A committee chairmanship in the Mississippi Legislature is considered a reward, a way for those in leadership to show their appreciation to an ally, recognize a certain expertise or acknowledge longtime service.
The chairmanship, though, of either of the committees that oversee the state’s corrections system is not much of a reward. It is a headache-filled responsibility that deals with so many problems and so much seemingly insolvable dysfunction. It can be tempting for the overseers to not rock the boat by questioning the corrections commissioner or others in the administration who are responsible for how well or how poorly the prisons are operating.
Becky Currie, the Republican chairwoman of the House Corrections Committee for the past two years, is not one of those go-along-to-get-along legislators, though.
She has been recently sounding the alarm about what she says is inadequate care provided to prison inmates by the private firm that is being paid more than a hundred million dollars a year for its services.
Currie, a registered nurse, has toured the prisons, talked to and observed the condition of sick inmates, and received correspondence from them. She said she has found widespread suffering that would be mitigated if only the inmates had been provided with timely and appropriate medical care. In a report this week, a former corrections official confirmed to Mississippi Today that she witnessed the kind of medical neglect of which Currie is complaining and shared text messages in which a higher-up official acknowledges the same.
The company that provides the care, VitalCore Health Strategies, denies any neglect on its part. It attributes any avoidable deterioration in the health of the inmates on their noncompliance with their medical provider’s instructions. Currie suspects, however, the real explanation can be found in the company’s profit motive. The less VitalCore spends on providing care, the more of the state’s money it gets to keep. And it knows that those behind bars don’t have much leverage — it’s not as if they can change medical providers — nor do they have many advocates in a state known for dealing harshly with those who break the law.
It's not really Currie’s job but rather Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain’s to hold VitalCore responsible for living up to its contract. Currie is questioning how committed Cain is to policing the company’s performance. She said, for example, that after she complained to Cain about what she saw during her prison visits, she was told in April that the Department of Corrections was withholding $2 million from the company because of inadequate medical staffing. A month later, however, as lawmakers were rushing through budget legislation during a two-day special session, included in the hundreds of pages of documents was a $4 million deficit appropriation for the prison medical program run by VitalCore, seemingly reversing the prior financial penalty against the company and then some.
There aren’t many saints behind bars. Still, the inmates should be treated humanely while they are there, and the punishment they receive should not exceed the severity of their crime. To let a medical condition go untreated is costly to the taxpayers, producing more expensive complications down the road. It can also be unjustly cruel. Currie cites the example of an inmate she met whose liver disease went untreated until it was out of control. What was supposed to be a five-year sentence is now a death sentence. Currie was pushing for legislation this year that would have directed the state Department of Health to conduct a comprehensive review of medical care in the prisons. Gov. Tate Reeves, however, wanted that review to be conducted by a private firm, according to Currie, and he got his way during the special session. The report is due in mid-December. Currie is skeptical it will be thorough enough. Even if it is, it could have been done for less money using state employees rather than an outside contractor.
