Mississippi is on track to increase spending on prisons for the coming fiscal year, a spike attributed to its medical care contract and rising payments to private prisons, according to a top budget writer for corrections in the state Legislature.
Lawmakers are considering spending over $480 million on the Mississippi Department of Corrections over the next fiscal year, said House Corrections Chairwoman Becky Currie, who presented the agency’s budget bill on Thursday. That’s an increase of roughly $12 million from this year. The largest single chunk of the budget goes to a prison medical contract currently held by Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies.
“This bill is higher because we are paying VitalCore more money this year,” Currie said. “By contract, it goes up from $124 million to $128 million, and next year it will be $133 million.”
Lawmakers spent much of the past week working on appropriations bills that will make up the over $7 billion state budget. The House and Senate will try to negotiate agreements on spending for each state agency in the final few weeks of the legislative session.
Currie has been a sharp critic of VitalCore, which was awarded over $315 million in emergency, no-bid state contracts by the Department of Corrections from 2020 to 2024. The company has since faced legal challenges and allegations that it routinely denies or provides inadequate care inside Mississippi’s prisons, some of which have come to light through Mississippi Today’s “Behind Bars, Beyond Care” investigation into prison health care.
Currie said she wants to make it possible for other entities to compete for Mississippi’s prison health contract 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.
“When this all goes forward, we will hopefully have a new commissioner and a new governor, new people, so hopefully we’ll be able to get these changes,” Currie said.
Currie successfully offered an amendment to the corrections budget bill on the House floor on Thursday to condition the department’s spending on the department’s solicitation of proposals for a new prison health contract in 2027.
As a condition of the department’s ability to spend any money from its central office, which includes the salaries of agency employees, the department would need to conduct a “request for proposals” that could allow other entities to compete with VitalCore for the contract. That could include other private health consultants, like VitalCore, or in-state hospitals. VitalCore could also submit a new proposal and renegotiate its contract under the proposal.
Currie had hoped to take the power to award health contracts away from MDOC and task the Department of Finance and Administration with the job, but legislative attorneys cautioned that such an approach might not pass muster, she said.
Other increases to corrections spending stem from a contractually-mandated rise in payments to private prisons of over $2 million, and $443,000 in unpaid utilities to the city of Walnut Grove for its operation of the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility.
Currie is also aiming to condition corrections funding on a requirement that the agency provide a report on spending connected to 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. The disparate info in the bank statements raises questions about whether the money has been spent on prisoners, she has said.
The budget proposal now goes back to the Senate for consideration.
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