Mississippi DOC Issues Almost $300 Million in No-Bid Contracts to VitalCore Health
When government agencies—including corrections departments—enter contracts with private companies, they typically go through a competitive bidding process, beginning with a Request for Proposals (RFP). This ensures that taxpayers have access to information used to award government contracts, providing a level of fiscal responsibility. However, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (DOC), under the leadership of Burl Cain, has entered into four no-bid emergency contracts since 2020 worth nearly $300 million—all with the same healthcare contractor, VitalCore Health Strategies.
In July 2020, after the DOC’s former contractor, Centurion Health, opted to terminate its contract to provide healthcare services to the state’s prison population, Cain declared an emergency under the Public Procurement Review Board’s rules and regulations. That then allowed him to sign a no-bid, $56 million contract with VitalCore on August 12, 2020.
By the time that contract expired in October 2021, it might be assumed that the emergency had ended and the competitive bidding process would resume. It didn’t. Another one-year emergency contract was issued to VitalCore, again bypassing the competitive bidding process. That contract was valued at $66 million, based on its per diem rate of $8.90 for each of the DOC’s 20,300 prisoners.
When that contract ended in 2022, prison officials cited “complexity of the services” provided by VitalCore when announcing that the DOC would enter into a third emergency agreement with the firm. The per diem rate under the one-year agreement increased to $14.56 per prisoner, for a total of $94 million. The DOC explained that “the additional year will ensure ample time is available to review and evaluate all [competitive bidding] proposals, finalize and award a contract.”
That was overly optimistic, apparently. No RFP was issued when the third contract with VitalCore expired in October 2023, and Cain awarded the company another one-year emergency contract valued at $100 million. As of September 2024, the state had paid the firm $82 million under that agreement. In total, VitalCore received $298 million under all the no-bid contracts.
An RFP was finally issued in December 2023; VitalCore scored higher than two other bidders, Wexford Health and Centurion Health, and was awarded the DOC’s healthcare services contract for a fifth year—the first time through a competitive bidding process.
Before Gov. Tate Reeves (R) recruited him to work as Director of the DOC in 2020, Cain had retired from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC), where he was Warden of the notoriously harsh Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. An Assistant Warden there, Cathy Fontenot, left DPSC about the time that Cain did, working then as an unspecified “consultant” until 2024, according to her LinkedIn profile. A Jackson politics blog, Jackson Jambalaya, reported that she became a VitalCore director during this period. Fontenot has since returned to Louisiana and the Office of East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux, III.
PLN readers may recall that former DOC Director Christopher Epps was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2017 for accepting bribes in exchange for no-bid contracts awarded to private vendors. [See: PLN, Oct. 2017, p.16.]
Source: Jackson Jambalaya
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