Corizon/YesCare/Tehum Care Bankruptcy Saga Continues; Centene & Sullivan Group Argue Over Centurion’s Liabilities

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Editor's Note

The bankruptcy saga of Corizon/Tehum Care/YesCare is back in the news. At issue now is a default on a prior bankruptcy settlement—and a negotiated resolution of that default. But before turning to these recent developments, a brief recap is in order.

In 2023, facing mounting lawsuits alleging medical neglect and abuse, Corizon employed the so-called “Texas Two Step.” Under Texas law, a company can divide into two entities. In bankruptcy, that structure can be advantageous: one entity retains the assets, while the other—holding the liabilities—files for bankruptcy. Corizon split into YesCare (assets) and Tehum Care (liabilities). Tehum’s director, Isaac Lefkowitz, acknowledged that the strategy can be used to “force plaintiffs into accepting lower settlements.”

The plan did not unfold smoothly. During mediation, a complaint alleged that the presiding judge, David Jones, had a romantic relationship with an attorney representing YesCare. Judge Jones was replaced by Judge Christopher Lopez. Around the same time, Senator Elizabeth Warren and others criticized the “abusive” bankruptcy strategy as a means of avoiding malpractice claims and unpaid bills.

A $75 million settlement was eventually reached, but incarcerated patients and families were granted the unusual right to opt out and pursue claims in court. Now Bloomberg reports that Tehum (now defunct) and YesCare fell behind on settlement payments, risking the loss of bankruptcy protections. Interestingly, attorneys representing YesCare in a lawsuit brought by an inmate in St Clair Jail (MI) have withdrawn from the case citing nonpayment. YesCare has since acknowledged default and reached a revised agreement approved by Judge Lopez, including an initial $2 million payment and adjusted terms.

This pattern is not new. As COCHS has noted before, bankruptcy has become a recurring feature of the proprietary correctional healthcare business model—resetting liabilities while operations continue.

A parallel dispute is now unfolding in Delaware between Centene and the Sullivan Brothers Family of Companies over liabilities tied to Centurion, Centene’s former correctional health subsidiary, which the Sullivan Group purchased after Centene exited the correctional healthcare market. The Sullivan Group contends that it should not be responsible for liabilities incurred before it acquired Centurion. Centene, however, argues that the purchase agreement required the Sullivan Group to assume those pre-sale liabilities and to hold Centene harmless.

What remains constant through these corporate restructurings and legal maneuvers is the continuing provision of care inside facilities—often under the same financial pressures. Lawsuits, settlements, bankruptcies, ownership changes. The names shift; the structure persists. What remains largely absent is systematic, outcome-based accountability for the healthcare of incarcerated people. Which is why COCHS continues to point to Medicaid integration and standardized quality frameworks as levers that might finally change the conversation from liability management to measurable improvement.

Improvement—wouldn’t that be a nice word to use more often in describing healthcare delivery in corrections?

Corizon/Tehum Care/YesCare Bankruptcy

Defunct prison health-care company Tehum Care Services Inc.'s former insiders and affiliates, including YesCare Corp., have allegedly failed to make months of settlement payments to creditor trusts, risking renewed litigation. They didn’t make five monthly payments of $1.5 million to two trusts meant to pay unsecured creditors and personal injury and wrongful death claimants, according to a notice filed by the trusts’ lawyers in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. The missed payments risk the loss of legal protections for insiders and a return to direct litigation from hundreds of current and former prisoners.

Attorneys representing Corizon, the medical services provider in a lawsuit filed by a former St. Clair County Jail (MI) inmate, have announced their intent to withdraw from the case. Foley, Baron, Metzger & Juip PLLC filed a motion to withdraw, citing nonpayment by its clients. In the motion, the firm described a “complete breakdown” in communication regarding payment. Corizon filed for bankruptcy in 2023, with CHS TX assuming most of its assets. The underlying lawsuit alleges that after Lisa Lee Alice Brown fell from a bunk bed and injured several vertebrae in her neck, she was not transported to a hospital for 68 hours.

Prison health-care company YesCare Corp. asked a federal court to maintain protections against thousands of prisoner injury and wrongful death suits it won during the bankruptcy of former affiliate Tehum Care Services Inc. after missing months of settlement payments. In an emergency motion filed Thursday in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, YesCare said it paid $200,000 as part of a forbearance agreement to pause default actions by creditor trusts, despite missing $7.5 million in settlement payments to the trusts. Terminating the protections would undermine a carefully negotiated bankruptcy plan.

Prison health-care company YesCare Corp. came to a deal to resolve months of missed settlement payments to trusts created through former affiliate Tehum Care Services Inc.'s bankruptcy, keeping thousands of prisoner injury and wrongful death suits at bay. YesCare acknowledged its defaults, agreed to make a $2 million initial payment and a $300,000 waiver fee, and committed to paying increased interest on past-due amounts of 8% under the deal. The arrangement was announced at a court hearing Monday in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas.

Centene, Sullivan Group, Centurion

Centene Corp once told shareholders it could bring efficiencies and improve outcomes in the multibillion-dollar market of privatized prison healthcare. But after a decade marked by dozens of lawsuits alleging prisoner harm and duping taxpayers, Centene—whose subsidiary Centurion provided healthcare services in Delaware prisons until 2023—sold its prison healthcare business. Centene is now locked in dueling lawsuits with the Sullivan Brothers Family of Companies, which purchased Centurion. The dispute centers on which company is responsible for malpractice and negligence claims dating back to Centene’s ownership. Centene alleges the Sullivan Group is reneging on its agreement to cover pre-sale liabilities and to pay a multimillion-dollar contingent fee tied to a half-billion-dollar annual contract with the Florida Department of Corrections.

Follow Ups

Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets

Editor's Comment: How homelessness and drug treatment policies will evolve in light of President Trump’s executive order, Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets, is gradually becoming clearer. At a recent Prevention Day meeting, Secretary Robert Kennedy announced a new pilot program—STREETS (Safety Through Recovery, Engagement and Evidence-Based Treatment and Supports)—as part of the administration’s shift away from the Housing First model. At the same meeting, Kennedy praised the White House’s announcement of government funding for faith-based addiction treatment programs.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the federal government would expand funding for faith-based addiction treatment as a response to mounting public drug use and homelessness in American cities. At an event marking “Prevention Day,” Mr. Kennedy introduced a $100 million pilot program called STREETS, or Safety Through Recovery, Engagement and Evidence-Based Treatment and Supports, for people who are both homeless and mentally ill or addicted. Tom De Vries, the president of Citygate Network, a Colorado-based association of 330 Christian rescue missions and ministries, said his members had relied for many years on philanthropic money and were adjusting to the possibility of a major change.

At a meeting for Prevention Day, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his Safety Through Recovery, Engagement and Evidence-based Treatment and Supports (STREETS) Initiative. STREETS furthers President Donald Trump’s July 2025 executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” It is billed as a $100-million investment to “solve long-standing homelessness issues, fight opioid addiction and improve public safety by expanding treatment.” The White House announced its Faith Office, which supports “faith-based entities, community organizations and houses of worship” in competing on “a level playing field” for federal grants and other funding opportunities. “Faith-based organizations play a critical role in helping people re-establish their connections to community,” Kennedy concurred.

MOUD & Jails

Editor's Comment: This Follow Up connects back to the October 1, 2024 Editor’s Note, in which COCHS highlighted a study that appeared in JAMA reporting that medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) were offered in only about half of the nation’s jails. At that time, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division made clear that denying continuation of a prescribed MOUD upon incarceration can violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Yet the AP article below suggests that resistance to evidence-based treatment remains widespread—with tragic consequences.

Two women from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation died in the Okanogan County jail. One of them, Amber Marchand, reportedly pleaded for treatment as she experienced withdrawal symptoms. Although Okanogan County had received a state grant intended to ensure access to FDA-approved medications for opioid use disorder, the jail failed to provide medication assisted treatments like buprenorphine or methadone. Instead, the women were given what is commonly referred to as a “kick kit”—Gatorade, ibuprofen, an antihistamine, an anti-nausea medication, and a blood pressure drug—an approach widely regarded as clinically inadequate for opioid withdrawal.

As we suggested in that earlier editorial, an institutional bias may persist that views substance use disorder not as a medical condition but as a moral failing. One is left to wonder how many correctional facilities continue to operate under that assumption—despite evidence to the contrary.

LaCrisha Cate died on the floor of a shower in the Okanogan County. She had been there for hours lying in a pool of her own vomit and an unopened Gatorade bottle by her side. She was the second citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation to die in that jail within three months. Amber Marchand died by suicide after she repeatedly asked jail staff for help with opiate withdrawal-related symptoms, which went untreated for five days. Okanogan County had received a state grant under a program meant to ensure its jail provides FDA-approved medications for people incarcerated with opioid use disorder that have been shown to be effective at alleviating severe withdrawal symptoms. But records show at the time of Cate and Marchand’s deaths, the jail instead provided their own de facto “opiate withdrawal protocol” method that medical experts say is not proven to effectively treat withdrawal symptoms: Gatorade, ibuprofen, an antihistamine, an anti-nausea medication and a blood pressure medication.

Waiting For Mental Health Services

Editor's Comment: Continuing COCHS’ ongoing theme of jails becoming de facto mental health facilities—and following last week’s story about a woman in a rural Missouri jail who died while waiting for placement in a state mental health facility—the article below provides our subscribers with statistics illustrating just how severe the wait for mental health treatment has become in Missouri’s jails.

The number of Missourians waiting in jail for services from the state’s mental health department continues to rise, with a backlog of more than 500 people. Mental Health Director Valerie Huhn told state lawmakers that 528 people are currently waiting for spots in state psychiatric hospitals for competency restoration. They wait an average of 14 months to be admitted to a hospital. With several bills filed this year designed to shrink the backlog and a federal lawsuit alleging the department has turned jails into “de facto mental health wards,” Huhn said the department hopes to use $6.1 million set aside in Gov. Mike Kehoe’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 to provide outpatient competency restoration treatment to 50 individuals.

Mississippi

Editor's Comment: Rep. Becky Currie, the Republican chair of the House Corrections Committee, has seen both progress and setbacks as her reform efforts move through the first legislative deadlines, as listed below. Of particular interest to COCHS is that a proposal for unannounced inspections did not advance. Subscribers may recall that we followed with interest when officials overseeing the Oklahoma County Jail unsuccessfully attempted to block the state department of health from conducting surprise inspections.

Measures to improve prison health care access and create stronger safeguards against the denial of care in Mississippi prisons survived the first legislative deadline, but several also died. What lived: creating a hepatitis C and HIV program in Mississippi prisons; providing prisoners with protective equipment; taking power to award health contracts away from the Corrections Department. Died: requiring medical kiosks for prisoners; redirecting funds from private law firm to legislative watchdog for prison health audit; remove requirement for advance notice before prison visits.

New York

Editor's Comment: In tracking the fallout from the murder of Robert Brooks and the subsequent wildcat strike, it appears that one of the correctional officers’ union demands—body scanning of all individuals seeking to visit incarcerated people—may be producing unintended consequences. The policy, which the state agreed to implement, is reportedly having a disproportionate impact on women visitors. There are claims that the scanners have misidentified tampons and metal implants from prior surgeries as contraband, leading to denials of entry and in some cases arrest.

Nearly a year ago, corrections officers in New York walked off the job in a wildcat strike. State officials, negotiating with the corrections officers’ union, agreed to a key officer demand: To meet with inmates in person, all visitors at state prisons would have to pass through full-body security scanners, which are supposed to better screen for contraband. In 2025, prison K-9 units made 218 visitor arrests related to contraband, according to the New York Department of Corrections. Canine units are often called in when body scans reveal possible contraband. But the upgraded security has come with consequences. Hundreds of visitors, a vast majority of them women, say they have been turned away. For many, the abnormalities identified by their scans corresponded with menstrual products, or with piercings or surgeries that had left metal inside or on their bodies.

ICE

Republican and Democratic elected officials and residents across the New York Hudson Valley region lambasted the plan to retrofit a former Pep Boys distribution center into a detention facility, expressing fears that the immigration operation would overwhelm scarce local resources and unleash a torrent of fraught encounters with federal agents. On social media, there is support for the facility, but it has been muted. Chester isn’t alone. A year into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, communities across the United States are opposing plans to convert warehouses into detention centers. The warehouses have become a potent symbol for critics who have painted them as inhumane places with grim accommodations.

Leading for-profit prison companies donated about half a million dollars to Republican members of Congress currently in office, and $57,000 to Democratic congressmembers, from 2021 through 2025. More than 70,000 people are currently being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the majority of them are incarcerated in private prisons. The Appeal has compiled information on every sitting member of Congress who has received donations from two of the largest private prison companies that contract with ICE—CoreCivic and GEO Group—along with the smaller Management & Training Corporation (MTC).

Senator Alex Padilla writes: People are dying in ICE custody. Medical care is routinely denied. Individuals held for weeks or months after courts ordered their release. Republicans in Congress are failing in their responsibility to provide oversight of ICE and the lawless actions of this administration. I visited the ICE detention center in California City. There are more than 1,400 people being held there, and that number is quickly growing. They’re facing abusive treatment from staff and excessive use of solitary confinement.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (NM) signed the Immigrant Safety act into law. A bill aimed at protecting immigrants and immigrant families in New Mexico. HB9 prohibits local and state governments from entering contracts with ICE. The Immigrant Safety Act prohibits state and local governments from entering into agreements used to detain individuals for federal civil immigration violations and requiring the termination of any such existing agreements.

A Cuban migrant held in solitary confinement at an immigration detention facility in Texas died after guards held him down and he stopped breathing, according to an autopsy report released. A witness told The Associated Press last week that Lunas Campos was handcuffed as at least five guards held him down and one put an arm around his neck and squeezed until he was unconscious. His death was one of at least three reported in little more than a month at Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent facility in the desert on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base.

Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz began telling his family that he wasn’t feeling well a few days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a California facility, his daughter recalled. Originally from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, he is one of six people who died in ICE custody in the first two weeks of 2026. Last year, 32 people died in ICE custody, the most in a single year since the agency was created. Management and Training Corporation isthe private prison company that runs the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, California.

Gerrymandering

Prison gerrymandering — the practice of counting incarcerated people at their detention facilities rather than their homes during redistricting — distorts political representation, inflating the clout of active voters living in districts with prisons at the expense of the communities from which incarcerated people come. This report assesses the level of distortion in state lower-house maps due to prison gerrymandering and illustrates how power could shift if all people were instead counted at their homes.

Staffing Shortages

State prisons in the United States became more violent and nearly 50% deadlier over the past five years as authorities struggled to keep enough guards on the job, according to a government-funded report. “We have less staff and they’re asked to do more,” said John Wetzel, a former head of Pennsylvania’s prison system and the chairman of Safe Inside, a nonpartisan research effort focused on improving state prisons. “We’re seeing the increased deaths, increase of assaults and there’s no argument that these are going up.”

Five prison employees were killed in North Carolina in 2017 — four from a failed escape attempt at Pasquotank Correctional Institution and another in an attack at Bertie Correctional Institution. Investigations that followed pointed to understaffing as a central factor. At the time of the incidents, correctional officer vacancy rates at the two prisons ranged from roughly 20 percent to 28 percent. Eight years later, that worst-case scenario is looming large for corrections leaders. Staffing levels across most of North Carolina’s prisons are as bad — or worse — than they were in 2017.

Winter

As extreme low temperatures sweep parts of the U.S., people in dilapidated jails and prisons face an increased risk of illness and even death. In Mississippi, January’s winter storms knocked out power at two correctional facilities in the Delta: the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood and the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman. The storm impacted temperature control in the facilities as well as everyday functions. Incarcerated people and advocates reported scarce food and water, interrupted access to medical care, and the inability to make phone calls.

Dozens of currently and formerly incarcerated people across the country have shared with researchers and media outlets their accounts of frigid showers, threadbare clothing and temperatures so low that they can see their breath inside their cells throughout the winter. As the eastern United States endures a frigid February, advocates for incarcerated people are bracing for the annual influx of complaints about a lack of heating and warm clothing, problems that can be exacerbated by temporary crises like power outages during a storm. They say the conditions could be considered "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, much like the sweltering conditions in prisons without air conditioning.

Studies

While the literature on criminal recidivism has extensively documented the role of independent risk factors, little is known about how these risk factors may co-occur to produce a cumulative effect. Such information would enhance understanding and be valuable for informing policy and programming. Results across two multivariate modeling strategies consistently reveal linkages between the psychological and social indices and recidivism risk. Implications for research and practice are considered.

State Roundup

California

Last fall, the city announced that the program, Berkeley CareBridge, was coming. According to recent program materials, doors will open in February.The new post-arrest and reentry program will be housed at the Signature Inn. According to the program website, "Berkeley CareBridge is a six-month post-arrest diversion and reentry support program that helps individuals stabilize after release from custody and reduce the likelihood of re-arrest."

Maine

Doug Dunbar, who once served as Maine’s deputy secretary of state, was sentenced in 2017 to 136 days in jail on drunken driving charges. He was incarcerated at the Penobscot County Jail. Since his release, Dunbar has joined the group No Penobscot Jail Expansion and become a vocal advocate for changes to the justice system, arguing that many of the people he met in jail would be better served by mental health or substance use treatment services. The question of whether to build a new jail in Penobscot County now carries higher stakes than ever, as the county faces a $7 million budget crisis driven in large part by costs associated with the aging facility.

Montana

One reason that the Park County Sheriff’s Office spent more on inmate medical/dental in six months than it budgeted for 12 months was the large number of emergency room visits, according to a presentation to county commissioners this week. During a budget presentation to commissioners, Park County Undersheriff Tad Dykstra said $45,000 was budgeted for inmate medical/dental costs for this fiscal year. The larger ER bill pertained to medical care for 19 inmates.

New York

A medical review board for the state Commission of Correction has determined that a 39-year-old man who died after suffering a rupture in his digestive system at the Clinton County jail had been subjected to “inhumane” treatment, and that his death was preventable had correction officers brought him for a medical evaluation and not ignored his pleas for help.

Ohio

Michael Papp’s body was cold and stiff inside his secluded Cuyahoga County jail cell when a corrections officer finally opened the door. Officers reportedly walked the pod 50 times, peeking inside cells for signs of life. Yet, somehow, they missed a dead body. In a 2025 compliance review of Papp’s case, state investigators called the staff response unacceptable and disgusting. It was evident, one inspector wrote in her scathing notes, that jail leadership hadn’t prepared staff for life-threatening emergencies, as directed in the state’s most recent investigation.

Oregon

An annual review of Multnomah County jails has yet again found systemic problems plaguing the system but this time has further extended the impact to the community at large. Under Oregon law, a grand jury of seven people visits, analyzes and assesses the Multnomah County jail system. Over the last decade, more and more inmates come into the jail system withdrawing from fentanyl and suffering from mental illness or lack of shelter. As a result, the jurors wrote, the jail system is essentially working as a “behavioral health and housing system” without the money to serve that purpose.

Pennsylvania

A lawsuit filed in federal court last week accuses Allegheny County Jail staff and the contractor that runs the medical unit there of failing to properly care for a man who had pneumonia and later died at a hospital. The complaint, which names as defendants the county, Allegheny Health Network and several unnamed corrections officers and medical staff, includes claims for wrongful death, failure to supervise, corporate medical negligence and denial of access to adequate medical care.

Texas

A new medical division at the Harris County Jail will seek to improve the timeliness and quality of medical care inside the state's largest pre-trial detention lockup. A state inspection of the jail in December found that inmates were occasionally not taken to doctors' appointments or the emergency room. Dr. Naomi Lockett, the jail's medical director, told commissioners Thursday that since November, there's been a significant reduction in the number of inmates receiving delayed medical care.

County jails across Texas held on average around 430 pregnant inmates each month between September and November 2025 — a statistics that has previously been tracked. What’s new information is that there were a total of 42 deliveries, 28 miscarriages and one ectopic pregnancy in this period, according to Kaitlin Hickner, a TCJS program specialist. A 2020 study of pregnant people in six large U.S. jails including in Dallas and Harris counties, Sufrin noted that this population often face additional issues that can create risks for their pregnancies such as a lack of access to medical care in the community, insecure housing, systemic racism as well as higher prevalence of trauma and mental illness.

Rikers Island

Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a new leader to run New York City’s Department of Correction selecting Stanley Richards to helm the agency. Mr. Richards, who most recently served as the chief executive of a prisoner advocacy nonprofit, will be the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the Correction Department. He will take the reins at a tense moment, after years of violence and mismanagement at Rikers Island led a federal judge to appoint Nicholas Deml, the former C.I.A. officer, to oversee the complex.

Correctional Healthcare Vendors

NaphCare

One of the country’s foremost private corrections health care providers has reduced its presence in Washington, blaming a hostile legal environment stemming from allegations of medical negligence. Family-owned, Alabama-based NaphCare — which has revenues estimated at more than $300 million — has been named in at least 40 federal lawsuits in Washington over the past decade. A year ago, the company provided jail-health services in seven Washington counties. Now, it’s present only in Kitsap, Benton and — for now — Pierce counties.

In Observation Of Presidents' Day
COCHS Weekly Update Will Not Be Published Next Week