By Karla Ward
The Kentucky Department of Corrections has removed 46 women who are under its care from a Richmond treatment center for substance use disorder after a litany of complaints about the facility.
The women were being housed at the 108-bed Liberty Place Recovery Center for Women in Madison County, one of 13 privately owned “halfway houses” with which the state contracts through its “Reentry Service Center.”
The facilities are typically used as transitional houses for inmates, parolees and probationers to “integrate into society after their incarceration,” and residency at one is sometimes required as part of a prison sentence. The women at Liberty Place were there for treatment of substance use disorders.
According to records obtained through the Kentucky Open Records Act, complaints sent in the past year to the Kentucky Department of Corrections, which oversees Liberty Place’s compliance with state standards, include allegations that at Liberty Place:
▪ Women were being served expired food, despite the facility having access to clients’ food stamp benefits.
▪ Women weren’t allowed to contact their probation and parole officers.
▪ Staff were not following doctors’ orders for patient care.
▪ Staff was withholding mail.
▪ Women didn’t have access to hygiene items.
▪ Some clients were denied contact with their children.
On Jan. 31, the sister of one Liberty Place resident reported to a corrections employee that a woman had been “strapped to a wooden chair for eight hours for smiling too much and being ‘too happy,’” according to records obtained through the Kentucky Open Records Act.
“She was not permitted to put her elbows on a table and could not lower her head,” the complaint reads.
The resident’s sister also told the corrections employee a woman had been “excitedly talking about seeing her children, and because she had talked about seeing them, her visits were taken away from her,” the same Jan. 31 corrections department email shows.
And she said women were required to say aloud what they didn’t like about each other.
In February, at least nine months after probation and parole officers began reporting to others in the Department of Corrections that they were receiving complaints from Liberty Place residents, the department moved women in its care out of the facility.
Morgan Hall, communications director for the Kentucky Justice & Public Safety Cabinet, said in a Feb. 21 statement the corrections department had relocated “all state offenders previously at Liberty Place to a different location” because of “allegations of mistreatment and an ongoing investigation.”
Hall did not respond to questions about exactly when the 46 women were moved, saying only that they “were moved shortly after the allegations were reported to the Department of Corrections.”
Hall also would not say where the women were taken, confirming only that “the location meets the required treatment plan and custody level.”
And while most of the women at Liberty Place were placed there by the state, some were not, said David Estepp, executive director of Kentucky River Foothills Development Council, which owns the Richmond facility and operates it in partnership with the Mountain Comprehensive Care Center.
Those women were free to stay after the corrections department removed the women it had placed there. It was unclear how many women remained as of early May.
Facility is ‘still up and running’
Estepp said in an interview that Liberty Place is “still up and running and functioning as normal” while negotiating with the state about future corrections placements.
“We’re just trying to work through what their expectations are ... and how it aligns with the existing parameters” under which the facility operates, he said.
Estepp said he could not comment on any of the complaints made by residents.
“We’re working on what the Department of Corrections is asking us to revise in our policies (and) procedures for future contract consideration.”
Meanwhile, as Liberty Place negotiates with the state, it continues to receive payments because its contract is still in place.
Through March 6, Mountain Comprehensive Care Center had received $121,828, or an average of around $40,000 a month, for its contract with Liberty Place, according to information obtained through the Open Records Act.
“As passed by lawmakers, the Department of Corrections is required to pay each contracted provider of substance abuse, mental health and reentry centers a minimum of 65% of the contracted beds monthly, whether the beds are occupied or not,” Hall said in a statement.
Hall referred further questions to Liberty Place.
Women ‘practice sober living’
Liberty Place Recovery Center for Women uses “a unique recovery program model that includes peer support, daily living skills training, and job responsibilities to practice sober living,” according to its website.
It serves women in the state’s 6th Congressional District, including Fayette, Madison, Mercer, Bourbon and Fleming counties, as part of the Recovery Kentucky initiative.
The facility says it provides “housing, food, clothing, personal care items, and recovery educational materials” to clients for free.
The Richmond center, on Lake Street, says it has a dormitory where clients take classes, complete homework assignments and work on a 12-step recovery program. It also has on-site apartments where residents pay fees based on their income and continue to work on their recovery.
During their first phase of treatment, Liberty Place says residents “begin working on assignments in various areas, such as gardening, maintenance, housekeeping, and kitchen duties,” rotating their jobs every four weeks. They participate in community meetings and may earn overnight and weekend pass privileges.
Later, residents may begin looking for work and start developing a plan to live independently while continuing to attend self-help meetings.
The facility says it “is the result of a joint effort by the Kentucky Housing Corporation, the Kentucky Department for Local Government, the Department of Corrections, and the FHLBank of Cincinnati,” according to its website.
More complaints against Liberty Place
According to records obtained through the Kentucky Open Records Act, residents began raising concerns with their respective parole officers about the facility as early as May 2024.
At least seven separate residents are mentioned by their initials in the complaints.
In one instance, on Dec. 10, 2024, Keri Hurtt, an officer with probation and parole, sent an email to the Department of Corrections’ Contract Facility Branch manager and a manager in the Division of Addiction Services, saying she had just gotten off the phone with the family of a woman at Liberty Place who had an appointment to see a specialist in Frankfort to determine if the woman needed to have an eye removed.
However, staff at Liberty Place had reportedly told the woman she couldn’t attend the appointment, even though her family was willing to provide transportation, “as it was not local,” Hurtt wrote.
The resident had also been told “that she could not have the surgery if recommended, because she would be given controlled medication afterward,” Hurtt wrote.
“As always, I have no idea if this is true .... but if it is, it is definitely a major concern,” Hurtt wrote.
In a letter dated Jan. 21, a woman in the facility complained that another resident sexually threatened her, and she “became very nervous and lost many hours of sleep out of fear” because the other resident was sleeping in a room across the hall.
In another instance, in December 2024, a resident said she felt the facility was discriminating against her because she was gay. She said she had been made to sign papers under the Prison Rape Elimination Act “as a preventative measure” because other residents said she and another woman “were getting too close.”
One resident wrote in a letter dated May 1, 2024, that she had been required to work nearly 16 hours per day in the kitchen with few breaks. On other occasions, while working as a house monitor, she said she had suffered from sleep deprivation because the schedule permitted her only 1 to 1 1/2 hours of sleep during a 24- to 26-hour period.
The woman said she had had two previous back surgeries and was in pain, but staff ignored notes from her doctor regarding her duties.
Ultimately, she wrote that she was discharged from the program because a staff member gave her the choice of sleeping on the top bunk of a bunk bed or on the floor, and she refused to climb onto the top bunk.
