Wisconsin inmate Darnell Price watched a golf-ball-size lump on his thigh grow as large as a football in 2021. The prison’s physician, Dr. Joan Hannula, did not order a biopsy. Months later, a doctor at a different prison ordered the test and diagnosed him with Stage 4 soft-tissue cancer. The state granted a compassionate release for Price, 52. He filed a federal lawsuit against Dr. Hannula and four other medical employees. She surrendered her medical license in California in 2004, then pleaded guilty to a drug possession charge and no contest to a charge of forging a prescription. In Wisconsin, where the arrests of prison officials last month raised urgent questions about inmate care, Dr. Hannula is not an anomaly, an examination by The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch found. Nearly a third of the 60 staff physicians the state corrections system has employed over the past decade have been censured by a state medical board for an error or a breach of ethics, a high concentration given how rare it is for a doctor to be formally reprimanded.
Almost all those censured staff physicians were disciplined before they began working in the state’s prisons.
Many have faced lawsuits from inmates saying they made errors that led to serious harm. At least 32 of those cases over the past decade have ended in settlements, for a combined $692,000. Dr. Hannula has denied that she was negligent in Price’s care. Beth Hardtke, a Corrections Department spokeswoman, said that all prison system doctors must have an unrestricted Wisconsin medical license. She said the department allowed the hiring of doctors with disciplinary records so long as they completed the education or treatment programs required to rehabilitate their licenses, standards similar to those in place at hospitals and clinics outside the prison system. Dr. Sheldon Wasserman, a former chairman of the state’s Medical Examining Board who reviewed a list of prison doctors and their disciplinary histories said many would have probably had trouble getting hired at hospitals and in other settings because of those histories. “A lot of these people are not employable,” he said. The vast majority of U.S. physicians have never been disciplined by state regulators.