Mississippi Legislator Blasts VitalCore, DOC for Shoddy Prison Healthcare
by Chuck Sharman
“We’re spending millions on prison health care,” Mississippi House Corrections Committee Chairwoman Becky Currie (R-Brookhaven) told Mississippi Today, “and we’re not getting any.”
That charge was made on the news outlet’s political podcast, The Other Side, on November 3, 2025, when Currie pointed the finger at the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and its contracted medical provider, VitalCore Health Strategies. As PLN reported, DOC Commissioner Burl Cain used emergency no-bid contracts four years in a row to award the business to the firm before it finally won a competitive bidding process in 2024. [See: PLN, June 2025, p.14.] But when asked if the process was truly competitive, Currie said: “Not in my view.” Since then the firm has “never had enough nurses” to meet its obligations to a contractual “standard that is so sub-par.”
The lawmaker toured state prisons herself in 2023, after realizing that “I was not going to find anything out … from Vital Core or [DOC],” she said. What she saw was shocking. “Most” of the health problems that prisoners presented “were huge.” Currie recalled one 23-year-old prisoner who lifted up her shirt and had “cancer growing out of her breast.” When the lawmaker asked VitalCore Chief Medical Officer Dr. Raman Singh how this was allowed to happen, he replied sunnily that “she’s going to get her first chemo this week.” Currie, a nurse herself, said that the prisoner was “not going to make it.”
One of the biggest problems she found was untreated diabetes. But as Currie discovered, VitalCore was paid its $124 million last year in prepaid monthly installments—so “if they don’t see any [prisoners], they get to keep the money,” she noted. Once admitted to a hospital, moreover, a prisoner’s treatment bill is also often refused by VitalCore, with hospitals complaining to Currie of unpaid bills totaling millions.
Hepatitis-C is also rampant, infecting over 5,000 of the state’s 27,000 prisoners, she learned. The numbers put in sharp relief the 50 prisoners that DOC and VitalCore officials bragged about treating. Currie said one six-foot-tall prisoner she met was so wasted by the disease that it “looked like he weighed about 118 pounds.” She was able to intervene and get him direct-acting anti-viral (DAA) treatment, and he has now recovered.
Part of the problem traces to shoddy practices. “[Medical] charting is not done well,” Currie found, also suggesting that this may not be accidental; “if you don’t write it down, you’re not responsible for it,” she said. But a bigger problem is that the contractor has “zero oversight.” An antiquated system relies on prisoners to submit handwritten medical “kites,” rather than sending an electronic message from the kiosk where other messages are sent and received. That allows the DOC and VitalCore a lot of plausible deniability, Currie said; when a prisoner complains, staff can shrug it off as the result of a lost kite.
And though DAA medication is expensive, Currie also couldn’t understand why the state wasn’t taking advantage of federal programs that pay for it in other lockups—including the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where Cain was warden before moving to Mississippi.
As a result, Currie said that “[w]e’re spending millions of dollars on healthcare—last year we spent $124 million … and we’re not getting any.” To those who might object to paying more for prisoner healthcare, Currie offered a reminder: “We’ve got to give them the care that the taxpayers have already paid for.”
“So Much Corruption” Needs
“A Complete Overhaul”
“I can’t even believe this has gone on,” the exasperated lawmaker continued, calling for a “complete overhaul” of the DOC’s healthcare system because there is “so much corruption.” She pointed, for example, to a provision in VitalCore’s contract obligating it to maintain four ambulances staffed with paramedics and stationed at prisons around the state. Yet VitalCore has just one ambulance, and it’s kept at the firm’s office in downtown Jackson. That means every trip that a prisoner makes to a hospital emergency room has to happen by medivac helicopter, costing taxpayers around $40,000 each.
“Now that I’ve looked,” Currie said she wonders “why isn’t anybody helping me?” She also wondered why Cain brought VitalCore with him from Louisiana, “saying they were the best.” But Currie said, “I’ve yet to figure what are they best at—making money and not taking care of inmates? [Be]cause that’s what I see.”
The lawmaker’s ire did not spare the DOC. “If you went into to [the prisons] to really see how drug and alcohol treatment works … or GED [programs],” she said, “it’s all smoke & mirrors.” When they get sick, prisoners paid nothing for their labor must pony up a $6 co-pay to see a medical provider—$10 if a prescription is involved. Yet when Currie asked Deputy Commissioner of Administration and Finance Derrick Garner where the money went, he blithely waved her away.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I don’t even count it.”
Into this “upside down world” where “nobody cares,” Currie brought legislation to the state House floor in 2025. But the bill was too big to pass, she said. She plans to reintroduce its provisions in separate bills next session. Among them: moving prisoner medical kites to the electronic kiosks and signing up the state for federal funding to provide DAA treatment to prisoners with Hep-C.
For all the roadblocks she’s run into, Currie says she’s haunted by a stack of prisoner lawsuits “as high as the capitol [building].” Each represents a sick prisoner who didn’t get help that the state paid for. Each also carries a separate legal tab that will ultimately be picked up by the state’s beleaguered taxpayers. In closing the podcast, Currie took pains not to single out Commissioner Cain, but said—for anyone in his position—she wondered:
“Why would you allow this to continue?”
Source: Mississippi Today
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