This is great reporting. Private healthcare providers in jails and prisons need far more scrutiny. Very often they let officials shrug off costs and responsibility while the people inside suffer and die. https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1320695444159291392

Corizon, which is front and center in the Reuters story, was also responsible for Virginia's Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. In 2012 a lawsuit in federal court alleged a "systemic, pervasive and on-going" failure to meet minimum standards there. https://www.pilotonline.com/government/virginia/article_9096368d-54ce-5018-beb7-bea8732e8965.html

What's that look like? What happened to Debbie Daley has been stuck in my mind for years. She was serving time on drug charges when UVA doctors found a cancerous mass in her bowels. Then she didn't see her cancer doctors for 6 months.

And the prison didn't give her pain medications as scheduled. When she finally made it back to UVA the tumor had grown outside of her body. It kept getting infected. When doctors at the prison wanted to cut into she wouldn't let them because the UVA doctors said not to.

So the prison doctors stopped giving her antibiotics. She said a Fluvanna doctor told her she didn't want to get better. Daley went septic, the infection out of control. When she was finally taken back to UVA a doctor admitted her out of concern for her treatment in prison.

In 2014, still in Fluvanna and with terminal cancer, Daley gave a deposition.

"To sit in pain and suffer 24/7 is not fair, not for nobody."

I'm not sure I've ever been so angry writing a story. The court records on Fluvanna - the case is STILL ongoing - are real-life horror.