Lawmaker probing Mississippi’s prisons finds inmates suffering from treatable diseases as corrections asks for more money ...Middle East

As the punishing Mississippi sun baked the grounds of one of America’s most notorious prisons, a wheelchair-bound man was so jaundiced he appeared to glow in the dark. 

The 6-foot-2 man had dropped to 115 pounds and sat drenched in sweat between bouts of vomiting at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. He sat before Rep. Becky Currie, chairwoman of the state House Corrections Committee, at the facility in the Delta known for its long history of deaths and violent disturbances.

Currie, a registered nurse, could tell the man had liver disease. She asked that the man’s name be concealed to protect him from retribution from prison officials. Currie said the inmate told her he contracted liver disease from untreated Hepatitis C. The contagious virus can be treated with antiviral medication that, if administered properly, is highly effective, curing more than 95% of patients. 

The man said he had been asking for medication for years, to no avail. Another man Currie met in prison with Hepatitis C had blood ammonia levels so high that he was hallucinating and had been told he had three months left to live. 

“He didn’t have but a five-year sentence,” Currie said. “Now he’s got a death sentence.”

Currie voiced her dismay to Burl Cain, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. 

Currie’s committee has legislative oversight of Mississippi’s corrections system, and Cain became aware of her increasing skepticism of the department’s ability to police the provision of health care in its facilities. 

So he told Currie in April that MDOC had withheld $2 million in state funding from the private company providing prison health care for having inadequate staff. 

But when lawmakers returned to Jackson in late May for a special session to set a state budget, MDOC requested an additional $4 million in a “deficit appropriation” – money to cover a shortfall – for the medical program provided by that same company. 

Currie said the money appears to be a bailout for VitalCore Health Strategies, canceling out any financial consequence the company was supposed to face. She also said there is no explanation for why MDOC is running a deficit for its medical program as sick prisoners languish without proper medical care, turning some short prison stints into death sentences. 

“A month ago, Commissioner Burl Cain told me that he had fined VitalCore $2 million for a lack of health care workers to be able to provide health care to inmates,” Currie said. “Then, in their budget, VitalCore and MDOC asked for $4 million to shore up a health care deficit. What this means is VitalCore and MDOC are working together to manipulate their budget.”

In a statement, an MDOC spokesperson confirmed the agency withheld $2 million from VitalCore under its contract with the company for staffing issues, but it said the financial punishment wasn’t a “fine.” It also said the $4 million budget request was to cover increased costs of providing health care. 

“MDOC has not ‘fined’ VitalCore,” wrote Kate Head, a corrections department spokesperson. “Rather, MDOC has withheld approximately $2M in proceeds under the contract due to VitalCore’s failure to meet certain contractual staffing requirements.”  

In a separate statement, Timothy Keck, a company spokesperson, said VitalCore has not received additional funds beyond what is outlined in its contract and has made progress hiring more medical staff. The company disputed claims that it denied treatment and said it complies with all state policies.

MDOC did not respond to a follow-up question asking why the cost of providing care had increased, the same question Currie kept asking as she embarked on several tours inside Mississippi’s prisons. Once inside the grounds of these facilities, the lawmaker says she witnessed widespread suffering. The suffering is preventable, and raises questions about how hundreds of millions in taxpayer money have been spent, she said.

“I disagree with them that they are living up to standards of care,” Currie said. “I am also aware that what money they don’t spend on inmates, they keep.”

‘Trapped here with no help’

Currie said the first man she met at Parchman later received medication for Hepatitis C, but only after she inquired directly with Cain about the holdup. 

She said the episode further affirmed to her that untreated illness among prisoners was not happenstance but the result of deliberate decisions made by those tasked with caring for inmates. 

Allegations that Mississippi denies inmates treatment for Hepatitis C stretch back years. The denial of medication, either willful or the result of mismanagement, has caused Hepatitis C to go untreated inside Mississippi’s prisons, Currie said she found while touring jails. 

But that isn’t all she found. 

Currie met a 23-year-old woman with a lump growing out of her breast from untreated cancer. Other women were denied pap smears and mammograms. She met men with untreated HIV. Many more inmates were charged for care they never received.

Then Currie began receiving letters — pleas for help scribbled on notebook paper. Mississippi Today reviewed some of the letters and is protecting the identity of its authors, who shared sensitive details about their medical conditions.

Last fall, Currie met a 69-year-old woman incarcerated at the Mississippi Correctional Institute for Women in Rankin County. The woman said she was having trouble breathing, but couldn’t get prison officials to let her see a doctor. In a letter to Currie months later, the woman said she still hadn’t seen a doctor despite her lips turning purple and blue. She also suffers from gastrointestinal issues that have gone untreated.

“It has affected my eyes, mouth, throat and now my urethra,” she wrote. “I have yet to see a urologist either. I am submitting another sick call to the clinic this week. I don’t know what else to do.”

A 60-year-old woman at the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood said she had urinary incontinence, but was denied pads and wipes because facility medical staff, directed by VitalCore, demanded she have a pelvic exam first. She had the exam and was still denied supplies.

“It looks to me like they are setting the criteria too high because at the end of the day, I still have urinary incontinence and am left to fend for myself without means to fend,” the woman wrote. “This is cruel and I am not the only one affected. We are trapped here with no help.” 

The steady stream of letters, each new arrival sounding more desperate than the last, suggested to Currie that the conditions inside Mississippi’s prisons, already condemned by federal officials, were worse than she imagined. 

“When people are writing me letters begging me for treatment for health care needs it’s hard for me to just ignore it,” Currie said. “When they need a liver transplant from untreated Hep C or begging me for help with untreated HIV. When they beg me for supplies because they make them reuse colostomy bags over and over that don’t fit, when they are bowel and bladder incontinent and they don’t provide diapers to them it is hard for me to hear that (MDOC) feels that they provide adequate care.”

VitalCore told Mississippi Today it does not deny treatment and provides “comprehensive and competent health care services in accordance with prevailing standards of care.”

Kate Head, the corrections department spokesperson, said the care provided to inmates exceeds “constitutional standards,” and the department “denies any allegation” that inmates receive care below such standards. 

More money, more sickness

Currie was awarded chairmanship of the House Corrections Committee after the 2023 statewide election. She is a conservative Republican with no appetite for the decarceral aspirations of many prison-reform activists.  

With these conservative bona fides in mind, House leadership dispatched Currie to answer a question of government efficiency: Why were Mississippi’s inmates getting sicker even after the state continued increasing its spending on medical care for prisoners? Currie wanted to know why she had been receiving letters from inmates detailing an environment where sick prisoners got sicker even as the state spent more money to treat them.     

In the next fiscal year, Mississippi is set to spend over $121 million on prison medical services, a number that has been climbing for years. But there is little evidence that the money is being spent on providing quality care, Currie said. 

“In my investigations, very little health care is given. We have Hep C and HIV patients dying from no care. We have diabetics who have no possible way of treating their diabetes. High blood pressure inmates who end up on dialysis. Cancer patients are dying from lack of care. So it is obvious to me that this is a game they have played for some time.”

Untreated illness in facilities around the state prompted Currie to author a bill during the 2025 legislative session that would have directed the state Department of Health to conduct a sweeping review of the medical care for inmates at Mississippi prisons.

The legislation passed the House with a large bipartisan majority, but it didn’t survive negotiations with the Senate. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves wanted to hire an out-of-state firm to conduct the review instead of the Department of Health, Currie said.

Months later in the special legislative session for the state budget, the Legislature approved a $690,000 appropriation for MDOC to review its medical services, money that Currie said will go to a private firm. The report will be presented to legislative leaders by Dec. 15.

But Currie said a private out-of-state firm will not be able to infiltrate prisons and identify systemic issues the way a state entity such as the Department of Health could. Plus, it wouldn’t cost the state extra money.

“I am glad the governor is going to look into health care, but it will be a waste of taxpayers’ money not to find out the truth about health care, and the only way to do that is to talk to inmates,” Currie said. “Their problems will not be found in their medical chart.”

A spokesperson for Reeves did not respond to a request for comment. But in a late May press conference announcing the special session, Reeves said he inherited a corrections department that oversaw numerous deaths, and that the department made progress under his watch. He also joked that he would support moving the management of the troubled MDOC to the Lieutenant Governor’s or the House speaker’s office. 

“I made this offer publicly before. I make it privately regularly. I tell my friends in the Lieutenant Governor’s Office and the Speaker’s Office that if they have a problem with something going on at the Department of Corrections, that if they would like to sponsor a bill to move the management of corrections, I’d probably support it.”

Reeves appointed Cain to lead Mississippi’s corrections in 2020. A former warden of the notorious Angola State Prison in Louisiana, Cain’s controversial career has regularly garnered national headlines. He resigned his post in Louisiana in 2015 after allegations that he misused public funds, but he has denied wrongdoing and was later cleared in an investigation conducted by the state’s legislative auditor. 

Pulling the wool over lawmakers’ eyes

The apparent mismatch between increased government spending and stagnant or diminishing health outcomes among prisoners is hidden from public view, some experts say. 

Marcella Alsan and Crystal Yang, professors at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School, have studied health care delivery in jails. They said the scale of death and sickness inside Mississippi’s prisons may fly under the statistical radar.

“Our research documents significant underreporting of deaths in custody within official statistics,” Alsan and Yang told Mississippi Today. “The issues uncovered within Mississippi prisons reveal poor management and an absence of clear standards of care, much like the jails in our study.” 

Stronger accreditation standards for correctional facilities can help tackle the “inefficiency dilemma” within correctional institutions, the professors said. 

For Currie, the problem lies with a legislative process that has allowed MDOC and VitalCore to use more taxpayer dollars without accounting for how the money is spent. 

“In the rushed special session where we had a self-imposed time limit to vote on a budget, the Department of Corrections and VitalCore pulled the wool over legislators’ eyes,” Currie said. “They act like we are spending more on inmates’ health care and these stupid legislators won’t ask questions. We swap money between health care and MDOC to make sure they get to spend or waste taxpayers’ money, and the Legislature doesn’t ask for any information supporting why they need more money.”

Without improved care and transparency around spending, she warned, prisoners will continue to languish with untreated illnesses with life-altering or fatal consequences. 

Susan Balfour, 63, echoed that sentiment. Balfour was incarcerated for 33 years at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility until her release in December 2021. Balfour said she was among a group of prisoners asked to clean the facility without protective equipment.

She was later diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, a condition that would have been identified earlier had she been provided medical screenings and treatment, according to a lawsuit Balfour filed in federal court.

“They ignored my pleas for help and let my cancer grow untreated for 10 years until it was terminal and too late,” Balfour said. “I never knew when I’d be seen after filing a medical request, and was always at their mercy. It’s like Mississippi is co-signing on their inhumane practices that prioritize corporate profits over people’s lives. Who do these public officials work for? And why are profits protected more than people?”

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