When the Eugene police arrived, they arrested Green, 28, on an outstanding warrant related to a misdemeanor incident two months earlier.

At the Lane County Jail, Green cursed and talked to inanimate objects. A booking deputy wrote in her notes: “May be bipolar/schizophrenic. No meds … talks to himself … not making sense.” Although the prison health care giant Corizon Health Inc. had a contract to provide health screening and medical care at the jail, no one from the on-site Corizon staff made any effort to see Green or talk to him.

Green was placed in a cell by himself. He wasn’t provided with any psychiatric treatment.



Kelly Green

The next morning, he snapped. During his arraignment inside a courtroom at the jail, a judge told him he would be detained for a couple of days. Green suddenly sprinted 10 feet toward a partition of concrete blocks, his head lowered. As skull met concrete, it sounded like “throwing a watermelon at the wall,” one observer later remarked.

What happened next illustrates much about what a growing chorus of critics across the country contends is fundamentally wrong with a privatized prison health care system that, at its core, exists to generate profits for investors. States and municipalities typically pay companies like Corizon a flat fee based on the number of prisoners for whom they provide care. The cold, hard reality is that every dime saved on prisoner care is a dime added to the company’s bottom line.

And when companies face financial difficulties – and it appears that Corizon does – their employees may face more pressure to cut costs by delaying or denying medical care to prisoners, as several former Corizon employees have alleged in court documents.

Though he suffered a catastrophic injury, later determined to be a “burst fracture” of the C-4 vertebra in his neck, Corizon employees chose not to send Green immediately to a hospital. Instead, court records show, they suggested that he be dropped off at the hospital after he was released from jail. In the meantime, he was humiliated and taunted by jail staffers as his condition grew progressively worse.

“If he had gone to the hospital before being released, Corizon would have had to pay the hospital bill,” said Elden Rosenthal, a Portland lawyer who represented Green’s family in a lawsuit against Corizon. “They had this system. There was something called a ‘courtesy drop.’ The physician’s assistant was thinking, ‘We’ll release this guy and then have the Lane County officers take him to the hospital.’”

It was almost seven hours before Green was transported to the hospital. By then, it was too late. He lost the use of his arms and legs, and was placed on a ventilator. He died from complications six months later. A medical expert for Green’s family said he would have been saved with timely intervention.

The life-and-death decisions made by Corizon staffers that day are the same kinds being made by the company’s employees in state prisons and local jails across America – decisions that inevitably weigh a patient’s medical needs against the cost to the company.

The Green case, like many others, raises the question of whether Corizon and its competitors place profits over the health and safety of prisoners who have no ability to choose their medical provider – and whether corrections officials should allow them to do so. The question is particularly important as the country begins to reform a criminal justice system that, with the world’s largest prisoner population, is viewed as a revenue stream by a collection of largely privately held corporations that exploit the privatization model for profit.