A For-Profit Jail On Texarkana Border Sued Over Yet Another Death
A deadly for-profit jail that sits on the border of Texas and Arkansas is facing yet another federal lawsuit after the “senseless” death of an inmate whose family called her “just the latest victim of a greedy corporate culture that sees inmates as dollar signs and puts profits over people’s lives.”
Holly Barlow-Austin died last June after her stay at the Bi-State Justice Center Jail, a facility that is run by LaSalle Corrections. A lawsuit filed Wednesday by her husband and mother says that the company has been “neglecting and abusing inmates, disregarding their fundamental constitutional rights, and engaging in other cruel and inhumane acts and practices.” LaSalle, the lawsuit says, “refuses to fix the systemic constitutional deficiencies” that keep causing deaths.
“So long as the corporation continues to profit, nothing changes,” the lawsuit states. “This case goes the very heart of everything that’s wrong with the privatization of America’s county jails.”
One of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit, Erik Heipt, previously represented the family of 35-year-old Michael Sabbie, who died at the Bi-State jail in 2015 after telling guards “I can’t breathe” at least 19 times before being tossed into the cell where he’d die. The circumstances of Sabbie’s death were first reported as part of HuffPost’s jail deaths project, which sought to track jail deaths in America in the year following the death of Sandra Bland.
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/lasalle-corrections-bistate-jail-holly-barlow-austin-195805381.html
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