The Massachusetts Department of Corrections last month announced a new contractor to provide health care services in state prisons, as care and mortality in prisons has received increased scrutiny in recent years.
The contract, with Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies, comes as the DOC’s agreement with Wellpath, a Tennessee-based company, is set to expire this summer.
Wellpath, whose agreement goes to the end of this month, has faced concerns that it was failing to provide adequate care to individuals incarcerated in the state, with delayed or denied care, inadequate staffing and failure to following physician treatment plans.
Wellpath and YesCare, another company bidding for the new state contract, were the subject of a letter in February from U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey to the DOC. The politicians raised concerns about the two companies having been subject to congressional oversight and criticism because of record handling health care needs in jails and prisons across the country.
Limited
access to care can have a distinct impact, especially on a prison
population that trends older, said Ada Lin, a staff attorney at
Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts.
“Our
clients are unable to access the medical care they need, even sometimes
in emergent circumstances,” Lin said in a written statement. “They
experience long delays in care, have little access to their own medical
records or other health information and are often blocked from seeing
specialists.”
She said that poor care can
have downstream impacts, for example an increased burden of chronic
illnesses, which can impact the community as a whole.
Massachusetts prisons have not been immune to concerns around their treatment of health care needs.
In
2020, the U.S. Department of Justice found that it had reason to
believe conditions at Massachusetts DOC facilities — especially around
access to mental health care — were lacking to the point that they could
violate the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits
cruel and unusual punishment.
That
investigation found that Massachusetts prisons failed to provide
appropriate supervision and care to individuals in mental health crises,
leading to incarcerated individuals dying or experiencing serious
injury after engaging in self-harm.
At
the end of 2022, the Department of Justice reached a settlement with
the state’s corrections department to more thoroughly train staff on
mental health care for incarcerated individuals and provide increased
supervision and more contact with mental health staff.
According
to statistics from the Department of Justice published in 2021, there
were 656 deaths recorded in state and federal prisons in Massachusetts
between 2001 and 2019. Heart disease and cancer were the most common
causes of death, making up over half of the carceral deaths in that
time.
Organizers are
also seeking legislative action on the issue. The Medical Civil Rights
Initiative, formed in 2019 by a group of Boston-based physicians, has
proposed the Medical Civil Rights Act as a step to improving access to
care across the system of interactions with law enforcement.
That
bill, which passed in Connecticut in June 2023 but has yet to make it
through the Massachusetts legislature, would create a legal right to
immediate medical services for an individual interacting with law
enforcement officers — something that currently not exist.
Advocates
for the legislation point to examples like the case of Al Copeland, a
Black man who had a stroke while driving down Massachusetts Avenue. He
pulled over and put on his hazard lights, but when police found him,
they assumed he was intoxicated. It took five hours for police officers
to call an ambulance.
While
much of the conversation around the legislation has focused on how it
would relate to police officers and their interactions with civilians,
Frederick Brown, a retired appellate court justice who has worked with
the legislation, said the bill would also apply to carceral settings.
“They have medical problems when they get arrested, and they have the same problems when they get incarcerated,” Brown said.