By Michael Goldberg and Gwen Dilworth | Originally published by Mississippi Today
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From prisoners suffering amputations due to diabetes to a mother taking desperate measures to help her incarcerated son treat his debilitating pain, Mississippi lawmakers on Thursday heard stunning testimony in a more than three-hour hearing about inadequate healthcare in state prisons.
Lawmakers presiding over a joint meeting of the House and Senate Public Health and Corrections committees peppered the CEO of Mississippi’s prison medical contractor, Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies, with questions about allegations of systemic failure to stop preventable deaths and illness. Their questions stemmed from stories that have poured in from their constituents, journalists and legislative watchdog reports.
Lawmakers also condemned the absence of the Mississippi Department of Corrections at the hearing, despite having sent the agency a letter urging its officials to attend.
Lawmakers, led by House Corrections Chairwoman Becky Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, proposed several measures earlier this year to improve prison healthcare and create stronger safeguards against the denial of care, but most of the proposed reforms died.
The Thursday hearing centered on some of the problems the bills sought to correct as lawmakers expect to propose more reforms for the state’s troubled and expensive prison healthcare system next year.
Lawmakers on Thursday heard about:
Alarming delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment
Dr. Jacob Graham, an oncologist at South Central Regional Medical Center in Laurel, said he has been alarmed by the significant delays in diagnosis and treatment faced by his patients who are incarcerated in MDOC facilities.
One patient he described did not receive a prostate cancer diagnosis until the disease spread to his bones and caused permanent paralysis of his lower body due to compression of the spinal cord.
Another waited nearly a year to receive prostate cancer treatment after a blood test showed dangerously high levels of a protein measured to screen for the disease. The test in fall of 2025 showed a prostate-specific antigen of 60 — significantly higher than the normal range of zero to four — but he did not receive a biopsy until April 2026, and did not begin treatment until August. Graham said it was “miraculous” the cancer had not metastasized in spite of the significant treatment delay.
Yet another patient with lung cancer that had spread throughout his body received treatment at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and a dire prognosis of weeks to a few months to live. But prison medical staff did not arrange for him to visit a local oncologist within a week as ordered, leaving him to languish for over a month before receiving follow-up care as his condition deteriorated. He was then hospitalized again due to complications associated with the delays in care.
Limb amputations and trip to a Motel 6
Multiple state lawmakers relayed stories of constituents who suffered amputations due to untreated diabetes in prison.
Limb amputations are a serious complication of diabetes, though a majority of diabetes-related amputations are preventable, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Rep. Elliot Burch, a Republican from Lucedale, testified that he received a call a year and a half ago informing him that a constituent with serious medical concerns had been released from prison to a Motel 6 on I-55 in Jackson, even though MDOC staff previously told his family they planned to refer him to long-term care.
Burch, initially skeptical of the story, decided to investigate himself. He traveled to the motel, and after he knocked on the man’s door, he found him with both legs amputated, unable to get out of bed himself to unlock the door. At least one of the amputations occurred while the man was in MDOC custody due to uncontrolled diabetes.
The man had been dropped off with insulin, but no blood glucose monitor. And the only food he had to eat was a bag packed with carbohydrate-rich foods, including crackers and sandwiches. The man ultimately had to seek emergency care for another issue and was discharged to long-term care from the hospital.
Rep. Steve Lott, a Republican from Lucedale, said he received a call from a constituent set to be released from South Mississippi Correctional Institution in Leakesville with serious health issues, including diabetes. Three days after the man was paroled from prison, his leg was amputated.
A mother takes desperate measures to help treat her son’s chronic pain
Pearly White said she almost lost her home from sending money to the prison where her son was incarcerated after he lost access to critical medication.
She went on to tell lawmakers about a scheme where fellow prisoners, under the watch of guards, coerced her to pay them an ever-increasing sum of money for illegal drugs to help her son manage pain medical officials failed to manage.
“She’s been extorted,” Currie said.
White’s son was an amputee when he went to prison, spending time at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman and Marshall County Correctional Facility after multiple DUI charges. He had spinal cord damage, a condition he managed with gabapentin, a prescription nerve-pain medication. The problems began when prison officials told him they couldn’t provide him with the drug.
He couldn’t function, she said, and desperate to manage the debilitating pain, he turned to marijuana. In a plea to help her son, White transferred money to people inside the prison through an app. She could afford the payments at first, but they eventually ratcheted up the price to over $1,000, threatening to cut off her son.
“They know what they’re doing,” White said. “They have help. The officers, they know.”
White, a veteran who works as a surgical technician in Oxford, said she has plunged into debt trying to get her son treatment he should have received through the state’s prison medical contractor.
“I stand up on this bad back and these bad knees every day so that I can pay the bills that I acquired from the inmates, because VitalCore didn’t think it was necessary that he have gabapentin,” White said.
White’s son was eventually released from prison and now lives with her.
White said she reported the scheme to MDOC’s Corrections Investigation Division and the FBI. She’s received no word from either entity about whether they investigated her case or the illicit flow of money into prisons.
VitalCore responds: ‘I think it’s time to tell our story’
After over an hour of testimony from speakers outlining a wide range of prison healthcare woes, VitalCore’s leader spoke for the first time to lawmakers.
Beth Clay, VitalCore’s lobbyist in Mississippi, introduced her client in soaring terms.
“I’m telling you, the people I’m bringing you today have hearts of gold when it comes to medical care,” Clay said.
Viola Riggin, the company’s founder and CEO, said she doesn’t like the limelight, but feels her company’s work has been misrepresented.
“I think it’s time to tell our story,” she said.
Before addressing the issues raised by those who testified, Riggin described her humble beginnings in Kansas, where she began her career working in correctional facilities when she was 19. She and Dr. Lorelei Ammons founded VitalCore in 2018, and the company developed a reputation for providing medical care to places in crisis, she said.
Riggin then extolled her company’s management of prison healthcare, distributing a packet with statistics she said show VitalCore has made progress improving outcomes inside state prisons.
She said she was met with a “dire” state of care in 2020 when VitalCore was awarded an emergency contract to provide medical care in Mississippi prisons after the previous company terminated its contract. VitalCore was awarded over $315 million in emergency, no-bid state contracts from 2020 to 2024. The state selected the company for a three-year contract worth over $357 million in 2024.
She described a dearth of medical staff, patients not receiving annual physicals, HIV going untreated and six years in which patients did not receive mammograms to detect breast cancer.
“The care was not appropriate, and it was not OK,” she said.
She claimed that many of the current challenges facing medical care are residual effects of previous contractors’ impropriety.
For example, Riggin said, reaching contractually obligated staffing levels took time, though the company is now better meeting the requirements. And as for allegations that VitalCore has delayed payments to vendors are vestiges of past contractors’ behavior — she said the company pays bills within 90 days.
Dispute over hepatitis C treatment
VitalCore has drawn criticism for treating only a handful of the hundreds of people in MDOC diagnosed with hepatitis C.
Brian Collier, VitalCore’s executive operations advisor and former executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the company is treating 50 patients diagnosed with hepatitis C each quarter.
At this rate, he said the company will by 2029 cure over 700 patients identified with the disease in 2024. This does not include new people who enter the facility or contract the contagious illness while incarcerated.
Currie questioned those numbers, citing conversations she had with Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain and Dr. Raman Singh, VitalCore’s chief medical officer, where they purported many more people incarcerated in MDOC facilities had tested positive for the illness.
“When I first became chair, when Burl and I actually got along, we had many, many discussions, and he told me that over 5,000 inmates had hep C,” Currie said. “Somebody is not telling the truth.”
Hepatitis C is a blood-borne infection that can be cured in more than 95% of cases with an eight- to 12-week course of medication, though it is costly.
State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said treating a fixed amount of hepatitis C patients a year is “unacceptable,” noting that the standard of care is to universally screen for the highly contagious infection and treat it immediately.
“If you don’t, with a confined population, you will have reinfection,” said Edney.
Edney said he could help the company access medication at lower cost through a federal program. Mississippi Today reported in 2025 that the Department of Health provided MDOC information about how to access the discounted prices, but the agency did not take steps to do so.
A notable no-show
Even as they probed VitalCore’s leaders and questioned some of their assertions, lawmakers commended the company for at least showing up.
The same could not be said for the agency that hired them: MDOC. On Monday afternoon, lawmakers learned that MDOC officials, most notably Cain, planned to skip the hearing over the problems that have unfolded on their watch.
On Tuesday, the chairs of the Public Health and Corrections committees sent Cain a letter urging him to reconsider. But their overtures apparently fell on deaf ears, as Cain and agency leaders didn’t show up.
MDOC did not provide lawmakers with an explanation for their absence, and the agency did not respond to a request for comment from Mississippi Today.
“So they just didn’t want to stop to sit and talk to legislators, I guess,” said Sen. Jeremy England, a Republican from Vancleave. “It sounds like they’ll be OK with whatever we do then if they don’t care to be here to listen.”
Rep. Chris Bell, a Democrat from Jackson, said he believes the joint committee should demand Cain come before it to answer questions.
“To hear the testimony of all the individuals that we’ve heard today and for him to have the audacity not to show, not to designate someone to come is totally disrespectful,” Bell said. “This is unacceptable.”
