'A lifesaver': How EJI provides healthcare to uninsured and formerly incarcerated people

Leonard Pettiway left prison nine months ago.

He grew up in Montgomery, and at the age of 67, he found himself back in his hometown with few resources and an uncertain future. “If you get out and ain’t got nothing, you might as well be homeless,” he said. “Nine times out of ten, people don’t want you around if you don’t have no money.”

Pettiway was shocked to find that the employees at the Equal Justice Initiative Health Clinic didn’t care what he did or didn’t have to offer them. They just wanted to help.

“You were on the early side,” EJI physician Dr. Margaret Hayden said during one of Pettiway’s visits this year. “Now, we’ve seen you a bunch and gotten to know each other.”

The clinic opened in early 2023 and has slowly built up its client base since then, bringing in formerly incarcerated people who already had EJI connections as well as those who happened upon the mobile clinic set up in front of parole centers.

With a brick and mortar clinic in East Montgomery and a van that regularly travels throughout the state, EJI Health has provided completely free healthcare to hundreds of people in the last year. Hayden said she and her team have seen nearly 250 patients.

“We're eager to take care of more people,” she said. “We feel like we have a pretty good system, and we can definitely see more, so we're trying to get the word out.”

EJI founder and director Bryan Stevenson said they’re looking to expand their health services, and priorities include addiction and dependency care, mental health and treating chronic illnesses like Hepatitis C and high blood pressure.

“People come out of our prisons, really, in a very vulnerable state,” Stevenson said. “This is about improving both outcomes for the people coming out of jails and prisons, but also improving public safety and improving public health. I think we're going to be able to establish that the people who access these services, the people who get the health treatment that they need, are going to have a much lower recidivism rate than the people who don't.”

‘You don't get to the part where you're going to be cured’

Pettiway was one of the clinic’s first regular patients.

“When I was in prison, I got no help. They monitored my sickness for all those years,” he said. “This place, it’s a lifesaver. You’ve got to be sorry not to get on your feet after you run into this place.”

Pettiway had Hepatitis C, a disease that attacks the liver and is common among the incarcerated population. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, one in four incarcerated people were living with Hepatitis C last year.

During his time in prison, Pettiway said he received no personalized medical care. To him, it felt like he was just a number, receiving the exact same checkup, cookie-cutter response and medication as every other man in the state’s custody.

“You go through the formalities, but you don't get to the part where you're going to be cured or nothing,” he said.

By the time Pettiway ended up at the EJI clinic, he didn’t know where his health stood.

The doctors there were able to completely cure his Hepatitis C in just a few months, refer him to a heart doctor in the area, provide him with other necessary medications and schedule almost monthly checkups.

Others healed

Dr. Hayden runs EJI Health alongside her husband Dr. Sanjay Kishore, registered nurse Ryan Pratt, clinic manager Meghan Hunter and a few others. They consider themselves a dedicated team, and they care for patients on a more personal level than the average doctor’s office.

Recently, Hayden and Kishore physically drove to an Alabama prison to deliver medication for a patient who had been reincarcerated for a parole violation.

On a separate occasion, the team showed up at the house of a Birmingham man who had been trying to make it to the clinic for months. He initially called in after seeing the Montgomery Advertiser’s June 2023 article announcing the clinic’s grand opening.

“We brought our stuff, threw it in the SUV, showed up at his house, did blood work and got stuff spun up, got it to the lab and got those results back to him,” Pratt said. “It's been weighing so heavy on him for so long.”

The team has traveled to nine day reporting centers across the state, offering care up to Huntsville and down to Mobile.

With the personalized care and deep investment from each healthcare worker into every patient, though, come some difficult emotions when treatment doesn’t end in a positive outcome.

“I think we had a sense of how hard it would be for reentry into the free world from prison, but now we've seen a couple of journeys where it's just so, so hard,” Kishore said.

He specified struggles with the fact that Alabama has not expanded Medicaid. In one instance, a patient was urinating blood, and the EJI doctors couldn’t get him in to see a urologist “without jumping through hoops and paying hundreds of dollars.”

“The odds are stacked against folks. Then when it comes to the number of folks that have been reincarcerated for the most minor violations of parole, it's been really saddening to see,” Kishore said. “We really feel like we're helping folks get on the right path. We feel like with health care, with support, you can improve public safety, but folks don't have a chance.”

How to become an EJI patient

While EJI is prioritizing care for people who have been incarcerated, you do not have to have been to prison to become a patient. The clinic also cares for people who are shut out of healthcare in other ways, including those who participate in EJI’s anti-hunger program.To find out if you’re eligible and schedule an appointment, you can call EJI Health at (334)239-9740 or email ejihealth@eji.org. The clinic is located at 421 St. Luke’s Drive.

Hadley Hitson covers children's health, education and welfare for the Montgomery Advertiser. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to the Advertiser.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: How EJI provides healthcare to uninsured, formerly incarcerated people