After decades of protest from activists, change is coming to the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) health care system. A June 23rd memo announced that the IDOC is abandoning contract negotiations with Wexford Health Sources, who had won a ten year, $4 billion dollar contract renewal at the end of 2023.
Now as IDOC initiates an emergency contract with Centurion Health, another private health care provider, advocates hope that this transition will represent a change in course for medical and mental health care across state prisons.
A history of neglect
Wexford’s 30 year history with IDOC has been charted in controversy. In September 2011, the for-profit healthcare provider was awarded a $1.4 billion dollar, 10-year contract to supply services across all IDOC facilities.
By this point, Wexford’s failure to provide services to people in IDOC was well-documented. Just three months earlier, the John Howard Association–a social services organization responsible for monitoring living conditions in IDOC facilities–released individual reports on IDOC facilities, stating: “Apart from reports on staff abuse, the most frequent report from [people incarcerated in] Menard concerned lack of adequate healthcare.” The same report cited issues like medical understaffing, and a general lack of access to medical, psychological and rehabilitative treatment.
Over the next decade, a flurry of lawsuits against Wexford from incarcerated individuals spoke of medical malpractice, elder abuse and treatment that exacerbated, rather than eased, issues of mental illness.
According to an analysis by Chicago Reader, Wexford paid $20 million dollars across more than 200 confidential settlements between 2011 and 2020. This analysis also found the company had doled out upwards of $17 million in out-of-court settlements over this period.
Individual grievances tell horror stories of unauthorized surgical intervention, medical neglect that led to amputation, and medication mismanagement that left one person permanently disabled.
Several of these stories ended in deaths. A highly publicized June 2024 case concerns Michael Broadway, a man who was incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center, who died of a heat stress induced asthma attack. According to another person who witnessed the event, Broadway called out for help, unable to breathe, while medical staff made no effort to respond. Broadway’s family is now suing Wexford.
Failed reforms and false promises
Over this period, a class action lawsuit, Lippert v Hughes, was aimed at reforming health care in Illinois prisons. The case reached a 2019 consent decree that mandated improvements across the IDOC to be overseen by a court-approved monitor.
Actual progress, however, has hardly been realized. The most recent monitoring report from November 2024 states that the IDOC is “substantially compliant” with only two of over 40 issue categories. The report specifically calls out understaffing of qualified care providers, noting this factor “has worsened over the five years since the inception of the Consent Decree.”
An uncertain future
The June 23 memo states that a Transition Oversight Committee will support the move to Centurion’s services, assuring that “our priority remains delivering high-quality medical and mental health services to those in our care.” Still, Centurion has faced its share of controversy and lawsuits across the states it operates in, and in recent years has been accused of bid-rigging for contracts. It now rests on IDOC’s oversight to determine whether Wexford’s legacy will continue under a new face.
It’s unfortunate that the government is going from one contractor to another to provide healthcare for individuals in custody. The human nature is the problem. The officers and the health care workers collude to further punish those who are already being punished by the law. They witness some who are released for wrongful conviction yet they still punish. When I went to work there and tried to bring the necessary change in perception and care, I met resistance and was called “inmate lover” and targeted and eventually removed.
I currently have a brother that is incarcerated, I have many concerns about his health he has a seizure disorder. He currently resides in a mental health unit, he has many complaints some which are valid concerns such as nurses passing medicine without giving the opportunity to identify the medicine being provided that was one that I found valid another thing is retaliation my brothers files many complaints often times he is met with some form of resistance such as no shower for days I have been looking into ways to try accommodate but I’ve learned that if and when I call to speak with someone or the warden I leave the necessary information never to get a call back!
I’m now in Litigation proceedings with a court appointed attorney with Wexford Health Sources Inc., Dr. Glenn Babich, and Phil Martin as Defendants in case no. 23-cv-00793 at U.S. Dist. Court for the Southern Dist. of Illinois for one count of Deliberate Indifferance/ Delay and denial of reason of pain in hernia site area. Pending litigation