Joseph Watson sits at a table in the visitation room on Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2018, at the Boonville Correctional Center in Boonville, Missouri. Watson was diagnosed with hepatitis C before his arrest. He’s fought for treatment since the Food and Drug Administration released the first cures in 2013. Before that, he had been approved to use Interferon, a medication that was much less effective and had serious side effects. “I couldn’t understand how I went from being approved for treatment with the drug that wasn’t very efficacious, to being denied treatment to a drug that was extremely effective,” Watson said.

Joseph Watson’s inmate number appears on his name tag on Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2018, at the Boonville Correctional Center in Boonville, Missouri. Watson said Corizon doesn’t have an effective way of treating inmates with hepatitis C because it only treats inmates who are considered “priority one,” meaning the more chronic cases of hep C. “I can understand why they would want to treat the sickest first,” he said. “But here's the problem, they don't move down the list. They wait for you to ascend the list. They're waiting for you to become a priority one.”

Joseph Watson talks about his experience with medical care in the prison system on Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2018, in Boonville, Missouri. Because he wasn’t getting any treatment for hep C from the department, Watson and his family offered to pay for it themselves but he said the department still denied that request. “The only thing they told me in the in the form that they sent me from central office was since they have an outside contractor for medical care that individual billing and payment is not an option,” Watson said.