Murder Incorporated: Profits from Privatized Prison Health Care

Gregory Jennings, Jacqueline Reich, Lorenzo Ingram, Sr., Henry Simmons, Calvin Moore, Billy Roberts and Kathy S. Kearns didn't know each other in life, but they shared a common bond in death: All died in U.S. prisons, the victims not of the death penalty, or at the hands of fellow inmates or guards, but in the allegedly negligent care of a single provider of privatized health services.

Correctional Medical Services (CMS) is a St. Louis, Missouri-based for-profit corporation that contracts to provide health care services to over 270,000 inmates at more than 330 prison sites in 29 states. At its Web site, the company claims to be "the nation's leading provider of contract healthcare services to prisons and jails." It also says it "designs a wide range of correctional healthcare programs and services to meet individual client needs."

CMS offers additional services including "24-hour physician and nursing coverage, specialty physician services, sick call and infirmary care, dental care, chronic care, and laboratory/radiology services. " It also performs administrative services as well, including "utilization management, medical affairs management, inmate health education, and infectious disease protocols for AIDS and tuberculosis."

It's difficult to get a sense of the company's current activities from their site since it contains only one press release for 2001 -- an announcement of a contract with the Tennessee Department of Corrections to provide health care service to more than 17,000 inmates at 14 state-run facilities. There are two press releases for 2000 and three for 1999.

However, a 1998 in-depth investigative report done by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, its hometown newspaper, shed light on the downside of prison care privatization. The Post-Dispatch's investigative team spent five months "visiting prisons and jails; gathering hundreds of police, court and medical records and other documents; and interviewing doctors, nurses, inmates, lawyers, scholars, prison and health experts and families of inmates who died behind bars."

Published in September 1998, "Death, Neglect and the Bottom Line: Push to Cut Costs Poses Risks," found that while CMS successfully reduced the cost of health care to several states, there were "more than 20 cases in which inmates allegedly died as a result of negligence, indifference, understaffing, inadequate training or overzealous cost-cutting."

While the St. Louis Post-Dispatch report is an excellent starting point for looking into CMS's operations, several recent updates indicate that the company hasn't done much to clean up its act. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Media Awareness Project and the Twin Cities Independent Media Center have all reported on CMS' sorry record.

At the ACLU web site, the civil liberties organization posts a late-January 2001 letter it sent to the Connecticut Department of Correction (CDOC) that claims CMS's health care services -- medical, mental health and dental care -- at the Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, is woefully "inadequate." The letter charges the Virginia Department of Corrections with conditions that "violate the Constitution," and maintains that Connecticut prisoners currently at Wallens Ridge are subject to a number of "unconstitutional" situations. (The ACLU was trying to prevent Connecticut from sending any more of its prisoners to Virginia.)

The ACLU writes: "The health care provided by Correctional Medical Services, the contract provider at [Wallens Ridge], was considered so grossly inadequate that [Virginia Department of Corrections] recently fined CMS nearly one million dollars. The Virginia State Auditor specifically found that CMS did not provide a dentist at [Wallens Ridge] for over three months, and never provided an optometrist. Medical privacy and confidentiality is non-existent at [Wallens Ridge]; as a matter of policy, prisoners are required to discuss their most private medical and mental health issues in the presence of security staff and other prisoners."