Mississippi prisoners were likely left without adequate dental care for months as the state’s private prison health care contractor failed to meet staffing requirements and the Department of Corrections failed to document the problem, according to a new legislative watchdog report.

In a report published on Friday, the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance, Evaluation and Expenditure Review, or PEER, found staffing shortages overseen by VitalCore Health Strategies, the Kansas-based private company that receives hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to provide medical care in Mississippi’s prisons under a contract with the Mississippi Department of Corrections.

The report, which focuses on dental care in nursing homes and prisons, also found that the Department of Corrections, beyond looking at staffing levels, could not produce any documentation showing it was monitoring VitalCore’s compliance with the lucrative contract awarded to the company. The findings suggest that Mississippi prisoners have been put in harm’s way by the government entities in charge of their care.

“The lack of monitoring lowers MDOC’s ability to hold VitalCore accountable for providing services and increases the possibility for inmates to receive insufficient care,” the report said.

The combination of shortcomings increased the risk of untreated medical needs and limited Mississippi’s ability to hold its contractor accountable, even as MDOC sought millions of dollars in financial penalties for staffing shortfalls — all of which has been previously reported by Mississippi Today.

Friday’s report follows numerous installments in Mississippi Today’s Behind Bars, Beyond Care series, which has documented alleged routine denial of health care in state prisons. The series includes reports of potentially thousands of people living with hepatitis C going without treatment, an untreated broken arm that resulted in amputation and delayed cancer screenings. The series has also provided an inside view of discontent among high-ranking officials inside the prison system, with one ex-corrections official turning over private communications between former colleagues showing them lamenting the quality of care provided by VitalCore.

The watchdog report also reveals the department is in the process of finalizing a contract through the Mississippi State Personnel Board to hire an external contract monitor to assist with keeping tabs on VitalCore. This means that MDOC plans to outsource its role in ensuring VitalCore provides the care it’s paid to provide.

The report said MDOC reviewed the findings and elected not to provide a formal response. Spokespeople for MDOC and VitalCore did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mississippi Today about specific findings in the report.

Those findings included the revelation that VitalCore’s staffing hours for dental professionals fell below contractual requirements every month from January to June 2025, with unfilled hours ranging from 31% to 57%. Dental directors filled only 43% of required hours, dentists 59%, and dental assistants 69%—all below contract standards.

These staffing shortages “decrease the likelihood of high quality dental care for inmates and increase the likelihood of overworking the dental professionals on staff,” the report said.

VitalCore blamed the unfilled staffing hours on employee “paid time off, sick time, military leave, staffing vacancies, and statewide dental professional shortages.” The company also claims there has been no reduction in dental services or any delay in providing care. But the legislative watchdog said the high percentages of unfilled staffing hours for dental professionals put “the contractor’s ability to provide quality dental care for inmates in question.”

The shortages have likely multiplied the workload for the current dental staff, the report added.

The watchdog also confirmed a Mississippi Today report from May, which revealed that MDOC requested over $4 million in paybacks from VitalCore due to staffing shortages. The agency requested back $500,000 specifically due to a shortage of dental professionals.

MDOC seeks money back from VitalCore if the required number of staffing hours falls below 90% for physicians, dentists, psychologists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants and below 85% for all other staff positions.

But other than monitoring VitalCore’s staffing levels, MDOC could not provide the watchdog with any documentation showing it was holding VitalCore accountable for potential failures to meet the terms of its contract.

The report found insufficient, inconsistent, mislabeled and missing data in VitalCore’s dental care records, which leaves oversight officials in the dark about whether prisoners are getting the dental care they need.

For example, dental sick call data was stored in a PDF format that wasn’t suitable for analysis, requiring manual counting and increasing the risk of error, the report said. Dental records were sometimes missing from patient charts, despite MDOC policy requiring such classification.

While the report acknowledges that Mississippi prisons have done enough to maintain accreditation, the lack of oversight “casts uncertainty on the quality of dental care VitalCore is providing to inmates and the internal mechanisms VitalCore utilizes to ensure quality.”