Former Jail Medical Provider Still Troubling County

Milwaukee County Jail and Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

The Milwaukee County Jail’s former correctional healthcare provider continues to make grief for the county.

Armor Correctional Health Services is a private company that provides healthcare services for jails and prisons around the country. Between 2013 and 2019 it was the contracted healthcare provider at the Milwaukee jail and when its business with the county finally ended, it left behind an ugly track record that included criminal convictions of Armor employees and numerous lawsuits.

The headaches caused by the company continue. Litigation over the private company’s conduct as a contractor in the county jail continues. And recently, according to the Milwaukee County Office of Corporation Counsel, Armor has, in at least one case where it was sued alongside the county, simply stopped defending itself.

“So it’s really important that we stay on top of this,” County Corporation Counsel Margaret Daun told the county board Committee on Finance. “Are they not paying their lawyers — like what’s going on here?”

Armor was, in a sense, foisted upon the county in 2013. But the groundwork for its entry into the jail was laid in the 1990s.

In 1996, an inmate at the jail sued the county over constitutional violations and inhumane conditions at the facility. This lawsuit led to a court-ordered consent decree, called the Christensen Consent Decree, that has led to monitoring by the courts of healthcare and population at the jail; monitoring that continues to this day. In 2012, the Milwaukee County Sheriff‘s Office, under then-sheriff David Clarke, reported that it was having trouble maintaining staffing levels in its Medical and Mental Health Unit and sought to outsource this care to a private company: Armor. The board resisted, but in 2013 Judge William W. Brash III ordered the county to contract with Armor in order to meet the requirements set forth by the Chistensen decree.

Over the next seven years, Armor would be involved in a number of incidents at the jail that led to lawsuits. In 2016, a jail inmate Terrill Thomas died of dehydration after the water to his cell was shut off. An investigation later revealed that Armor staff falsified records that said they performed medical checks on Thomas.

In 2017, Jennifer Jawson sued Armor and the county over the stillborn birth of her child, claiming the stillbirth was due to inadequate medical care by Armor. The county has since been found by a court to not be liable and has been dismissed as a defendant in the case, Daun recently told supervisors, but the case is still moving forward with Armor employees as the main defendants. Still, attorneys for Jawson have argued that “should Armor be unable to pay or to defend itself in the Jawson matter… Milwaukee County should become liable and responsible for Armor’s misdeeds, negligence or fault,” Daun said.

The court has rejected this argument in the Jawson case, which “was a very critical decision that just happened a couple of weeks ago,” Daun said. Especially in light of something that Armor is doing in another case where the county is also a defendant. “Armor has gone through three or four different sets of lawyers within the last calendar year and had no representation in this case,” Daun said.

The case is a lawsuit brought on behalf of Omar Wesley for failure to provide adequate medical care and medicine. “And because they are a corporate defendant, in that case, a default judgment was entered against Armor in the Wesley case,” Daun said.

In light of this, Daun said her office and the county’s insurance agency, Wisconsin County Mutual Insurance Corporation, are “carefully monitoring how Armor is managing its litigation across the country.”

“We have been in communication with Armor; we have put them on notice that their failure to defend in the Wesley case, we believe, was a breach of their contract to us.”