Before incarceration, I had always heard about how bad the medical department was at New Jersey State Prison. Yet, much of society seems to think that prisoners receive a free ride when it comes to medical car, when they, themselves, have to pay full throttle for theirs.
As I’m lying in a St. Francis hospital bed one day awaiting knee surgery, a nurse asks me if everything it okay. My answer was no because I was feeling anxious about the surgery. Right before I was put under anesthesia, the doctor performing the procedure was reviewing my chart, and the way he held the marker told me that he was ready to mark the wrong place. I, an inmate, had to tell him that he was about to operate on the wrong leg! Imagine waking up having received surgery on the wrong leg? Stories like this happen often to people inside NJSP. And it all starts from the only medical main street we have: requesting a sick-call. As you will see, there’s nothing free about it.
Reports have said that New Jersey taxpayers pay more than half a million dollars a day. I wonder where all the taxpayers’ dollars have gone because it sure doesn’t seem like it’s being spent on proper procedures and medical care for inmates. If it was, then those daily millions should surely prevent a medical practitioner from nearly operating on a patient’s wrong leg.
Rutgers University Correctional Healthcare has been the provider, but not the overseer, of where the money for medical care goes or what is done with the money. A closer look needs to be taken at exactly how money is allocated for medicine, surgeries, x-rays and even a simple sick-call. Cutting corners seems to be more important than proper cutting or incisions during surgeries. These medical practices will either cost someone their job or cost someone their life. Neither scenario sounds so free.
Some may say that the reason for spotty treatment and high tax dollars is due to the rise in inmate population. Even if that were the case, why is an inmate told that the state doesn’t have the budget whenever something is needed as serious as heart surgery or as simple as an MRI?
NJSP has a copay system in place for sick-call visits. The co-pay (at the time of this writing) is $5 a visit and $1 for medications – not bad, I admit. The problem, however, is that some inmates may only earn $1.50 to $3 a day, while the cost of living within New Jersey prisons has ballooned to an unaffordable high.
Inmates hold a warranted mistrust with the medical department because so many of our peers have been misdiagnosed and have died due to inadequate care. On the flip side of things, several prisoners have also survived some poorly performed medical procedures and are significantly richer because of it. But was it really worth it? This writer and podcaster of I Can U Can, Jaime Centeno, was diagnosed with H-Pylori, which is a condition that attacks the stomach due to ingesting food or water infested with rat feces. I visited the medical department for about six months, and not one so-called medical professional was able to figure out what was wrong with me. I was told, “It’s just a stomach ached.”
I made it my business to report to sick-call every week because I knew something was seriously wrong with me. Finally, a provider, who shall remain nameless because she was the only one who cared enough to test me for everything under the sun, had finally gotten to the root of the problem.
Some inmates won’t even utilize the medical department’s sick-call because of incidents like the above mentioned. After months of investigating, I discovered an entire population of inmates with the same problems that I had. I’m grateful that NJSP made me pay for my medical records because now I can share what happened to me through certified documentation. And, as mentioned, those records were not free.
During the last fiscal year, New Jersey has paid University Correctional Healthcare for the contract of $183.1 million, up from what the state paid in 2005 – $127.3 million. Dana DeFilippo, on February 17, 2026, released a report on the New Jersey Monitor, stating that, “New Jersey prisons hold fewer people, but costs continue to rise.”
Anyone continuing to claim that I am just here receiving “free” medical care and that their tax dollars are going to waste, I want you to know that I agree in part. Your tax dollars are going to waste. But, if I have to explain to a doctor that he’s about to operate on the wrong leg, then this so-called free care almost cost me one of my major limbs.
Our sick-call means that we are fighting tooth-and-nail to receive minimal quality healthcare. Take it from me, some third-world countries have better healthcare that the prisons in New Jersey. How is that possible in a so-called free country that doesn’t deal with pesos, but instead has a budget of $1.2 billion? Now that’s what I call “sick.”
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