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Meet the Medical Company Making $1.4 Billion a Year Off Sick Prisoners

In states that use Corizon to provide healthcare in their prisons, medical neglect and abuse run rampant. 

NationAction

October 8, 2013

The healthcare provider Corizon makes an estimated $1.4 billion off sick prisoners every year. With profits like those, you would think it was actually treating prisoners. But in states that are using Corizon to provide healthcare in their prisons—and right now twenty-nine are—medical neglect and abuse run rampant.

As Liliana Segura reported in her introduction to the Prison Profiteers series, Corizon’s attitude toward the debilitating virus Hepatitis C is especially alarming: They just don’t treat it. “The result could be deadly,” Segura writes,

Last year alone, no fewer than seven sick prisoners died at Metro Corrections, a jail in Louisville, Kentucky, while on Corizon’s watch. The company made headlines when six employees quit their jobs, according to local press, “amid an investigation by the jail that found that the workers ‘may’ have contributed” to two of the deaths. This summer, it was announced that the contract between Corizon and the city would not be renewed.

TO WATCH

In our new Prison Profiteers video, produced in partnership with the ACLU and Beyond Bars, prisoners’ family members describe the horrendous treatment that their loved ones received in institutions that use Corizon.

TO DO

Corizon isn’t the only company profiting off mass incarceration. Visit our Prison Profiteers action page to learn about other profiteers and find out how you can fight back.

TO READ

The Nation’s Liliana Segura gives an overview of the massive scope of the crisis of companies profiting off mass incarceration: “With 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States,” she writes, “prisons are big business.”

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