The healthcare industry for inmates grew throughout the 1990s and 2000s and was greatly affected by the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The closure of mental health hospitals sent many former mental patients to city streets and, oftentimes, to jail. These developments posed ever-changing problems for city and county jails. Almost half of the jails surveyed in the study had switched to privatized medical care by 2010, and 62% had followed suit by 2018.

Now, the inmate healthcare industry is dominated by a handful of companies that produce worse custodial death results than local medical operations. Yet, these medical care companies have helped cities and counties cut costs. In addition, leaving the management of medical operations to an outside entity is a huge plus for jails, since corrections and medical care are two completely different industries.

A review of records in the years 2010 through 2015 shows that death rates were similar no matter what the source of medical care for inmates. That changed in looking at death rates from 2016 to 2018. Over a three-year span, in jails in which the major medical care companies handled inmate healthcare, 691 was the total number of deaths in jails that had an average population of 138,000 inmates. There were, in contrast, 587 fatalities in jails averaging more than 152,000 inmates with medical care handled by publicly-run units.

Learn more about this story in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and the ongoing posts in this series.

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–Guest Contributor