They chain sick prisoners to benches for hours without treatment. They ignore pleas for help until it’s too late. They watch as people die. This investigation exposes how Centurion Health transforms its $1.4 billion Missouri prison healthcare contract into a machine of medical violence, leading to deaths, lawsuits, and countless untold stories of suffering behind bars.

Centurion Health is being sued—again, and by multiple parties—for failure to offer the appropriate medical care the company is contracted by the Missouri Department of Corrections [MODOC] to provide prisoners. 

In virtually every state Centurion has received a prison healthcare contract, the for-profit enterprise has faced legal reprimand. It happened in Arizona, Idaho, Minnesota, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Vermont, to list just a few. 

Missouri appears to be no exception. Centurion secured a lucrative $1.4 billion contract to provide care to incarcerated persons where “the good of the people” is to “be the supreme law” three years ago under dubious conditions that led to an immediate legal challenge. 

Centurion prevailed in the contract bidding over four competitors, including Corizon, a rival company that filed suit related to the bid. As has been previously reported, the multi-billion dollar healthcare provider got the contract with MODOC even though its price was higher than what lawmakers allotted for prison healthcare services. Centurion won the bidding war even though, the Corizon lawsuit alleged, the company engaged in improper correspondence with the administration of then-Gov. Mike Parson and failed to report personnel were fired over a previous bidding scandal in Tennessee. 

“Providing innovative, high-quality healthcare to those who are incarcerated will not only serve them while they are in the facilities but also better prepare them for reentering Missouri communities,” the Centurion CEO circa November 2021 said in a company press release  announcing the contract. 

Centurion has been paid more than $450 million from its MODOC contract so far, yet grievances, lawsuits and testimony from multiple incarcerated individuals and others suggest the company has provided less than “high-quality healthcare” inside state prisons. It has, however, elicited civil litigation that could lead to the company being held accountable. 

The Family of Othel Moore Jr. Holds Centurion Partly Responsible for His Death

Centurion boasted about better preparing people for reentry, but Othel Moore Jr., who was murdered by asphyxiation inside the Jefferson City Correctional Center (JCCC), had his life cut short prior to getting the chance to leave prison, and a lawsuit suggests the company bears some of the responsibility for the 38-year-old man’s horrifying execution on December 8, 2023. 

The Defender covered Moore’s killing extensively in a piece titled “The Torture-Murder of Othel Moore Jr. and Missouri’s Concentration Camp Prisons.” Moore’s family attorney Andrew Stroth described it as George Floyd 3.0 in an interview with The Defender.

Othel’s late biological mother, Doris Ann Scott, and his surviving sister, Oriel Moore, with help from a team of civil rights attorneys, filed the suit in late October 2024. 

“Moore endured a relentless onslaught of excessive and unnecessary force, including repeated deployments of OC spray, the use of shock gloves, the application of severely restrictive prone restraints, and the imposition of a spit hood, helmet, and leg wraps,” according to their complaint. It notes that officers confined Moore to a restraint cart inside a small area called a “dry cell,” and with Centurion staff watching, they ignored the man when he repeatedly begged and pleaded for his life telling them he could not breathe. He “should not have died,” it states; Moore “just needed someone to care about him.”  

It points to MODOC and Centurion “policy, training, and supervision failures” as contributing to the “unjustified use of excessive force against Othel Moore, Jr., the failure to provide medical care and the failure to intervene in the death of Othel Moore, Jr.”

In October, the family released video of what happened to Moore, which showed the man lying motionless for 10 minutes before a nurse checked on him. 

Andrew Stroth, an attorney who’s assisting with the civil lawsuit against MODOC and Centurion, could not say for certain why Centurion failed Moore or why the company has a pattern of failing to provide decent healthcare inside prisons. 

“Is it that they don’t care? I don’t know,” Stroth said. “But I know that if you watch the video, you witness individuals working for Centurion Health, along with the corrections officers, failing to provide care. And [they’re] ultimately responsible for the death of an otherwise healthy Black man, Othel Moore.” 

He accurately noted that on Centurion’s website, it states the company is a “beacon” when it comes to correctional healthcare. But, Stroth contends, the claim is belied by their repeated failure to fulfill legal and professional obligations—and by Moore’s unnecessary death. 

While one Centurion staffperson is explicitly named as a defendant in the lawsuit, executive leadership and management at Centurion are culpable for the company’s negligence too, Stroth stressed. 

“I think if taxpayers are paying money and prisons systems are paying money to hire a healthcare provider, that healthcare provider has to have adequate standards,” he added. “And a situation like this shines a bright light on their failure, because Centurion Health failed Othel Moore that day.” 

Centurion-Related Horror Stories from Prisoners Inside the JCCC 

In its three-year tenure with MODOC, Centurion has failed more than one Missouri prisoner, and multiple incarcerated persons have sought recompense for how they were treated. 

Eugene Culpepper, a prisoner in the JCCC, filed a lawsuit against Centurion and one of the nurses employed by the company in January 2023. In his suit, which ultimately got dismissed in August of that year, Culpepper wrote that he had not been given the chance to be seen by medical staff—that is, he was not given the opportunity for “sick call”—when he suffered back pain, endured asthma attacks and experienced his limbs going numb. 

As Culpepper noted in the complaint he filed and more recently reiterated to the Defender, prisoners in protective custody only receive “sick call” once a month. 

“Centurion health staff did examine me only after a great deal of pain and suffering,” he recounted.

As Culpepper, who still suffers from asthma and severe back issues, explained it, to be seen by healthcare staff required declaring a medical emergency. 

Prisoners have to fill out a form when a medical condition is not considered potentially fatal. 

Culpepper filled out the form when he had chickenpox, he shared, and by his account it took days before he was seen by medical personnel. 

 People who are not incarcerated likely do not understand that Centurion’s staff can be “non-caring at times,” he lamented. 

Homer Dugan, an 84-year-old prisoner also inside the JCCC, made a similar assessment.  

“To me it seems as though a lot of the nurses just do not care,” Dugan told the Defender in mid-December 2024. 

He acknowledged, though, there are several likely reasons for that, and it’s not necessarily on all the individual nurses. The number of nurses on staff, the long hours they work, the vexing romantic desires conveyed by some of the imprisoned men—who are, in the main, deprived of interpersonal intimacy—and the distrust Centurion personnel are encouraged to maintain vis-à-vis incarcerated persons all make it hard on prisoners in dire need medical attention, in Dugan’s analysis. 

Per his account, Dugan discovered he has cancer after he started urinating blood and experiencing blood clots. Staff ran tests to make the diagnosis after that. Several weeks later, the blood clots prevented him from urinating, he recalled, and his bloated bladder caused agonizing pain. 

“I went to our medical facility and the nurse that morning refused to see me and left,” Dugan shared. “I finally got seen and was later sent to the outside hospital and a catheter was put in me which later got infected. It can be very hard at times to get in to see a nurse.” 

He mentioned that guys have to fill out a medical service request and then sit in what they call the “tank” with other men all waiting to be diagnosed by a nurse who decides if a prisoner will get to see the one doctor inside the prison. Having to wait in the holding area full of sick men in order to get treatment means a guy is lucky if he doesn’t leave worse off than he was when he came in, Dugan lamented, adding that there are days when not everyone who waits in the “tank” gets to see a nurse. 

In addition, whether a sick prisoner is seen by a doctor can depend on the particular nurse that makes the call or on the guard that is present when the person is evaluated, Dugan explained.

He told the Defender he’s seen many men diagnosed with minor ailments by nurses and sent back without seeing the doctor only to have their health rapidly deteriorate. As Dugan described it, that happened to a friend of his who repeatedly complained about a problem until one day he broke his leg standing up, so he was taken to the transitional care unit only to die two days later. 

According to Antwann Johnson, who is also incarcerated in the JCCC, Dugan himself complained about symptoms for some time before he was finally diagnosed with cancer. If “you’re not discovered losing [consciousness] on the cell floor,” Johnson shared in a December 2024 message, “you have little to no chance at getting any healthcare attention!” 

Echoing his fellow prisoners, he told the Defender the main concern inside the JCCC is that medical staff will not treat a prisoner in a timely manner if the person’s medical issue is not considered life threatening. A prisoner whose ailment does not meet that high bar is told to fill out the health service request and is ordered back to his housing unit, Johnson explained. 

“I’ve [witnessed] several inmates denied medical attention only to die from their symptoms within several hours to a few days,” he averred, “and the [families of those men] never knew it!” 

Favoritism is also a factor, as he sees it. Guards help prisoners they personally like get needed medical attention, he disclosed. In contrast, if they view someone as a troublemaker, like they did Moore, that person is less likely to receive care as needed. 

Johnson shared with the Defender a record of his medical complaints, in which he mentioned that he tried to “self-declare for medical treatment” three times on April 4, 2023, because of numbness, pain and swelling, which he feared could be signs of a stroke, a serious blood clot or severe nerve damage. In his recollection a nurse determined his concerns did not qualify as a medical emergency, and he was told there was nothing they could do for him.

He experienced “unimaginable discomfort” for more than a week, along with “emotional and psychological distress” because he had no clue what serious condition he was dealing with, according to his medical complaint. 

“For over a week,” he wrote in the aforementioned, “this numbness, pain and eventually swelling has caused me to lose sleep and [experience] unimaginable discomfort,” and the condition caused “emotional and psychological distress” related to the uncertainty of it all. 

Given the recurring symptoms he struggles with, he told the Defender he worries he might have a serious illness. Centurion staff do not appear eager to look into it. And, Johnson explained, many prisoners who have medical complaints “live in constant fear of retribution or retaliation!” 

Men Incarcerated Elsewhere in Missouri Denounce and File Suit Against Centurion

According to Oscar Garner, problems with Centurion policy and practices are not limited to the JCCC. 

Garner, a 41-year-old man incarcerated in the Eastern Reception Diagnostic Correctional Center (ERDCC) in Bonne Terre, Missouri, “sick call” is only available four days a week, and staff only see four to five prisoners per day. And “if you don’t make it to the front of the line to be one of the [five],” Garner wrote, “you won’t get seen.” 

At South Central Correctional Center (SCCC), in Licking, Missouri, those in segregation aren’t afforded “sick call” at all, Garner attests. He spent time there, as detailed in a lawsuit he filed against Centurion and one of the company’s physicians. 

He had previously been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and provided medication for the illness, according to the legal complaint he filed. While in segregation in the spring of 2022, he asked to be seen by a doctor because the nortriptyline he had been prescribed was not working, and he was in pain, having gone 10 days without defecating, according to the complaint. In the lawsuit he also told the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri that after he was released from segregation on June 9, 2022, he put in a health service request to be seen by a doctor, but medical never responded to it. 

After speaking with a nurse and finally getting to see the Centurion physician inside the SCCC, the M.D. told Garner that, despite how much he was hurting, he did not need any medication for IBS, and he was prescribed no more, the complaint states. He went a week without having a bowel movement, vomited and could not sleep after that, it also noted. When he eventually returned to see the doctor, he was rebuffed again and, as the intestinal pain persisted, he was given no medicine for his IBS. The lawsuit detailing the above got dismissed in October 2022. 

Garner told the Defender he was never given a legitimate reason why he was taken off his IBS medication, but he added that he was informed he would need an expert witness to effectively challenge the doctor. 

Based on what he shared, the situation is not much better at the Bonne Terre facility. Appointments for “sick call” are absent at the ERDCC, he wrote in a late December message. And he attributed problems in the prison to both officers and medical staff, but to the latter, in the main, since they typically refuse to prescribe medication. There is also little recourse, as case workers usually will not distribute grievance forms; when the incarcerated do manage to submit grievances, they do not get processed, Garner explained. 

In November 2024, he filed a lawsuit against the superintendent at the ERDCC, which also lists staff on the Centurion payroll as defendants. In that suit, which was ultimately dismissed in January, he mentioned submitting a health service request only to receive no response. He then wrote to the health service administrator because, despite his discomfort, he had been denied “sick call” as well as his regular medication, per the statement of claim in that legal complaint. In addition to being constipated and finding blood in his stool, he mentioned having trouble breathing and also suffering headaches, as well as trying to manage a cut and swollen wrist while in segregation, where medical staff were not assisting prisoners. According to the lawsuit, he wrote to the warden, filed another request for care and even had his family call in, all to no avail, as he received no medical attention for the “excruciating pain” that “disrupts his sleep” and prevents him from engaging in everyday activities like writing and exercising. 

Now, some months he receives treatment, other months not so much—and at times he is taken off medication entirely, he explained. “I’m off all of my medication,” Garner wrote from inside the EDRCC in late 2024, “and no one knows why so I’m told to write [to] a doctor that [does not] exist due to the institution not having a provider of any kind.” 

Similar to what is asserted in the lawsuit Stroth helped the late Othel Moore Jr.’s family file, Garner, in his suit, referred to “a policy, practice or custom of deliberate indifference” with respect to incarcerated persons who are denied needed healthcare referrals, treatment and medicine, especially when in segregation at the ERDCC. 

Unlike Culpepper, who is not opposed to MODOC continuing to contract with Centurion, provided the company starts upholding its obligations to provide prisoners care, Garner wants to see the company gone. He cited the lack of qualified doctors and dentists on staff and the intentional denial of treatment as key reasons why. 

William Chamness, a 61-year-old prisoner inside the ERDCC, also attests to the absence of appropriate dental care. Chamness filed suit against Centurion in April 2023. His suit listed two nurses and a doctor employed by Centurion as defendants. 

In his legal complaint, Chamness noted that Centurion staff removed his teeth. Per his account, Chamness was told he would be provided fitting dentures. But, he claimed in the suit, Centurion never made the impressions of his teeth they told him they would, nor did they “provide appropriate clean-up of the wounds caused by” the removal of teeth. Chamness mentioned experiencing “ongoing pain, suffering, loss of use, [and] disfigurement” owing to Centurion’s refusal to “provide the standard of care” required. 

According to Chamness, the retaliation he has faced for filing his lawsuit, which was dismissed in March 2024, continues, and so do his oral health issues. 

“I continue to experience daily pain, loss of use of my mouth in order to eat properly, and my face is disfigured due to poor care/denture device(s),” he wrote, adding: “My inability to eat all of the food provided to me as a prisoner has caused me to [lose] weight and suffer many health issues.” 

The dentures he received do not fit and are unusable, Chamness shared, but he cannot get Centurion staff to do anything about that. 

Centurion nurses and MODOC staff “control a patient’s access to care, and each work hand-in-hand with each other in order to estop patients, including myself, from attaining access to care,” explained Chamness. 

To receive care, prisoners in the ERDCC have to fill out those health service requests, but often, he explained, they are only able to do that during “sick call,” which frequently gets canceled by both Centurion personnel and MODOC officers, resulting in no documentation of needed care getting filed. Without the record, it gives the impression care is not needed “despite droves of offender[s]/prisoners/patients that need care,” Chamness wrote. 

He told the Defender medical staffers have threatened to have officers write him up for submitting needed health care requests, and that both guards and medical staff have threatened him for submitting too many health service request forms.

Both Centurion and MODOC staff “work together each day, make fun of me and other prisoners each day together, and work to maintain their duty/assignments while not actually performing the duty/assignments that the state has paid, and continues to pay, them each to perform,” Chamness wrote. 

His situation is not unique, he stressed. Prisoners do not receive prescribed medication when they should or at all, and officers will keep incarcerated patients from going to the medical provider area, resulting in their follow-up appointments being recorded as “no shows,” Chamness explained. 

Documented Wrongdoing Adduced as Litigation against Centurion Continues

A civil lawsuit recently filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri in St. Louis offers further evidence for Centurion’s pattern of neglect—and, perhaps, the suit could be a catalyst for change inside Missouri prisons. 

Ryan Patterson, a prisoner inside the ERDCC, filed the pro se legal complaint on December 11, 2024, alleging “cruel and unusual punishment”—a violation of the Eighth Amendment—as have other incarcerated persons in similar pro se suits against the billion dollar company. 

According to the complaint, Patterson pushed an emergency button several times to self-declare for treatment because he was experiencing chest pain. Nobody came, he recalled, so he took his nitroglycerin pills as instructed. 

Patterson told the Defender he is glad a nurse visited his cell for a wellness check, which the nurses do periodically to make certain prisoners are alive “because the guards don’t care if [you] live or die,” as he put it. 

Per his Patterson’s complaint, he informed the nurse that the pain was not relenting and per his account, she checked with her boss who had said they would call him up for medical, but he waited and waited without being seen, so, fearing for his life, he self-medicated with more nitroglycerin. 

Finally, according to the suit, he was called up to medical for an EKG, only to be chained to a bench in a holding cell for nearly four hours until an officer walked past just before dinner time in the prison. 

“I’m screaming for help but by the grace of god I’m still here today,” Patterson wrote to the Defender. He added that “if they had their [wish] I’d be dead,” and then summed up the health care situation inside Missouri prisons, lamenting, “that’s pretty much how it is in M.O.D.O.C.” 

In his complaint he wrote that he was returned to his cell without ever having been seen by medical personnel. 

A July 2024 written response to a grievance Patterson filed that May was included in the legal complaint filed with the court. The director of nursing who signed the document acknowledged Centurion was in the wrong. 

“You were brought to medical on 3/15/24 but were not seen by a nurse or a provider,” he was informed in the grievance response. “Policy states you should have received an assessment.” 

The outcome of Patterson’s lawsuit, like the outcome of the suit filed by Moore Jr.’s family, have yet to be determined but could prove decisive as regards whether Centurion admits to additional wrongdoing and faces substantive repercussions for failure to provide Missouri prisoners proper care.  

Centurion did not respond to a request for comment. 

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