Prison health care under scrutiny from feds

ST. LOUIS -- The U.S. Justice Department is investigating medical treatment provided by a St. Louis-based company to inmates at the women's prison in Vandalia, after at least two died.

Among the cases being scrutinized is that of Al'Deana Simmons of Camdenton, who died in July of an apparent aneurysm. Simmons told her family that prison doctors changed her anti-depression medication. She cried about blinding headaches.

Her mother, Virginia Terry, recalled that in their phone conversation the day before she died, "she said her head was sizzling and that she was going blind.

"The prison doctor saw her for 10 minutes and said nothing was wrong," Terry told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Justice Department investigators from Washington have been to the prison three times and interviewed 127 inmates about the medical treatment provided by Correctional Medical Services, the nation's largest prison health care provider.

The company won its first Missouri contract in 1992 under then Gov. John Ashcroft, who now heads up the Justice Department as U.S. attorney general.

Yet, in a move rarely seen by the Justice Department, Missouri's prison system has denied the investigators the access they want. The investigators have wanted to see the infirmary and talk to prisoners and staff at the prison, about 70 miles northwest of St. Louis. Prison officials wouldn't allow it, instead telling federal investigators they could talk to prisoners only in the visitation area during normal visiting hours.

That kind of restriction to a prison setting is rare, happening only a handful of times in the Justice Department's 23 years of work using the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act.

The act, passed by Congress in 1980, empowers the attorney general to investigate the conditions at public institutions and file lawsuits to remedy "a pattern or practice" of unlawful conditions.

Tim Kniest, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Corrections, said investigators were restricted because of safety concerns. They could have a tour if they went through the proper channels, he said.

Correctional Medical Services has contracts to provide medical care for about 228,000 inmates and prisoners in 27 states.

The company's five-year contract with Missouri covers medical and mental health care for the 29,500 prisoners in Missouri's 21 prisons. The cost to the state is about $80 million a year. The Justice Department investigation is focused solely on Vandalia.

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation in 1998 found that many cases of inmate deaths related to medical care in the nation's prisons involved Correctional Medical Services.

A company spokeswoman, Becky Vollmer, declined to comment on the cases of specific inmates because of confidentiality. But she said the health care provider is cooperating with investigators.

"Our belief is, a fair review will show the health care services at the site are responsible and beneficial to the inmates served," Vollmer said.

The American Civil Liberties Union in St. Louis is conducting its own investigation into 51 complaints about health care in Missouri prisons. Those complaints range from allegations of suspicious deaths to botched medical care and lack of care.

Stephanie Rane Summers, 48, a former Vandalia inmate, died in 1999 of liver failure and bacterial pneumonia.

Sara Gilpin of Joplin says that her sister's hepatitis C went undiagnosed for 2 1/2 years and that she never was evaluated to be on a list for a liver transplant, although doctors outside the prison who evaluated Summers recommended that.

Gilpin has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Springfield.

Kniest said the Corrections Department has confidence in the medical care being provided.