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About 14 months later, and after being fined $70,000 by the state for failing to meet contractual standards, Corizon walked away from its $1.1 billion, five-year contract with the Florida Department of Corrections. The company’s performance also has been criticized in government and court reports in Idaho, New York, Kentucky and Pennsylvania between 20.Īt the time of The Palm Beach Post report, the company had annual revenues of $1.4 billion.

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In a September 2014 series of articles, The Palm Beach Post found that the company provided “deficient care” to Florida prisoners and reported that the number of deaths in the state’s prisons had reached a 10-year high.

Hundreds of lawsuits are pending, many filed by inmates themselves, court records show. prisoner population – at 534 correctional facilities in 27 states.īy all appearances, Corizon is under financial stress as it faces increasing scrutiny about its practices by prison officials, journalists and the courts. Today, as the country’s largest for-profit prison health care provider, it’s responsible for the care of approximately 345,000 prisoners – about 15 percent of the U.S. The question is particularly important as the country begins to reform a criminal justice system that, with the world’s largest prisoner population, is viewed as a revenue stream by a collection of largely privately held corporations that exploit the privatization model for profit.Ĭorizon, owned and partly managed by a private equity firm in Chicago, was formed in a 2011 merger of two prison health care companies. The Green case, like many others, raises the question of whether Corizon and its competitors place profits over the health and safety of prisoners who have no ability to choose their medical provider – and whether corrections officials should allow them to do so. The life-and-death decisions made by Corizon staffers that day are the same kinds being made by the company’s employees in state prisons and local jails across America – decisions that inevitably weigh a patient’s medical needs against the cost to the company. A medical expert for Green’s family said he would have been saved with timely intervention. He died from complications six months later. He lost the use of his arms and legs, and was placed on a ventilator. It was almost seven hours before Green was transported to the hospital. There was something called a ‘ courtesy drop.’ The physician’s assistant was thinking, ‘We’ll release this guy and then have the Lane County officers take him to the hospital.’” “If he had gone to the hospital before being released, Corizon would have had to pay the hospital bill,” said Elden Rosenthal, a Portland lawyer who represented Green’s family in a lawsuit against Corizon. In the meantime, he was humiliated and taunted by jail staffers as his condition grew progressively worse. Instead, court records show, they suggested that he be dropped off at the hospital after he was released from jail.

Though he suffered a catastrophic injury, later determined to be a “burst fracture” of the C-4 vertebra in his neck, Corizon employees chose not to send Green immediately to a hospital.

The cold, hard reality is that every dime saved on prisoner care is a dime added to the company’s bottom line.Īnd when companies face financial difficulties – and it appears that Corizon does – their employees may face more pressure to cut costs by delaying or denying medical care to prisoners, as several former Corizon employees have alleged in court documents. States and municipalities typically pay companies like Corizon a flat fee based on the number of prisoners for whom they provide care. What happened next illustrates much about what a growing chorus of critics across the country contends is fundamentally wrong with a privatized prison health care system that, at its core, exists to generate profits for investors. As skull met concrete, it sounded like “throwing a watermelon at the wall,” one observer later remarked. Green suddenly sprinted 10 feet toward a partition of concrete blocks, his head lowered. During his arraignment inside a courtroom at the jail, a judge told him he would be detained for a couple of days.