In the wake of Mississippi Today reports of an amputation from a neglected broken bone, untreated hepatitis C and delayed cancer diagnoses, Rep. Becky Currie will try again in the coming legislative session to push through Mississippi prison health care reforms.  A similar effort by the Repub lican chairwoman of the House Corrections Committee fizzled and died in in last year’s session.    In an interview outlining her plans, Currie said she will introduce legislation based on findings gleaned from numerous tours of Mississippi’s prisons as well as instances of alleged denial of medical care documented by Mississippi Today.  The findings have come to light as the state continues to direct hundreds of millions a year to a private medical contractor, VitalCore Health Strategies.  “We’ve got to give patients – I call them patients because when you’re sick, you’re a patient no matter where you are – we’ve got to give them the care that the taxpayers have already paid for,” Currie said.  Mississippi Today’s “Behind Bars, Beyond Care” series has documented alleged routine denial of health care in Mississippi prisons: potentially thousands of people living with hepatitis C going without treatment, an untreated broken arm that resulted in amputation and delayed cancer screenings one woman said led to a terminal diagnosis. One ex-corrections official said people are experiencing widespread medical neglect in Mississippi’s prisons, and revealed internal communications between department officials lamenting the quality of care provided by VitalCore. During the 2025 legislative session, Currie took to the floor of the Mississippi House and presented a wide-ranging list of examples that she said showed inadequate medical care in state prisons. In some cases the lack of care resulted in unnecessary suffering and death, she said. Many of the issues have been allowed to persist because the state Department of Corrections is policing its own provision of health care at prisons, Currie said.  Currie last year drafted a bill that introduced numerous reforms, including giving authority to the Mississippi Department of Health to review prison health care and make policy changes.  Other central tenets of the bill included ensuring that inmates have access to 24/7 medical care, dispensing medication in a way that ensures inmates who need it actually receive it, requiring prisons to provide communal electronic kiosks for prisoners to request medical appointments and waiving fees for a wide range of medical services.  Long considered one of the most conservative members of the Mississippi House, Currie secured support from the entire House, winning over everyone from tough-on-crime Republicans to criminal justice reform-minded Democrats. The bill passed 118-0 in the House. It was amended and whittled down before passing the Senate, but ultimately died in late negotiations between the chambers. Currie believes the bill contained too many provisions, drawing opposition from the office of Gov. Tate Reeves and some of his Senate allies. Currie said Reeves’s office wanted to hire a private firm to conduct a review of prison health care instead of the Department of Health, a debate that loomed over the bill as House and Senate negotiators failed to agree on a final version in the closing days of the 2025 session. To avoid a similar impasse this year, Currie will introduce many of the same measures, but in separate bills. “I had it kind of like the Big, Beautiful Bill,” Currie said. “I had the big health care bill for MDOC, which was a failure on my part, because they were able just to say, ‘Oh no, we don’t want all of that this year.’ I’ll come at it a little differently (this year) and do it piece by piece.”  One key policy fix Currie plans to reintroduce this year is revamping the process by which inmates request medical attention at many prisons. Prisoners often still need to rely on guards to bring them to an infirmary. This arrangement gives guards, who are not medical professionals, the power to determine whether a prisoner receives immediate care. “We’re still at the part where an inmate has to tell a guard that I need to see a doctor, and he tells them to sit down and shut up, and they never get to see a doctor,” Currie said. In October, Mississippi Today reported on the case of Christopher Boose, a 38-year-old Mississippi man who fell off his bunk at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility and broke his arm. He was allegedly denied treatment by guards for a week and developed sepsis. Boose, who was serving a one-year sentence for a Drug Court infraction, had his arm amputated. He has filed a federal lawsuit seeking $5 million in damages.  To prevent similar episodes from happening in the future, Currie plans to push for new requirements to document prisoner requests for medical attention. “The problem is we keep zero records, and there’s no accountability,” Currie said. “Like the article you did. It’s like oh, well, he lost his arm, I’m so sorry he didn’t get seen. We had to cut his arm off.’ I mean, it’s just, that kind of thing happens so often.” Another prison health care issue Currie plans to tackle again is the spread of hepatitis C. Documents and private conversations reported by Mississippi Today show the problem appears to be widespread in state prisons.  Rep. Becky Currie Credit: Rogelio V. Solis, AP A major scientific advance in the early 2010s – direct-acting antiviral drugs – transformed treatment regimens for hepatitis C, offering high cure rates, shorter treatment durations and fewer side effects. But the medication can cost the Mississippi system almost $30,000 for a six-week course. Many state prison systems have negotiated lower prices for the medication and are able to treat more patients. Currie plans to keep pushing for the Department of Corrections and VitalCore to purchase hepatitis C medication through health care organizations enrolled in the federal 340B program, which requires pharmaceutical companies to sell outpatient drugs at discounted prices. The program can offer discounts on drugs in the range of 20% to 50%.  The Department of Health provided MDOC information about how to access 340B pricing, but as of October, the agency had not yet taken steps to obtain the reduced prices, a Health Department spokesperson told Mississippi Today.  In an interview, Senate Corrections Chairman Juan Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, said that he “vaguely remembered” Currie’s bill and supported some of its key provisions, but wanted to center efforts in his committee around reducing Mississippi’s prison population to free up more money for health care services.  Barnett said he wasn’t completely satisfied with the performance of VitalCore, the private medical contractor that has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars to provide health care in prisons.  “My thinking of trying to handle most of that cost is to reduce the prison population by passing legislation that will allow people with certain crimes to be able to be released,” Barnett said. “When you get the population down, then you have more money at your disposal to handle medical issues.” Mississippi has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world — 661 people per 100,000. About 19,500 people are currently incarcerated in state prisons.  Currie was initially surprised when House Speaker Jason White made her chairwoman of the House Corrections Committee. But amid a growing chorus of complaints about the provision of health care in Mississippi’s prisons, White told Currie, a former nurse, that she would have free rein to clean up the system.  “Becky, go get em,” Currie recalls White telling her.  So she crisscrossed the state, traveling to prisons and speaking with inmates about the issues they faced when trying to receive medical care. She encountered people with jaundice from untreated hepatitis C and women with cancerous lumps growing out of their breasts.  Despite evidence that prisoners in a state with such a high incarceration rate aren’t receiving proper medical attention, Currie said, she has waged a lonely push for reform. “It’s just me,” Currie said. “And it’s not that the proof’s not there.”  ...read more read less