A legislative push to improve health care in Mississippi prisons — which has attracted legal scrutiny and mounting allegations that prisoners are denied necessary treatment — is still alive in the Legislature even after some lawmakers appeared ready to scuttle the effort.
Rep. Becky Currie, the House Corrections chairwoman spearheading a package of reforms aimed at ensuring prisoners aren’t denied care, used a legislative maneuver to keep the measures alive after Senate leaders prepared to kill them on Tuesday. Hours before a deadline for committees to pass general bills from the other chamber, Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, changed the language in a Senate bill dealing with prisons and probation and inserted the language from her own proposals.
That move was prompted by Senate Corrections Committee Vice Chairwoman Lydia Chassaniol, a Republican from Winona, saying she planned to kill almost all of Currie’s bills without taking them up for a vote by Tuesday’s deadline. Chassaniol is running the committee while Chairman Juan Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, is out with an illness, and said she was honoring Barnett’s wishes by only bringing two bills forward.
“I just decided, what do we have to lose? They’ve killed the bills, we’ll force them to have to do it again,” Currie said. “I’m just continuing the fight.”
The legislative proposals follow Mississippi Today’s ongoing “Behind Bars, Beyond Care” investigative series, which has documented alleged routine denial of health care in Mississippi prisons. The findings include potentially thousands of people living with hepatitis C going without treatment, an untreated broken arm that resulted in amputation and delayed cancer screenings one woman said led to a terminal diagnosis. One ex-corrections official said people are experiencing widespread medical neglect in Mississippi’s prisons.
The proposals Currie kept alive on Tuesday include a bill to require the creation of a hepatitis C program and an HIV program aimed at improving the treatment of prisoners. A Mississippi Today report in October revealed that only a fraction of Mississippi prisoners diagnosed with hepatitis C receive treatment, which has allowed the treatable infection to develop into life-threatening illness. Additionally, the bill would require the state to develop a plan focused on improving the health of female prisoners.
Another bill Currie advanced would take the power to award health contracts away from the Department of Corrections and task the Department of Finance and Administration with soliciting proposals for a new medical contractor. The current medical contractor, Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies, was awarded over $315 million in emergency, no-bid state contracts by the Department of Corrections from 2020 to 2024. It has since faced legal challenges and allegations that it routinely denies or provides inadequate care inside Mississippi’s prisons.
Currie said she wants to make it possible for other entities to compete for Mississippi’s health contract proposals after Gov. Tate Reeves leaves office in 2027. Reeves appointed current Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain, under whose watch VitalCore has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.
“We don’t want them here anymore after this governor leaves,” Currie said. “I’m not saying who’s going to get (the contract), but what I am saying is we want everybody to be able to submit. The way the RFP was written before, it was only for VitalCore, so we just want to be fair.”
The proposals had passed the House with unanimous, bipartisan support before being thwarted in Senate committee.
Currie also revived a policy that would increase oversight of the Inmate Welfare Fund. Currie said she found seven bank accounts linked to the fund, but only obtained access to one. In that one account, she found about $32 million, but had trouble tracing much of it. Currie said the disparate info in the bank statements raises questions about whether the money has been spent on prisoners.
The House’s efforts this year come after Mississippi’s prisons have attracted federal scrutiny for poor conditions, at times leading to death and suffering. Mississippi has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world — 661 people per 100,000. About 19,500 people are currently incarcerated in state prisons.
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