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Lawmakers will hold a hearing on Thursday to look into dire problems with healthcare in Mississippi prisons and allegations of systemic failure to stop preventable deaths and illness.
Prison healthcare problems have been exposed through news investigations, legislative watchdog reports and first-person accounts from those working inside.
But apparently the Mississippi Department of Corrections will be a no-show at the hearing, a letter obtained by Mississippi Today shows.
In a letter on Tuesday to Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain, Public Health Chairs Rep. Sam Creekmore and Sen. Hob Bryan, along with Corrections Chairs Rep. Becky Currie and Sen. Lydia Chassaniol said they were “disappointed to learn that the Department of Corrections will not take part in Thursday’s joint hearing.”
“We want to be clear about the purpose of this hearing. It is not meant to assign blame. It is meant to help members of both chambers understand how health care is delivered behind the walls today, where the gaps are, and what the Legislature can do to help,” the lawmakers wrote. “The Department’s perspective is essential to that conversation. No one knows the day-to-day challenges better than the people responsible for meeting them.”
The letter does not say whether MDOC officials provided lawmakers with a reason for their avoidance. A department spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about the matter.
The hearing comes after Mississippi Today’s Behind Bars, Beyond Care investigation documented potentially thousands of people living with hepatitis C going without treatment, amputations from delayed care and inmates having trouble getting cancer screenings. Such findings, as well as handwritten letters sent to lawmakers by prisoners seeking care and panicked messages from their family members, have drawn bipartisan condemnation in the statehouse and numerous hearings this year at the Capitol.
In an interview, Currie, who has led the charge to improve healthcare in Mississippi’s prisons, said many prisoners are not getting cancer treatment in time to recover and are forced to languish for lengthy periods without care for ailments such as diabetes and hepatitis C, even as spending on prison healthcare has risen for taxpayers.
“Treatment could be less expensive and have better outcomes when treated early. Diabetic care is almost nonexistent. Many inmates complain to me that they have sugar drops when their blood sugar gets low, but they don’t have anything but the canteen to get a candy bar to get their sugar up, and then (prison medical staffers) put in the chart that the inmates are noncompliant.”
MDOC has the fourth-highest funding of any Mississippi state agency, set to receive over $430 million in the next fiscal year. The high costs for taxpayers can be attributed in part to its medical care contract and increased payments to private prisons, according to Rep. Currie, a top budget writer for corrections in the state Legislature.
The largest single chunk of the corrections budget goes to a prison medical contract currently held by Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies. The Kansas-based company was initially awarded four no-bid emergency contracts, for hundreds of millions of dollars, before securing a three-year contract worth over $357 million.
Mississippi Today’s investigation revealed that the same year the state agreed to keep paying VitalCore, a top official at the MDOC, remarking on a prisoner’s rotting leg, said the company “sucks.”
After she took over as House Corrections Chairwoman, Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, began to notice what she described as disturbing instances of inadequate care under VitalCore’s contract. She embarked on a tour of Mississippi’s prisons and said she couldn’t believe what she found.
Currie encountered a wheelchair-bound man so jaundiced he appeared to glow in the dark. She met a 23-year-old woman with a lump growing out of her breast from untreated cancer. Other women were denied pap smears and mammograms. She met men with untreated HIV. Many more inmates were charged for care they never received.
“Since I began trying to hold VitalCore accountable to the contract they signed, they are doing somewhat better,” Currie told Mississippi Today. “They are now treating HIV, which they weren’t doing. They are treating 50 hepatitis C inmates a year, which is far below the necessary numbers if they want to eradicate (the illness), but better than they were doing. We still have a long way to go on many things.”
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.
As the healthcare problems roiling Mississippi’s prisons began to surface, Reeves dispatched Kenny Ellis, his former policy director, to keep an eye on the corrections committees in the Legislature. Cain then appointed Ellis as MDOC’s chief of staff in early 2026.
After numerous bills to reform prison healthcare passed the House unanimously, most of the measures were killed in the Senate by former Corrections Chairman Juan Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg and Vice Chair Chassaniol, a Republican from Winona.
Rep. Justis Gibbs, a Democrat from Jackson, advanced the only prison health care reform to survive legislative negotiations last session. His measure requires that prisoners be provided with protective equipment while handling cleaning chemicals. The measure was inspired by the story of Susie Balfour, a Mississippi woman, who died of breast cancer last year at the age of 64.
In a lawsuit that her family eventually settled, she said her exposure to cleaning chemicals in prison might have led to her cancer, and that prison health providers delayed or failed to schedule follow-up cancer screenings for Balfour even though they had been recommended by prison physicians.
In a statement ahead of Thursday’s hearing, Gibbs urged the Legislature to pass more legislation on prison healthcare in 2027.
“Meaningful, large-scale reform will require the commitment, collaboration, and support of an overwhelming majority of our Legislature,” Gibbs said. “We are talking about human rights here. It shouldn’t be such a hard lift.”
Creekmore, a Republican from New Albany, said he urged MDOC officials to participate with the hearing given the steady stream of stories emanating from Mississippi’s prisons about inadequate healthcare.
“There are very sad, unsuccessful stories about healthcare in prisons,” Creekmore said. “So I just hope that we can put everybody in the same room and figure something out.”
In the letter lawmakers sent to Cain, they said the issues of prison healthcare impact the state as a whole.
“The health of the people in our correctional facilities is a public health issue for every Mississippian,” the lawmakers wrote. “Nearly everyone who enters our prisons will one day come home. Whether they return healthier, treated for addiction and mental illness, and ready to work, or return sicker and more likely to reoffend, affects our communities, our hospitals, our Medicaid program, and our public safety. A strong, rehabilitative corrections system is in everyone’sinterest, and we cannot build one without the Department at the table.”
