The incident at the center of a lawsuit filed on behalf of former Colorado inmate Paul Knuth, who had much of one leg amputated in 2025 after an alleged disturbingly substandard medical treatment, are far from unique.
Indeed, tales of the incarcerated dying or becoming permanently disfigured from conditions that would have been easily treatable had they been addressed in a timely manner are all too common in an era when many jails and prisons hand over the responsibility of caring for such individuals to private corporations that are allegedly more concerned about the bottom line than human dignity.
But Knuth’s suit against CoreCivic, a giant prison healthcare firm based in Texas, two CoreCivic employees, and the board of commissioners in Bent County — home of the Bent County Correctional Facility (BCCF) in Las Animas, where Knuth’s health crisis occurred — contains a highly unusual assertion. His attorneys at Denver law firm Holland, Holland Edwards & Grossman, LLC maintain that Bent County has a financial motivation to engage in lax oversight of CoreCivic due to language embedded in their shared contract…