Mississippi Today
As cancer spread in Susie Balfour’s body, she says prison medical providers failed to treat it. Now she’s fighting for life.
A formerly incarcerated woman facing terminal breast cancer is suing the prison system’s former and current health care providers for failing to diagnose and treat the disease until it spread in her body.
Susie Annie Balfour, 62, of Memphis, is the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi that alleges prison medical officials acted with deliberate indifference because they knew for years that she might have cancer, but they did not order a biopsy to confirm until November 2021.
Over the course of a decade, Balfour had at least eight mammograms at Merit Health Central in Jackson. That number is less than the annual mammograms and later twice a year mammograms outside doctors recommended after each of her visits, according to the lawsuit.
Stage 4 cancer has metastasized and spread to Balfour’s lymph nodes, bones and other parts of her body. She said she’s trying to stay encouraged and do what she can.
“I never know when my time will be up, but until then I’m not going to stop fighting,” said Balfour, who was incarcerated at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility for over 30 years and released on parole in December 2021.
The complaint alleges the contract between the Mississippi Department of Corrections – which is not named as a defendant – and former medical contractors Wexford Health Sources and Centurion of Mississippi and current contractor VitalCore Health Strategies created financial incentive for the companies to withhold necessary and lifesaving care to incarcerated people.
How that manifested was reduced outpatient referrals and hospitalizations and encouragement of conservative care to cut costs, according to the complaint.
“This is just another avenue to draw attention to what’s happening in the prisons,” said Andrew Tominello, who is representing Balfour.
Balfour first asked prison medical staff for a mammogram in June 2011.
After that visit, doctors recommended she return for follow-up annual mammograms to monitor any changes in calcifications found in her right breast. By 2016, doctors recommended she have mammograms every six months.
Instead, Balfour went up to three years between follow-ups, according to the lawsuit.
It wasn’t until Nov. 3, 2021, that a biopsy revealed Balfour had an invasive, malignant cancer in her breast, court documents state.
The lawsuit alleges VitalCore was aware of the doctors’ findings from the November visit and did not inform Balfour about the cancer until days before her release on Dec. 27, 2021.
Less than a week after leaving prison, Balfour went to the University of Mississippi Medical Center where she had another mammogram and full testing, which the doctor used to diagnose her cancer as Stage 4.
Balfour wonders if actions had been taken sooner, maybe things would have turned out differently with her health.
On behalf of its provider VitalCore, MDOC declined to comment. Representatives from Centurion and Wexford did not respond to a request for comment.
Other defendants named in the lawsuit are Merit Health Central and multiple physicians and nurses employed by the hospital and prison health care providers. The lawsuit accuses them of malpractice for failing to properly diagnose and treat Balfour, causing her cancer to progress.
A spokesperson for Merit Health declined to comment. Defendants will have 21 days to respond to the lawsuit complaint.
The lawsuit also alleges Balfour and other incarcerated people were required to clean the prison with chemicals such as glyphosate that are known to cause cancer. They were not given protective equipment when mixing raw chemicals to avoid exposure, according to the complaint.
To date, at least 15 other people incarcerated at CMCF have cancer, and they are not receiving “necessary, life-saving treatment,” according to the lawsuit.
READ: SMCI inmate, fearing he has cancer, still awaiting needed medical procedure, he says
“These are human beings that deserve a second chance in life. Instead they’re being allowed to get sick and left to die,” Pauline Rogers, co-founder of the RECH Foundation that helps women returning from prison, said in a statement.
Balfour is seeking compensatory and punitive damages to be determined at trial.
Centurion became MDOC’s inmate health care provider in 2016 after a multi-year bribery scandal that led to the 2014 indictment of then-MDOC commissioner Christopher Epps and prison contractors including Wexford. VitalCore Health Strategies became the provider in 2020.
In a separate lawsuit, VitalCore is being sued for failing to provide adequate medical and mental health care to incarcerated people and proper accommodations and services to those with disabilities.
Balfour was incarcerated for a capital murder conviction in the shooting death of a Southaven police officer that carried a death sentence that was overturned in 1991. She was resentenced to serve 30 years, according to court records.
“I just want everybody to be held accountable,” she said. “ … and I just want justice for myself and other ladies and men in there who are dealing with the same situation I am dealing with.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1875
Nov. 2, 1875
The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from voting, resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the state.
A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black Mississippians had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to challenge Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state.
Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, including a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton.
The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan.
John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: “It was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.”
A federal grand jury concluded: “Fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
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In a time when trusted journalists and media sources are disappearing, we believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without on-the-ground, trustworthy reporting, civic engagement suffers, accountability falters and corruption often goes unaddressed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Hinds County loses fight over control of jail
The Hinds County sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.
Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, including a failure to protect detainees from harm.
However, the appeals court called the new injunction “overly broad” in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.
The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be removed.
The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – especially if the receivership has no end date.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion.
In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which holds people facing trial.
“But the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,” the appeals court wrote.
This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022.
The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the solutions they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in Jackson.
The county had a chance to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the death of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old infrastructure and use of force.
Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.
But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff.
The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference.
Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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