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In December of 2025 Kristen Windham, director of policy for Gov. Tate Reeves, emailed a state lawmaker with a “report” on the status of a long-awaited review of Mississippi’s prison health care system.
The document that Windham called a report was a letter that barely stretched beyond a page. And her update was that the monitoring report lawmakers were expecting still did not exist.
That came as a surprise to lawmakers who passed a law that said they are due a review of the medical services contract from the corrections department on Dec. 15 of each fiscal year. The state recently approved paying the law firm Butler Snow $700,000 for monitoring prison health care, despite no report being delivered yet.
Mississippi Today has documented potentially thousands of people living with hepatitis C going without treatment, amputations following delayed care and 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, drew bipartisan condemnation in the state House and numerous hearings at the Capitol.
“They have decided to treat 50 inmates a year with Hepatitis C when there are thousands,” House Corrections Chairwoman Becky Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, said in a recent interview with Mississippi Today. “They provide care when the Hepatitis C patients are so far gone that they need a liver transplant or die.”
In her email to Currie, Windham cited a lengthy process, one that involved developing a “monitoring program” and “auditing tools” – neither of which had been put in place five years after VitalCore Health Strategies became the medical contractor for Mississippi’s prisons. The Kansas-based company was initially awarded four no-bid emergency contracts, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in the process, before securing a three-year contract.
“As you are no doubt aware, developing a medical monitoring program and audit tools tailored to ensure both contract compliance and to evaluate the quality of healthcare takes months to develop,” Windham wrote in the December email. “When development of the audit tools and the initial site visits are completed, MDOC will be able to estimate when the first monitoring report will be completed.”
Seven months later, the Mississippi State Personnel Board on July 16 approved paying the law firm to monitor Mississippi’s prison healthcare system. But several lawmakers granted access to the report under state law told Mississippi Today they still have not seen it, and it’s unclear what progress has been made toward its production.
“I have not received anything,” Currie said. “If we had used the money that we are paying Butler Snow to tell us what we already know, we could have cured so many people suffering in prison.”
The state law that said lawmakers are due a report from MDOC on Dec. 15 of each fiscal year passed in May of 2025. But Dec. 15 came and went later that year without lawmakers receiving a monitoring report. Windham’s email, obtained by Mississippi Today, shows what the governor’s administration has been telling lawmakers about the process for monitoring Mississippi’s troubled prison healthcare system, a process that has largely unfolded out of public view.
House Public Health Chairman Sam Creekmore, a Republican, and Senate Public Health Chairman Hob Bryan, a Democrat, also told Mississippi Today they had not yet seen any report. Under state law, both of the chairman are owed a copy of the report. They said the last formal update they received was in a December 2025 letter – previously obtained and reported on by Mississippi Today – from Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain, who said a private attorney will manage a team “experienced in correctional healthcare management” to conduct contract oversight.
That attorney, Bill Lunsford of Butler Snow, the politically connected law firm contracted to monitor Mississippi’s prison health care contract, did not respond to a list of questions. Spokespeople for the Mississippi Department of Corrections also did not respond to messages with similar questions.
Mississippi Today filed a public request asking for all monitoring reports submitted by Butler Snow on health care available to the state’s incarcerated population. In May, MDOC said the agency does not possess any such documents.
The genesis of the still-awaited prison health care audit dates back to May of 2025, when the Legislature passed a bill instructing the corrections department to deliver a report on the contractor’s performance. The department hired Butler Snow, a Mississippi-based law firm that has defended prison systems and private prison health contractors in civil rights lawsuits alleging health care failures in several states.
The 2025 legislation mandating the report on prison health care said MDOC shall provide a report of the monitoring and review of the medical services contract to the chairmen of Senate and House Appropriations, Corrections, and Public Health committees and to the Legislative Budget Office.
Currie had tried to give the Mississippi State Department of Health the authority to monitor prison health care. But her push was defeated, in part due to opposition from Gov. Reeves, who wanted to award monitoring authority to a private firm, according to Currie.
In MDOC’s search for a medical contractor in 2023, it wrote that the agency “does not employ any licensed personnel responsible with oversight of its contracted healthcare provider,” but said it planned to reestablish a medical compliance office within three to six months of executing the contract.
At that time, VitalCore had served as the agency’s medical contractor since 2020 after being awarded four no-bid emergency contracts worth $324 million for the services. Combined with its current role, VitalCore has been awarded over $600 million in state contracts.
In the months leading up to the 2026 legislative session, Currie developed a sweeping legislative package of reforms aimed at improving the quality of care in Mississippi prisons and introducing more oversight of the prison medical contract.
Currie wanted to use the report lawmakers had been promised to fine-tune the legislation and build consensus in the Senate, where all her reforms had failed the prior year. So in December of 2025, weeks before lawmakers were set to return to Jackson, Currie began asking for updates.
“I am asking for the audit that the Governor insisted on doing by hiring a firm for over $700,000 dollars to audit Vitalcore,” Currie wrote. “I would like to get it tomorrow before the Christmas Holiday and give me time to study it before the session.”
Windham replied that the contract “provided a six-month implementation period before monitoring activities would commence.”
“Over the next several months, the auditing/monitoring tools will be developed, and the monitoring team of experts will conduct initial site visits of MDOC facilities and begin utilizing the tools,” Windham added.
Windham did not respond to a list of questions about the site visits, the monitoring tools and the status of the report.
Without the report in hand, Currie still proceeded with advancing her reforms through the House. But the legislation was ultimately doomed again in the state Senate.
Corrections Committee Vice Chairwoman Lydia Chassaniol, a Republican from Winona, refused to advance the bills out of committee. Chassaniol had been running the committee while Corrections Chairman Juan Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, was out with an illness. Chassaniol claimed she was honoring Barnett’s wishes.
“The Health Department was going to do it for free,” Currie said of the long-awaited report. “Now we are charging the taxpayers all this money for a report that supports the inadequate care.”
Mississippi Today reporter Gwen Dilworth contributed to this report
