What do you do when your state's the poster child for corruption, when your top politicians are drummed from office for ethical and moral lapses and the world peers at you like one of those mugshot magazines on the counter of the Quick Mart?

If you're Alabama, you double the heck down.

Bring it. Bring it on.

What do you do when your prison system is a cage match for inmates and correction officers alike, where prisoners are stacked like kindling, where conditions are third world, a federal judge calls your prison mental health care "horrendously inadequate" and the best hope for medical treatment is to hope you don't need any?

If you're Alabama you gamble. Because hey, look at the odds. How many times can this state keep rolling craps?

A lot, people. A lot.

Take a look at Wexford Health Services, the Pittsburgh company the Alabama Department of (In)Corrections has chosen to provide medical care to inmates - a contract that could surpass $150 million. Wexford was chosen in December over several other companies, even though Alabama prison folks knew it was tied to a Mississippi corruption scandal so ugly it would make a Montgomery lobbyist blush.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood last year sued Wexford and others, saying it and a company it used for administrative services for years paid millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks, through a middle man, to former Mississippi prisons chief Christopher Epps. Epps in turn directed state contracts worth $290 million to the companies, according to the suit.

Epps and the middle man wound up pleading guilty and both were sentenced to prison. Hood is trying to recover all $290 million for which he says Mississippi was defrauded.

And the Alabama Department of Corrections knows all this. Alabama Prison Commissioner Jeff Dunn knows all this.

And picked Wexford anyway.

Because all companies, he says, have their strengths and weaknesses.

That's what Dunn said Thursday morning, anyway, when a GOP lawmaker asked him about the Mississippi problems during a DOC budget hearing (in which DOC is asking for more money). It's pretty much what Dunn said when the company was chosen in December - after complaints that the whole selection process was flawed. The decision to hire Wexford came down to quality and cost, he said.

But this is Alabama, where the corruption breeds like bunnies and it always ends up hopping all over us. This is Alabama, where we ought to know better.

(Julie Bennett)

A prison spokesman argued last month that Wexford itself wasn't accused of doing anything wrong, and a Wexford spokeswoman said in a statement to AP that the company was simply ensnared in the Mississippi lawsuit because it unwittingly employed a consultant tied to the investigation.

But Mississippi's AG sees it differently.

Hood argued in court filings that the former prison commissioner has a "backroom" relationship with Wexford and the Bantry Group Corporation, which Wexford used for administrative work. Those companies paid a former state Representative named Cecil McCrory "so-called 'consulting fees" that McCrory passed along to Epps in exchange for all those lucrative contracts to Wexford and Bantry.

"Defendants Wexford and Bantry were willful participants in the scheme insofar as they knew - had every reason to know or should have known - that the money they were paying McCrory was being used to pay bribes and kickbacks to Epps for the purpose of obtaining and retaining public contracts."

If they didn't know they should have.

Just like Alabama. If it doesn't know better than to simply avoid the appearance of absurdity, it should by now.

It should know better.

John Archibald's column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.

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