By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Floridians are paying Centurion of Florida L.L.C., the state’s prison health care provider, up to $2.8 billion over five years. And it seems only the lawyers who sue Centurion closely monitor what the strictly-for-profit company does with all that money.
No one says prisoners should be coddled with concierge services. But lawsuits claim Centurion provides abysmally awful care: by slow-walking cataract surgery until inmates go blind; by withholding treatment with fatal results for common ailments such as colitis; and, most shockingly, by making it easy for Tristin Murphy, a schizophrenic man in pre-trial detention, to kill himself with a chainsaw.
Centurion, which until 2011 was known as Centene Corporation, is paid to provide comprehensive medical, dental, and behavioral health services to inmates housed in over 80 state correctional facilities statewide. So are Floridians reaping a decent return on their Centurion investment?
“It’s a private company that’s getting a large amount of taxpayer money and a very large part of the Department of Corrections budget, meaning there should be some appropriate scrutiny,” said Dante Trevisani, executive director of the nonprofit Florida Justice Institute (FJI). The Miami-based public interest law firm has a decades-long track record of using litigation to force prison reform.
In October the FJI sued Centurion and Ricky Dixon, secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections, to make sure prisoners who need cataract surgery have it fast enough to help them. Delaying these surgeries for months or, in some cases, years constitutes extreme medical neglect that violates the Constitution, the FJI complaint alleges.
“Rather than providing a quick and simple surgery, defendants have allowed hundreds of people, many of them seniors, to become totally blind,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Erica Downs was quoted in a FJI media release. “Not only are they now at risk for permanent vision loss, but they are far more likely to suffer from falls and fractures and be abused in prison.”
For example, the complaint describes the plight of inmate Randall Barde, who is totally blind in his left eye and urgently needs a specialist to save his right eye. Eight years ago he had the blurry vision that cataracts cause; after visits to seven eye doctors spaced out over months and years as his eyesight worsened, Barde finally had complex surgery – at that point, not much of a remedy.
Now pending in Tallahassee federal court, the lawsuit is a proposed class action on behalf of an estimated 2,000 Florida prisoners. FJI is working with pro-bono counsel from Winston & Strawn’s offices in Washington, D.C., and Miami.
Trevisani said Centurion’s lawyers are taking a hard line on releasing the medical records he needs to make the case for class action certification, which the judge is expected to grant or deny in six to nine months. Certification would essentially win the case; a denial would portend defeat.
“They’re refusing to produce the medical records of anybody other than the two named plaintiffs,” Trevisani said. The discovery dispute is set for a hearing on June 15.
CENTURION BLAMES THE INMATES
Centurion’s lawyers, from the Tampa law firm of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, deny in court documents that their client is responsible or liable for the prisoners’ vision problems.
Among their 14 listed defenses – plus a general denial and a catch-all in case something helpful turns up in discovery – is this one: “The damages allegedly suffered by Plaintiffs, if any, were the result of their own acts and/or their failure to mitigate their own damages.”
The horrific 2021 suicide of Tristin Murphy, 37, at the South Florida Reception Center in Doral inspired a previous FJI lawsuit, intense lobbying by Cynthia Murphy, Tristin’s mother, and a state law effective Oct. 1, 2025. Now, mentally ill people must be tracked to avoid self-harm and may be eligible for outside treatment instead of languishing in jail – or worse – until their trials.
Still, the law does nothing to improve the mental health, medical, substance abuse and dental care Centurion is supposed to provide for almost 90,000 Florida inmates under the terms of its contract funded by state taxpayers. Centurion of Florida is a subsidiary of privately held Centurion Health, which lists more than 12,000 employees working at 325 correctional facilities in 14 states.
The Florida Correctional Medical Authority (CMA), an independent agency within the state health department, exists to oversee prison health care through periodic site inspections. When CMA finds a problem it drafts a corrective action plan that stays in place until the problem is resolved – at least on paper.
Notably, when Murphy died on Sept. 16, 2021, state authorities weren’t actively supervising Centurion’s mental health services at the South Florida Reception Center. The facility had completed an action plan after a damning 2017 mental health survey; it was overdue for another inspection.
The wrongful death lawsuit FJI pursued in federal court on behalf of Murphy’s family was settled confidentially and dismissed in 2024. Defendant Patricia Banchs, a psychiatric nurse, examined Murphy during a psychotic episode and had to call in security; yet “incredibly,” the complaint says, she labeled Murphy in such a way that he was placed in a work detail, got hold of the chainsaw, and used it on himself.
In court papers Banchs denied she did anything wrong. “Any injury to Plaintiff was caused wholly or in part by [Murphy’s] own acts, omissions, failures to care for himself, or illegal or wrongful conduct,” her lawyers wrote.
As of last week Banchs was employed by Centurion, according to her LinkedIn profile.
THE PRICE OF INDIFFERENCE
The public’s usual indifference to horror stories about prison health care doesn’t surprise Dr. Mark Stern, who served as a federal court-appointed monitor for state and local correctional facilities.
“I think one of the underlying reasons that we as a country don’t put more money into health care for people in prison is that we don’t provide enough health care to the people who are outside prison, and therefore the community doesn’t see prison as the first priority,” he told Florida Bulldog. Stern is on the faculty of the University of Washington School of Public Health.
In his view, taxpayers need to acknowledge they always subsidize inmate health care – one way or another. Ex-convicts with untreated or undiagnosed illnesses wind up in emergency rooms or with far-advanced diseases that require expensive cures.
“That’s why the public should care,” Stern said. “We’re going to be paying for their health care and if we make them healthier, we do better as a community.”
In 2019, an independent audit of Florida’s prison health care concluded it would be “feasible” to insource these services by absorbing them into the corrections department. Estimated annual savings from vendor profits and overhead would be $40 million to $45 million.
But the findings went nowhere. Not coincidentally, Centurion zealously protects its corporate interests with lobbying and campaign contributions to state legislators.
The current five-year contract between Centurion and the corrections department, good through June 30, 2028, guarantees Centurion a percentage to cover overhead, administration and profit, while reimbursing the specific costs of care. Critics see an incentive to cut costs and make the company look economical but no incentive to ensure at least minimally standard care.
“This is a contract where the government saves money when they use fewer or less expensive services than budgeted,” Wanda Bertram said. She’s with the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative, an Easthampton, Mass., think tank that studies incarceration.
Her group recommends insourcing prison medical care to state-run health and human services, but not correctional, agencies, “It would be better because prisons are concerned with security issues and that often leads to situations where security takes precedence over health,” Bertram said.
Privatization has human costs the public largely ignores. “The attention to date is focused on saving money with little attention or interest in the prisoner death rate increasing over 1,000 percent since health care was originally privatized,” David M. Reutter wrote in Prison Legal News (PLN)for April 2020.
“Prisoners are indeed an expendable population in Florida,” according to Reutter, an inmate at the Cross City Correctional Institution near Gainesville who is serving a life sentence for the 1988 murder of Barbara Friedman in New Port Richey. He’s a contributor to PLN, a monthly publication of the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center in Lake Worth Beach.
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