Illinois prisons were ordered to improve health care for inmates. They've spent seven years failing.

Johnnie Flournoy is going blind. It all started with him “seeing smoke.”

Flournoy, 74, is incarcerated at Pinckneyville Correctional Center, a medium security prison almost five hours south of Chicago. He’s been in Illinois prisons since the early 1990s.

His vision started to deteriorate early in his imprisonment, and he was diagnosed with glaucoma in 2002. But when his eyesight started looking hazy, he didn’t know what was happening.

“I’m telling myself, I know I’m in a no-smoking institution,” he told the Sun-Times.

A doctor eventually told him in 2007 that his untreated glaucoma was destroying his optic nerves.

While incurable, glaucoma is easily manageable with daily prescription eye drops, the sort that a patient with insurance can get for as little as $10. But for years, as he moved from one state prison to the next, he’d never get the drops with any kind of consistency. He might get them regularly for a time. At others, he’d go months without them.

He spent years filing grievances within the prison, and sent complaints to the governor’s office. He even won two settlements after suing over his vision issues.

And after five surgeries, he’s lost all vision in his left eye. He’s now waiting for the day he wakes up and can’t see out of his right. Yet he still isn't getting his drops regularly.

“They let me go blind,” he said, “and they still ain’t doing nothing.”

IDOC did not comment on Flournoy’s medical history or his allegations of neglect.

Flournoy’s story of decades of medical neglect is a common one in Illinois prisons. It’s a full-blown crisis where the state’s critically understaffed facilities struggle to deliver proper correctional medicine to the tens of thousands of inmates in their care.

That’s despite being under a consent decree, or court-enforceable settlement agreement, to improve health care since 2019. The Illinois Department of Corrections continues to fail to provide adequate medical and dental care to incarcerated people, according to reports from an independent court-appointed monitor.

The monitor’s ninth report, filed last month, listed several deficiencies and echoed the findings from previous reports. They included, among other issues:

• The department only employs the equivalent of 16 full-time physicians across its 29 correctional facilities, which house more than 30,000 people.
  
• The department is given a budget for roughly 33 full-time physicians. Even though the monitor says staffing is "dangerously low" and advises IDOC to "increase budgeted physician staffing," the department claims it’s in compliance with the consent decree’s staffing requirements without giving evidence as to how.
  
• High turnover also plagues IDOC. Over the last six years, 49 physicians have resigned, the monitor reported.
  
• About 60% of nursing staff positions are vacant, and about a quarter of the facilities don't have a medical director to oversee care.
  
• The department has not implemented a policy for analyzing staff workload and tracking filled and vacant positions. IDOC has also not supplied the monitor with clinical performance reviews for physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, dentists, dental hygienists and dental assistants. Nor have they shared disciplinary records for those professionals.
  
• The vast majority of patient records are on paper and have not been digitized, which the monitor described as "inefficient, unreliable, and inadequate." A lack of electronic medical records makes it difficult to ensure continuity of care or to track patient's medical conditions, the monitor says.

And in a review of 15 deaths in custody since the last report in 2024, the monitor learned that three people died from asthma, deaths the monitor said were preventable.

“People are sentenced to prison. They’re not sentenced to die from preventable diseases,” said Alyssa Meurer, a lawyer with the Uptown People’s Law Center and a member of the legal team for the class-action lawsuit that triggered the consent decree.

An IDOC spokesperson shared a statement saying the department is "committed to providing safe, high-quality, and clinically appropriate healthcare to individuals in our custody and maintains a growing Office of Health Services (OHS) that oversees healthcare delivery across the Department."

But the spokesperson did not answer a detailed list of questions about the current state of healthcare in Illinois' prison system.

‘The reality is they’ve done very little.’

IDOC entered into the consent decree following a class-action lawsuit against the department for inadequate health care.

The suit began with Don Lippert. While incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center in 2010, he claimed that he was denied his twice-daily insulin shots, sending him into diabetic shock. His suit has since expanded to cover all individuals in state custody who have serious medical and dental needs.

Under the consent decree, the state promised to make systemic reforms to the prison health care system. The judge overseeing the agreement assigned an independent monitor to provide updates to the court and observe whether the state is making good on its promises.

The mandated reforms include: hire more qualified staff; implement an electronic medical record system; improve facilities and equipment to meet medical needs; maintain reliable and up-to-date data; and create an organizational structure that ensures inmates get the care they need.

In a special report from September, the monitor wrote: "At the six-year mark in the Consent Decree, IDOC has not achieved any of these provisions, significantly hindering compliance and improvements in care."

That continues to be the case, legal experts told the Sun-Times.

“The first step to making change is admitting you have a problem, and I think that’s something the state struggles with,” said Samantha Reed, a lawyer with ACLU Illinois and a member of the class-action suit’s legal team.

“The reality is they’ve done very little,” she added.

One of the few areas where IDOC has complied with the consent decree is improving the department's written policies. A spokesperson told the Sun-Times that the department overhauled its quality improvement directive, quality management program and quality improvement manual. The spokesperson also said the department has a "robust" compliance unit.

But improving policy is just one step, said Meurer with the Uptown People's Law Center.

"The monitor has repeatedly stated that IDOC does not have the adequate staff to implement the policies," she said. "So there's change on paper, but it has not actually effectuated any change within the facilities day to day with patient care."

IDOC's private vendors are also a part of the problem, like its longtime health care provider Wexford Health Sources, said Meurer and Reed. More than half of prison medical staff are employed by a vendor, according to the monitor.

For years, Wexford, a private, for-profit company, faced accusations of poor care, neglect and preventable deaths. In previous reports, the court monitor also found serious deficiencies in Wexford's practices and documented deaths from substandard medical care.

IDOC abruptly ended its contract with Wexford last summer after negotiations stalled. The state entered an emergency contract with Centurion Health, another for-profit, private health care provider for prisons.

A Sun-Times investigation last year into Centurion's record found that people under the company's care say they were repeatedly ignored, denied care and misdiagnosed. In lawsuits from several state prisons, a pattern emerged: Inmates would repeatedly complain about a health issue, were ignored by correctional and medical staff members, and their condition would worsen to the point of dangerous complications or death.

Since Centurion took over last year, incarcerated people across the state have said their health care has not improved under the new company. Some claim that they, like Flournoy, continue to deal with lapses in care including inconsistently receiving medications and not getting them on time. they

Centurion did not respond to a request for comment.

While Reed and Meurer readily call for companies like Wexford and Centurion to be held accountable, it's the state's constitutional duty to ensure the people locked up have adequate health care, they say.

"The state is confining people and preventing them from accessing health care on their own," Meurer said. "There's a reason why we're not suing Centurion or Wexford. We're suing IDOC because they're the ones responsible for making sure people get adequate medical care."

From blisters to an amputation

Though the flaws in correctional medicine do mirror larger issues with American health care, it's acutely worse for people locked up, Meurer said. They can't advocate for themselves the way a patient on the outside can. And even when they get medical appointments, they frequently miss them because there isn't a correctional officer who can take them or the prison is on lockdown.

"They are technically wards of the state, and we know from a lot of research that prison creates worse health outcomes," she said.

Take the case of Anthony Rodesky, who has been locked up in Illinois prisons for more than 20 years.

While housed at the now-closed "supermax" Tamms Correctional Center in 2011, Rodesky started developing painful blisters and sores on his right foot, according to his wife, Ranota Rodesky. As a Type II diabetic, he has long dealt with poor circulation. But the prison denied him bandages and properly fitting shoes.

The sores only got worse and his foot was operated on several times until he was diagnosed with a bone infection that triggered gangrene. By 2015, when he was at Pontiac Correctional Center, his leg was amputated below the knee.

He sued IDOC and Wexford. In July 2021, a federal jury awarded him $400,000 and he settled separately with Wexford. Despite that victory, Rodesky's care hasn't improved, his wife said.

"The money's not getting him the care he needs, and it's not getting any accountability," Ranota Rodesky said. "Just because you settle a lawsuit doesn't mean you're admitting that you were at fault. You're just doing what you can to brush this away."

Lately, Anthony Rodesky has been dealing with a new, dire medical issue. About seven months ago, the 55-year-old noticed a lump on his throat.

"It got real big fast, and he's been losing a lot of weight fast," said Ranota Rodesky, who lives in New Jersey where her husband was originally sentenced. "It started out like a quarter, and now it's like the size of a baseball."

Rodesky said it took six separate emergency requests for her husband to get a CT scan, which he finally got earlier this month. But he hasn't been able to get an appointment to go over the results nor has the lump been biopsied.

And he was just transferred from Pinckneyville to Menard Correctional Center.

Ranota Rodesky worries the lump on his throat is cancerous. If it is, she plans to move to Illinois.

"I'm gonna be their worst nightmare. They got the wrong husband," she said.

IDOC did not comment on Rodesky's medical history and his allegations of neglect.

‘I’m not going to lose my mind’

At Pinckneyville, Flournoy mostly keeps to himself. He carries a small magnifying glass to help him see and a digital watch that reads out the time and date — critical tools he fought to get for years.

He has other medical issues that aren’t getting proper treatment, including a hernia, polyps on his colon and a heart arrhythmia. He walks with a cane. He wears an eye patch made out of a shoelace and a piece of cloth over his glassy left eye and drooping eyelid.

But his family is fighting for him. Family is everything to him.

If he has an issue, his little sister Patricia Brown will doggedly call the warden’s office and prison medical director, not letting up until he gets help. She’s his crusader. They talk everyday, whether about the movies they’ve seen or the next time they’ll see each other in person.

“He keeps telling me any chance he’s got, ‘Just hold on. I’m coming home,’” Brown said.

Flournoy collects the medical records he receives and the grievances he files and sends copies to his family home in Morgan Park on the South Side. His nephew, Jimmie Brown, keeps track of everything Flournoy sends home.

Holding a suitcase overflowing with documents, Jimmie Brown said, “This is everything he sends home letting us know he’s not getting medical care.”

Those documents show IDOC ignoring Flournoy’s worsening vision.

“Patient needs all glaucoma medicine for life to prevent blindness,” his doctor at UI Health in Chicago urged in a 2015 report sent to IDOC and reviewed by the Sun-Times.

When the Sun-Times visited Flournoy in November, it had been a month and a half since he was last given eye drops.

Through it all, Flournoy has found a measure of peace with his situation.

“I’m not going to lose my mind,” he said of the day his vision fully goes. “I’m just going to be strong and realize that when it goes, it’s gone. I told my sister when my sight is gone, just get me an old hi-fi, get me the oldies and get me my headphones.”

He didn’t always feel that way. Years ago, as he despaired about not getting his eye drops, he thought about the most shocking ways to get the public’s attention on his condition.

“I need to carve in my body what’s going on and commit suicide,” he thought. His body would get transferred to Chicago, where his family and the media would see what happened to him.

“And people will wake up.”