.

Hall believes the reason for the empty beds is a controversial program known as 287-G.

It allows the Sheriffs Department to identify and turn over illegal immigrants to federal authorities.

The program has been in operations for 5 years in Davidson County.

Hall says it's the only explanation for the lack of inmates.

"We've looked at other jurisdictions that do not have 287-G to see what the impact has been and it's nowhere near what we're seeing in reductions, so we know it has a significant part of that," said Hall.

Hall made those comments after budget hearings Monday morning where he said his department will once again come in on budget.

But as they used to say in olden times, "Where's the beef?"