were convicted in this case and prosecutions were continuing in 2017. In February 2017 the Mississippi Attorney General announced civil suits seeking damages and punitive damages from 15 contractors and several individuals who had contracts during this period awarded under Epps and associated with prison operations. As of early 2017, the state has contracts for only three privately run prisons. History The East Mississippi Correctional Facility Authority authorized the facility. East Mississippi is the state's main "special needs" facility, housing up to 1500 prisoners with serious mental health issues. Located on 160 acres, the prison opened in April 1999; it was intended to provide intensive treatment of prisoners with severe mental illness. It has been operated since the beginning by for-profit prison management companies: Cornell Companies was the first; it was acquired by GEO Group in 2010, which took over its contracts with the state and county authorities. Prison advocacy groups have tracked conditions here. In 2010 MDOC and the American Civil Liberties Union agreed to a deal to transfer mentally ill prisoners from Unit 32 of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman to EMCF in an effort to improve conditions for them, as well as for other prisoners who remained in the unit. In an effort to improve conditions at EMFC, that year MDOC removed GEO Group, the second-largest prison management corporation in the country, as contractor to operate this facility. It replaced the firm by awarding a contract to Management and Training Corporation (MTC) of Utah, the third-largest prison management company in the country. It also had a contract to operate Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility and two other state facilities. Class action suit, 2013 Civil rights advocates claimed that conditions at the EMCF did not sufficiently improve under MTC management. In May 2013 the ACLU and the SPLC filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the prisoners at EMCF; it stated "prisoners live in barbaric and horrific conditions and their basic human rights are violated daily." The ACLU said that prisoners do not receive even a basic level of mental health care; many are confined to solitary confinement, which aggravates their problems. The facility is dirty, understaffed, hyper-violent, and poorly supplied. Allegations included: rampant rapes. Placing prisoners in solitary confinement for weeks, months or even years at a time, where the only way to get a guard's attention in an emergency is to set