A Private Prison Company Gave 1,300 Recordings of Confidential Inmate Phone Calls to Prosecutors

Kansas’ US Attorney’s Office has admitted listening to opposing lawyers’ conversations.

Thinkstock/ Getty Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

More than 1300 private conversations between a private prison’s inmates and their lawyers were recorded according to information in a new lawsuit against CoreCivic, the private company running the facility, and its technology provider Securus Technologies. Numerous charges and convictions against the inmates could ultimately be overturned if a judge finds prosecutors violated attorney-client privilege by listening to the recordings.

The court filings describing the newly disclosed recordings follow another civil lawsuit and a long-running federal investigation into actions by the Kansas US Attorney’s Office that authorized the recordings. The civil suits seek at least $10 million in damages and demand the company cease recording confidential conversations.

The possibility of recording at the CoreCivic (formerly known as the Correction Corporations of America) pre-trial detention facility in Leavenworth first emerged in 2016 when footage of an attorney client meeting, subpoenaed by a grand jury in a prison drug smuggling case, came to light. Outcry from criminal attorneys that the recordings violated inmates’ 6th amendment rights prompted Kansas federal district court Judge Julie Robinson to order all detention facilities in Kansas and Missouri, including those run by CoreCivic, to cease recording any privileged conversations. 

A special independent master, David R. Cohen, was appointed to investigate the matter at Leavenworth, finding just 200 recorded calls. The disclosure of 1100 further calls made between 2011 and 2013 is explained by Cohen having only examined calls connected with the initial case. The revelation comes only a month after the Kansas US Attorney’s Office, which had been withholding information from Cohen’s investigation, announced it was ready to reach an agreement to begin cooperating with Cohen and the Federal Public Defenders Office, whose clients were recorded. While prosecutors have admitted to listening to the recordings in the smuggling case, it’s unclear the extent to which they may have done so in other cases.

This isn’t the first time the Leavenworth facility has attracted negative attention. Mother Jones covered a 2017 Justice Department audit that identified “poor oversight” and “severe understaffing.” And Securus, the company responsible for recording the calls, has previously faced legal action for illegally recording communications between lawyers and detainees. In 2016 The Intercept reported that the company had settled with the Austin Lawyers Guild, the Prison Justice League, and several individual defense attorneys over a suit alleging Securus recorded privileged communications with their clients. A 2015 hack of 70 million recorded calls between December 2011 and spring 2014 contained at least 57,000 privileged calls.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate