There’s no arguing that Yolanda Evett Patterson was into the kinds of things that could wind up making her a statistic.

After she and a cousin were arrested on charges of shoplifting two garter belts at a Sears store three months ago, the 28-year-old Gastonia, N.C. woman collapsed in the Gaston County Jail. She had complained of breathing problems when she was arrested, but apparently, no one at the jail took her complaint seriously enough until it was too late.

Her cousin told The Charlotte Observer that jail guards joked that Patterson was “a good actor.”

But Patterson wasn’t acting. She later died at the hospital. An autopsy recently revealed that a combination of alcohol and cocaine killed her.

Now, according to the Observer, Patterson’s death, as well at the recent death of another jail inmate, have generated debate about the quality of that jail’s privatized health care services; whether it’s wise to expect good health care on the cheap for inmates who, like Patterson, likely carry with them a number of medical problems and addictions.

Yet Gaston County officials renewed its contract with Prison Health Services three days after Patterson’s death in August.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The privatization of jail and prison services is big business. It’s a business that won’t stop as long as companies are able to make money off the backs of downtrodden blacks like Patterson – who make up a disproportionate number of the million-plus people in U.S. prisons and jails – and save the taxpayers money at the same time.

Ken Kopczynski, executive director of Private Corrections Institute – a Florida-based company that monitors privatization of prison health care – told the Observer that large companies are interested in making a profit, so they cut costs where they can.

Sometimes, he said, inmates get the wrong medication or no medication because workers believe they are faking.

That says quality of care isn’t the issue. Efficiency is.

Unfortunately, more and more black people are becoming potential cash cows for the corrections contracting industries that are providing services in many prisons and jails. According to 2002 statistics from the Justice Department, black women are five times more likely to be incarcerated than white women. Many of them land in jail or in prison because of drugs – or because of crimes they commit while under the seduction of drugs. And there are still more black men in jails and in prisons than in colleges.

That may not change anytime soon.

But the deaths of Patterson and others should get black people to thinking about a new approach to discouraging young black people from committing crimes and using drugs by showing them how their bad choices in life are making big companies rich.

Instead of simply warning them about the dangers of drugs and the threat of being locked up, maybe its time to anger them with the news that there are companies out there waiting, like vultures, for them to slip up and come to jail.

Maybe it’s time to tell them while life’s struggles, such as not being able to get a decent job, may make the temptations of crime alluring, by yielding to that temptation they may wind up creating jobs and making money for a private company that would be hard-pressed to hire them or anyone who looks like them.

None of this is to say that inadequate or questionable care by private contractors in prisons and jails should go unchecked. And I can’t help but believe that if paramedics had been more sensitive in dealing with Patterson, maybe someone would have decided that to take her to the hospital or to a detoxification facility instead of to jail.

But the notion that private companies are profiting, in large part, off the pathologies that plague our community ought to anger us. It ought to anger us especially when many of us descend into those pathologies when we can’t get decent jobs, or access to the education or social capital that we need to thrive.

From the looks of things, Patterson may have been a victim of medical neglect. But she also was a victim of her own unfortunate choices. And the fact that county officials renewed a contract with the private health company under whose watch she died shows how those choices continue to fatten the pockets of people who could care less about us or our communities. It ought to make us mad.

Mad enough to stop making them rich.