By the end of 2016, Nicholas Bailey had no teeth. A Michigan prison dentist had removed all of them because they were decaying.

“I’m in pain,” he wrote in a series of complaints to prison staff, begging for dentures. “I cannot eat because I have no teeth.”

But instead of giving him dentures, the medical staff gave him soft food and told him he’d have to wait, even though he said his gums were swollen and bleeding. That’s because, under the Michigan Department of Corrections policy, prisoners can get dental care during their first two years in prison only if the treatment is considered urgent — and being toothless does not count.

Even among prison systems that limit dental care, Michigan’s policy is an outlier — and one of many issues described in a years-long lawsuit over dental care. In court filings and interviews, dozens of prisoners complained that their decaying teeth were left to rot and ache. Some said they’d been pressured into having otherwise fixable teeth pulled, by practitioners who asked them to pick between living in pain and losing a tooth.

“Most people in society have at one point in time had some type of tooth pain, and they know how bad it can be,” said Daniel Manville, the Detroit-based lawyer who is suing the state’s prison system and its medical providers over dental practices. “But in a system where you have to wait two years for dental care, it’s barbaric.”

Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz said the agency’s dental care does not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and is “far better than what the majority of the prisoners received prior to entering prison.” He declined to comment on individual allegations in the pending litigation.

Read the full article about inadequate dental care in prisons by Keri Blakinger at The Marshall Project.