By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Ashley Ellis weighed just 87 pounds when she reported to the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Vermont to serve a 30-day sentence for “careless and negligent operation of a motor vehicle.” Two days later, she was dead.

As Terry J. Allen reports for In These Times, Ashley suffered from severe anorexia and bulimia. She died because the understaffed, profit-driven prison health service contractor, Prison Health Services (PHS), failed to give her potassium supplements that kept her heart beating normally. Investigators later learned that staffers nicknamed Ashley “Potassium Girl” because she begged so frantically for her medicine.