Privatizing government services and activities doesn’t sound like a bad idea on paper. The acumen required to run a successful business venture should transfer over into increased productivity and efficiency; sure, there’ll be a couple of hiccups along the way, a little stumble here, a misstep there. The problem is that we’re not talking about people’s mail (which is important, by the way) or some other inanimate object. Instead, we’re talking about people’s lives.
The privatizing of health care in the nation’s prisons and jails, for example, should be seen as not only an abysmal failure but also a gross violation of human rights. Deundrez Woods’ story is similar to many others: arrested on one set of charges—allegedly shoplifting and passing a counterfeit bill—Woods was found to have an unpaid speeding ticket once he entered the system. A two-month sentence in Alabama’s Madison County Jail in July 2013 became Woods’ death sentence.
… After about a month in the jail, Deundrez’s behavior started to change dramatically — by early August, he had dropped dozens of pounds and was barely lucid. He was suffering from a badly infected wound on his right foot — gangrene — that was not treated by the jail’s medical staff, despite his obvious and rapid deterioration. A lawsuit filed against the county by his mother, Tanyatta, alleges that Woods spent five days in a medical observation cell in front of jail staff, naked and hallucinating in a gangrene-induced haze. He didn’t eat or drink during that time, according to the lawsuit: He just rolled around and withered away on the hard cell floor.
Meanwhile, Tanyatta had no idea how disastrously Deundrez’s health had declined. She didn’t get a glimpse of her son until his August 15 court hearing. By then, she says, her son was barely recognizable. He couldn’t talk, walk, or even stand — the formerly powerful athlete was rolled into court on a wheelchair — and perhaps most disturbingly, he couldn’t register who she was.
“He wasn’t himself,” Tanyatta told ThinkProgress. “There wasn’t nothing normal about him… It looked like he had lost about maybe 60, 70 pounds… his mouth was crusted, his eyes were like dry, glazed over… He thought he was back to a child stage. He kept saying that his granddaddy was pushing him in a wheelchair and in a swing. But he wasn’t in a swing, he was in a wheelchair. And I kept on asking, did he know who I was, and he said ‘no.’ I said, ‘are you sure you don’t know who I am?’ And he said ‘no ma’am.’… There’s not a child that doesn’t know their mother’s voice.”
Deundrez Woods’ story is similar to scores of others across the country. Tanyatta Woods’ lawsuit was settled but that will neither bring back her son nor address the issue of privatized medical care in prisons and jails. Illinois-based Advance Correctional Healthcare (ACH), the defendant in Woods’ case, “was listed as one of INC. 5000’s fastest growing healthcare companies,” according to a review of company corporate records provided to ThinkProgress. The company operates in more than 250 facilities across the country, spanning 17 states. That’s one company.
The lure of privatizing correctional health services via for-profit companies is simple: it cuts costs.
These cost-saving promises have been a powerful lure for local and state governments eager to trim their budgets. Although data on private correctional health care is hard to come by, as of 2012, at least 20 states outsourced a portion of their health care to private companies, according to the Washington Post. Moreover, a June report by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General found that federal prison spending on outsourced health care increased by nearly a quarter between FY 2010 and 2014, from $263 million to $327 million.
How this plays out in jails is even murkier. Dr. Marc Stern, a correctional health care expert and former assistant secretary for health services in the Washington State Department of Corrections, said that there’s no hard data on rates of privatization in jails, but guesstimated that around 50 to 60 percent of jails have outsourced some part of their health care to private companies. The decentralized, state-run nature of the jail system — with no federal oversight and only 27 states having independent oversight bodies with mandatory inspection duties — makes it even harder to know what’s happening inside our nation’s jails.
The bottom line is what drives states and counties to privatize health services. That bottom line is a number. It’s monetized. That is the only thing for-profit companies, as well as the government entities that contract them, see.
Its not the same thing that Tanyatta Woods sees, or the scores of other parents and family members whose loved ones died behind bars. But it should be.