Private Prisons Operator CoreCivic Laying Off 500-Plus Workers Across Texas (Updated)

AUSTIN, TX — Nashville-based CoreCivic, a company formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America that owns and manages private prisons, is laying off more than 500 employees throughout Texas after failing to retain a contract with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, according to state filings.

The company notified the Texas Workers Commission of its plans to lay off 518 workers at facilities in Rusk, Willacy and Rusk counties. The notifications are in compliance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requiring employers with at least 100 workers to give a 60-day advance notification of mass layoffs.

Patch requested accompanying correspondence submitted at the time of the layoffs notifications to glean more information about the mass CoreCivic layoffs. Recently, the TWC stopped providing lists of job titles affected (citing issues related to worker privacy) as they did so for many years, making it impossible to know what positions will be affected.

What is known is that 518 layoffs will occur by the end of August. The Texas Board of Criminal Justice on June 30 announced that Utah-based Management & Training Corporation (MTC) would be awarded operation and management of the Lindsey State Jail in Jacksboro, Texas, (Jack County) and Bradshaw State Jails in Henderson, Texas, (Rusk County), agency spokesman Robert Hurst wrote to Patch in an email responding to queries.

Moreover, LaSalle Corrections was awarded the contract o provide the operation and management of the Willacy County State Jail, Hurst added. LaSalle Corrections is Louisiana-based with a Southwest Texas headquarters in Dripping Springs, Texas.

"The contracts are each a two-year contract base with three, two-year renewal option periods," Hurst added. "The previous vendor for Bradshaw State Jail, Lindsey State Jail and Willacy County State Jail was CoreCivic. Contracts are awarded though a competitive bidding process."

The spokesman didn't address the reasons why CoreCivic failed to secure a contract extension to run the three jails. But an official with CoreCivic attested to this failure in the correspondence to WARN: "This letter will constitute notice, pursuant to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, that despite our best efforts, CoreCivic's contract with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is ending...." each of three letters per region begin.

The planned layoffs are set to occur at three locations:

• In Jack County located in North Texas, where 169 workers will be laid off.
• In Willacy County located in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where 157 jobs will be cut.
• In Rusk County located in East Texas, another 192 workers will be without work by Aug. 31.

Elsewhere in the country, CoreCivic has run into problems with contracts as well. The Nashville Scene reported last month that CoreCivic is the target of a pair of class action federal lawsuits after a massive scabies outbreak at prisons it managed.

“[CoreCivic] deliberately failed to adequately screen those entering its facility, respond to inmate requests for medical attention, treat those infested with the parasite, quarantine the infected individuals in its care, or to take any other precautions to prevent the spread of scabies outside the facility,” the lawsuit reads, as reported by Nashville Scene. “This caused a foreseeable and preventable systematic outbreak which spread to the Plaintiff and all others similarly situated.”

Closer to home, the company—under its former Corrections Corporation of America iteration—was the subject of frequent protests centered on conditions at a detention facility in Dilley, Texas (located 150 miles south of Austin) used by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to house undocumented women and children. Critics have called the detention center tantamount to a jail, despite its sanitized South Texas Family Residential Center name.

The facility was hastily built in 2014 in an effort to deal with a sudden influx of Central American mothers and their children that summer. Lawsuits by immigrant advocates were filed that questioned the legality of the Obama administration's family detention policy.

The Dilley contract was lucrative for CCA, with Reuters reporting that the company was paid $296 per person per day to run the site holding up to 2,400 detainees, making it the nation's largest immigrant detention center. Unlike its contracts coming to an end in August with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the one with ICE to run the facility in Dilley is all but assured after the Department of Homeland Security recently extended the terms in a new contract.

>>> Image via Shutterstock