I encourage all prisoners, former prisoners, and families of those presently in the custody of the AZ Department of Corrections to contact Attorney General Holder, as well, with your personal stories related to your safety or that of a loved one in prison. Now is the time to strike - the feds need to be dragged into this by more than just me. They
need to hear all of you calling them out to take some responsibility
for neglecting this mess. It's not like this is the first time they have
heard from me, anyway...
Please send me a copy of what you write so I can post it here, too.
----------------
chalk art on sidewalk: margaret jean plews
photograph: PJ Starr (phoenix 2011)
Margaret Jean Plews
PO Box 20494
Phoenix, AZ 85036
480-580-6807
"Our
strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it.
To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our
music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our
sheer relentlessness, and our ability to tell our own stories..."
- Arundhati Roy
June 7, 2014
The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Attorney General, US Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Dear Attorney General Holder;
I am writing to provide a citizen’s rebuttal of
Governor Jan Brewer’s statements of May 1, 2014 in her letter to you regarding the Prison Rape Elimination Act,
which grossly misrepresented conditions in the state prison system
during her reign. I am also intending this letter to serve as a formal
request for a CRIPA Investigation into the pervasive patterns and
practices at the Arizona Department of Corrections that place prisoners
at exceptionally high risk for sexual victimization and complications
from unresolved trauma, especially women, the mentally and
otherwise-impaired, and LGBT prisoners.
I am emailing this letter with relevant links embedded, but will also
be snail- mailing a copy to you with supporting documents (as well as
some of my artwork, memorializing the ghosts of Jan Brewer and Chuck
Ryan).
By way of introduction, I am the author/editor of the blog
ARIZONAPRISONWATCH.ORG, which I began writing five years ago after the
death of prisoner Marcia Powell
revealed disturbing practices and attitudes at the Arizona Department
of Corrections. My particular concern was the mentally ill women at
ASPC-Perryville, at first. I recognized in Marcia’s life story the same
elements of the numerous women I had come to know and love in my
many years working with people who were trying to survive while homeless, addicted and severely mentally ill in Ann Arbor.
I also identified with her - I myself am a recovering alcoholic and
addict, and could have landed in prison under draconian drug war and
repeat-offender sentencing had I been caught at any number of things
earlier in my life, especially if it was in Arizona (what but a “repeat
offender” is an addict, anyway?). I also have bi-polar disorder and a
bad attitude when it comes to authority, and could have easily been in
Marcia’s cage that day myself.
If you are unfamiliar with the case, Marcia was doing 27 months for a
$20 blow job she agreed to give an undercover Phoenix cop one fateful
day, and died in a cage in the Arizona sun in May of 2009, at
ASPC-Perryville. That was after an extended “suicide watch” in the 107
degree heat, during which time a prisoner is supposed to be checked on
every 10 minutes. After ignoring Marcia’s pleas for relief for four
hours (one guard walked away offering no aid knowing she had even
defecated on herself) - officers eventually noticed she had collapsed
from the elements with second degree burns on her body and her organs
failing; her core temperature at the hospital still exceeded the ability
of thermometers to read it, which only went as high as 108 degrees. Not
realizing she had a legal guardian and an adoptive mother, Ryan pulled
the plug on her life support before the stroke of midnight - she died
shortly thereafter.
chalk art by margaret j plews photo by PJ Starr
AZ DOC Central Office, Phoenix
(Thanksgiving 2011)
DOC officers never expected that Marcia Powell would die out there because
they had just left another woman in that cage for 20 hours 3 days earlier,
and she didn’t die. See, Marcia’s death was horrific, but it’s not
really shocking that it happened - the only wonder was that the DOC got
away with punishing prisoners in the heat that way for so long.
That was less than five months into Charles Ryan’s tenure as Interim
Director at the Arizona Department of Corrections, but he had begun
disassembling the more rehabilitative and empowering programs his
predecessor had implemented and imposing new policies immediately upon
taking office. A former DW of Ryan’s
alleged to the AZ Attorney General
that the change the new director made about how to house cellies
resulted in at least two homicides within the first 18 months of his
rise to power there. But Ryan had moved up through the ranks under the
more brutal directors whose bullying style of management he appears to
have emulated, and thus played a large role for decades in cultivating
the policies and ethos at the AZ DOC that are so deeply hostile towards
prisoners who exercise their right to not be subjected to cruel and
unusual punishment. That tendency to resolve issues with violence or the
threat of it trickles down from admin to officers to prisoner, and
eventually ignites the flames that can bring a prison to its knees.
The good governor talked about Arizona’s “long traditions” of
protecting citizens in custody - wow, is she out of touch. She hasn’t
read Prof. Mona Lynch’s “
SUNBELT JUSTICE”
yet, about the trailblazing role the state has played in implementing
draconian sentencing and correctional practices over the past 3 decades -
the increase in criminalization for politics and profit that the rest
of the country has seen the folly of and begun to abandon.
Its actually because of this state’s long tradition of depriving
prisoners both of their rights as well as the most basic tools they need
in order to fight for them that the AZ DOC is in such shameful
condition now. Arizona’s
1990 constitutional amendment excluding prisoners from the definition of crime victim (and related rights and resources), the
Lewis v Casey decision in 1996 eliminating the right of prisoners to access a law library among other things, and the Clinton-era
Prison Litigation Reform Act (
heavily lobbied for by then DOC Director Terry Stewart) were collectively devastating.
I have volumes of letters that will lead you to both victims and
perpetrators of countless civil rights abuses precisely because the
grievance procedure on most yards is a sham and the
DOC obstructs efforts by prisoners to file suit by creating obstacles - especially for illiterate, Spanish-speaking, and mentally ill or developmentally disabled prisoners. In fact, the DOC has
NO POLICIES translated into Spanish,
despite nearly 20% of their population being foreign nationals, mostly
from Spanish-speaking countries. I’ve been recruiting people to do the
translations myself, as this is not a concern of the DOC’s so long as no
Spanish-speaking prisoners grieve the lack of Spanish-language
policies.
This means that Spanish-speaking prisoners (and other
non-English-speakers) apparently need to rely on the skills of untrained
staff and fellow prisoners who happen to speak some dialect of Spanish
when they need to
speak to medical, for example, or appeal a disciplinary action, or grieve their housing assignment. Most just suffer their time in silence.
If prisoners could fight abuse and neglect more effectively
themselves, the DOJ and ACLU wouldn’t have to do it for them, and you
know it as well as I do, Mr Holder. So does the AZ DOC - they put an
extraordinary amount of energy into preventing prisoners from learning
to articulate their grievances and use persuasion, negotiation and civil
law to effectively change their world. There’s a
prisoner petition,
of sorts, going around that expresses well the barriers they encounter
on their way to the courts while trying to exhaust administrative
remedies, and offers some proposed solutions, as I recall. It is worth a
look by your people.
As a result of a disempowered prisoner population (and, some argue, extremely weak correctional officers unions in AZ), the
state prisons are fire traps, and prisoners often complain they are in
decaying facilities with mold growing freely in corners, rats and roaches competing for space with the people,
feces and blood smeared on the wall in suicide watch cells,
inoperable hot water heaters in the winter and non-existent air
conditioning in the summer, and scarcely enough food in the sack-lunch
“sedentary diets” given to those in detention, administrative
segregation and maximum security to keep them from starving to death.
More prisoners are fleeing the violence on the yards than are being
punished for perpetrating it.
AZ DOC’s medical and psychiatric care is not just deplorable in its
negligence, it’s outright abusive, and the DOC has as much to do with
that as any of the other parties involved:
Parsons v Ryan was filed
before the system was even privatized, after all. When I started
blogging on the prisons the only thing one could find about AZ DOC on
the internet was pretty much what the state wanted you to see. Now you
can easily Google “arizona prison health care” to see how much things
got worse when
Wexford and
Corizon
came in to feed off of the sick and dying; Director Ryan has lost
control over the department’s squeaky clean public image, among other
things. His own well-funded propaganda machine is failing him, as are
all levels of management and administration, apparently.
THE FIREHOUSE, Phoenix AZ
40-foot sidewalk mural memorializing the ghosts of jan brewer...
I met with director Ryan and his classification staff in December of
2013, along with Dianne Post from the NAACP here, the primary author of a
lengthy letter to him about gay and trans prisoner safety based on my
correspondents. I don’t think he realized how much of what he and
his people had to say was disturbing to the outside observer;
some of the documents from that meeting - detailing how serious the need for safety is in the AZ DOC - are in the packet.
According to the DOC, 75% of detention cells are full of guys who are
unacceptable to or just plain uncooperative with the racialized gangs
running the yards - those are the prisoners I hear the most from. The
guys pass my name and addy around the detention cells as they do the 805
dance from prison to prison, because I send them the info they need to
fight the DOC - stuff like the
Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook. It costs me a
few hundred bucks a month in printing and postage to keep up with the
need for assistance...but, some people spend their time and money on
their gardens or pets or kids - I just happen to be a little eccentric
about helping the underdog. I think its a worthy investment, helping
people help themselves.
Those prisoners filling the detention cells while fleeing the
violence are either seeking Protective Custody (PC) or being punished
for refusing their General Population (GP) housing assignments (with
“refusal to house” tickets ) after being denied PC. The guys complaining
about the assaults extortion and murders, in fact, are overwhelmingly
being denied PC and maxed out (ie their good time and privileges are
lost and their classification scores zoom up) on major disciplinary
tickets for not doing anything to hurt anyone, while the ones behind the
extortion, assaults and murders, drug trade and other evils are still
free to dominate the prison yards and dictate the culture - often
empowered by corrupt officers who want the gangs to help keep the
grievances down on the yard, or to keep the assaults just between
prisoners, or who just want to line their pockets to buy a new gun or
truck.
I have read the
Does v Stewart
proposed settlement, by the way, and am well-familiarized with DOC
policy - I can assure you that both the Does v Stewart agreement and the
DO805 policy are routinely being blatantly violated by administrative
staff at Central Office. I can say that with certainty after receiving
hundreds of letters from prisoners and half as many more calls from
family members over getting folks into safe housing since last winter. I
have ample evidence the DOC is denying PC to almost ALL prisoners who
seek it without the aid of an attorney or the very expensive assistance
of Donna Hamm from
Middle Ground Prison Reform.
(She’s done a lot of good work, don’t get me wrong - she just costs a pretty penny.)
Interestingly, Ms. Hamm, who charges a flat fee of $2500 to advocate
for PC housing for a prisoner, claims a 85- 90% success rate for her
clients, while about that same percentage of all PC requests each month
are denied, according to the DOC, leaving hundreds of guys in detention
each month awaiting the PC verdict. That alone should raise red flags
that the DOC isn’t really using any real criteria when they decide who
goes to PC and who goes back to the hole in the next GP yard to try
again(or get killed), other than that prisoner’s or their family’s
ability to litigate them.
And they don’t do the mental health checks they’re required to do on
each guy who is turned down for PC to make sure he doesn’t kill himself
out of terror. They can’t possibly meet that demand - Corizon isnt even
meeting its minimum mental health care mandates. Thus, I believe guys
are still probably killing themselves in the wake of PC denials, like
Rosario Rodriguez-Boroquez did in the fall of 2010. A
rape victim in the hole on the same MAX unit in Florence
followed in his footsteps a week later. That second prisoner might have
been saved had the DOC debriefed affected prisoners, they way they do
with staff after suicides, homicides and traumatic deaths of prisoners
or staff; correctional “best practices” would suggest they should.
Over the course of the past 12 months I’ve corresponded with
approximately 35 gay and transgender prisoners alone, some of whom the
Navajo Nation’s Human Rights Commission and the NAACP of Maricopa County
have already contacted the DOJ about (and have heard nothing back). In
the fall of 2013 a collective of concerned community members convened
to study the data from my queer correspondents and
draft a letter to Charles Ryan with concerns about the LGBT population being routinely
denied PC by his staff when they seek it, even after reporting to the
DOC that they had been sexually assaulted or exploited, extorted or
beaten because of their sexual orientation or gender identity (the AZ
DOC houses transgender women on GP yards in all-male prisons, FYI). In
fact, right now there are several gay and transgender prisoners still in
GP who have been trying to get into PC for up to and over a year now,
unsuccessfully.
Most recently, one gay prisoner who I had intervened personally for
to advocate that he receive PC was denied PC and subsequently raped by
his cellie, only to be denied PC again and placed in another GP yard. He
had initially sought PC because his crime was widely publicized and the
media indicated that his male lover was an accomplice - he was marked
man on the yards, no matter what prison they put him in, and they knew
it. That was not only deliberate indifference to his safety, I believe
endangering that vulnerable prisoner -repeatedly - was an act of malice
and spite in retaliation for my criticisms of the DOC’s staff who make
those decisions. And that, sir, is a federal crime, I believe, for a
state agent to do. Mr Ryan cannot be trusted to hold those staff
responsible for harming that victim, the only party to his rape - to my
knowledge - who sits in a detention cell tonight. My correspondence with
Director Ryan and his staff about that case is enclosed in the packet.
Even though the victim in the above case had to be taken to a
hospital and rape kit was done, there’s no reason to think the
perpetrator will actually be held responsible or that further rapes will
be discouraged by how this one will be handled. According to the AZ
DOC’s current
PREA report as posted on their website,
out of 54 alleged “inmate-on-inmate unwanted sexual acts” and 30
alleged “inmate-on-inmate abusive sexual contacts” (I think they mean
RAPE!) reported to them in 2012, absolutely none could be substantiated
by the DOC’s CIU. Either the entire DOC prisoner population lies about
rape and it never really happens in our state, or the DOC has no sincere
commitment to either preventing it or responding effectively to it when
it occurs.
Why should anyone even report their sexual victimization to the DOC,
I’m asked? They end up being labeled as a snitch and sitting in the hole
for months on end seeking PC, while the perpetrator gets off scott free
to rape again. It’s especially disturbing to prisoners when the perp is
a gang leader or enforcer, too - which is too often the case,
particularly in re: the exploitation and abuse of transgender prisoners.
“PREA reporting” has become a sick joke at the AZ DOC - it only
stigmatizes the victim, who too often gets no counseling, nor are they
very often placed in protective custody or mental health programs beyond
the term of the rape investigation, even though research shows that
most prisoners are at exquisite risk for even further victimization and
deterioration of their mental status once they are raped the first time.
In addition to the recent example of the prisoner who was
deliberately placed at risk by DOC staff with a bone to pick with me, I
know of one gay prisoner who was verbally abused expressly for being gay
after he reported rape (along the lines of you deserved it you fucking
fag), in an incident in which he ended up biting staff while being taken
down when he refused to sit on the floor to take more of the abuse. The
rape victim got an extra year and half added onto his sentence as a
result, and had to beg his judge to tell the DOC to place him in PC
before they finally relented and did so. I believe he was more
traumatized and harmed (by way of being charged with assaulting the
staff) by the DOC’s response to his rape report and request for PC than
he was by the actual sexual assault on him in the first place.. He is
more than willing to make a statement if you will interview him.
I’m also wondering if the DOC ever reported the suicide of Forrest
Day as a potential PREA issue. She had reported to her sister before she
died that she was being sexually pressured/propositioned by an officer
which she found disturbing, but his identity wasn’t revealed to anyone
before she was found hanging in her cell, so he couldn’t be
investigated. It no doubt never would have been substantiated anyway -
you know how it is, when it comes down to the word of a prisoner against
a crooked cop: the bad guys in power always win. So, again, why bother
reporting rape in Arizona’s DOC even if PREA was implemented, the
prisoners want to know. What would be any different than it is now, in
practice, even if the DOC did say they were on board with the feds? The
culture is so misogynistic and transphobic that it will take not only
re-training, but years of just cleaning house - all those good old boys
of Chuck Ryan’s and Terry Stewart’s need to go in order to turn this
Titanic around.
That isn’t about to happen if Jan Brewer is left to her own devices
here, though, because she has been unmoved by the needless tragic
deaths, the abysmal medical care, or the DOC’s brutal response to those
trying to simply flee the violence - and its not like I haven’t been
emailing her staff my blog posts all this time - they know, at least,
even if she doesnt. No matter what new atrocity is perpetrated on
prisoners at the AZ DOC, Jan stands by her man, and so is either
completely fooled by him and sheltered from public opinion, or she is
fully aware of all that I’ve told you about, and is flat out lying to
you in that May letter. If that’s the case, I’d like to know why they’re
so damned determined to keep the DOJ out of their prisons.
Either way, be it due to ignorance or complicity with evil, Jan
Brewer has consistently failed to provide any leadership around
protecting prisoners - not even the children. She says that Arizona is a
“leader” in protecting our most vulnerable people, especially kids and
the mentally ill. After all, everything she’s done to improve mental
health care and child protection is going to be her legacy - which is
truly sad, because she hasnt done much on those fronts short of the
medicaid expansion, which was to save the hospitals from going under as
much as it was for the good of the poor here.
I dont know if she recalls - or ever even knew - that the
last kid to suicide at the Adobe Mountain Detention Center
run by the AZ Department of Juvenile Corrections did so after some of
the other kids relentlessly bullied him for being gay and mentally ill.
It seems the staff didn’t know how to deal with either queer kids or
serious mental illness. I hope they do now.
Charles Flanagan
who took over the AZDJC several years ago, has not invited nearly the
scrutiny of his department by me that Ryan has, so he might be doing something
right there - or at least not so horribly wrong as his former boss.
I’ll be terribly disappointed if he advised the Governor not to comply
with PREA as well, though.
What I’m saying here is that Jan Brewer is either deliberately
whitewashing the prison picture here, or she just doesn’t know what
she’s talking about when it comes to prison rape, plain and simple. I
can verify myself that Chuck Ryan knows everything I’ve told you of and
more because most of what was reported to me along those lines I passed
on to him, personally. I have lots of emails documenting it all.
The problem is that Ryan doesn’t tell the truth about any of this, either - he even
insists to the legislature that there’s NO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT practiced at the AZ DOC
(that’s just semantics, but the legs accept his answer as evidence that
the ACLU is hysterical and over-reacting) - so you can’t count on him
to give you an accurate assessment of whether or not the AZ DOC is doing
its job when it comes to protecting prisoners from violence,
exploitation, and rape.
No, Mr. Holder, you really need to come talk to me and the families I
work with- not just have the FBI spy on me and my buddies in black.
Look at my files and analyze my data yourselves. Visit my
correspondents. Chat with former employees like former
Eyman DW Carl Toersbijns or former
Perryville officer Gary Bullock, former
ASPC-Lewis Lieutenant Chuck Bauer, former
Corizon employee, Teresa Short,
AZ State Representative Chad Campbell,
who has called for Ryan’s resignation, or any number of other parties
to this disaster who I could introduce you to so you can verify mine and
the the prisoners’ accounts of prison conditions and the many assaults
on their safety - including sexual assaults and exploitation - in the
AZ DOC.
While you’re at it, subpoena the records from the AZ Corrections and
Peace Officers Association - they had thousands of DOC employees sign
onto a
letter of no confidence in Chuck Ryan to Jan Brewer not two years into his tenure. That letter alleged that, among other things:
“...There exists, within ADOC administration, a well-known
pattern of obstructing the disclosure of hazards in time to prevent
accidents, injury, illness, and deaths. Tragically, in these instances,
danger is not "imminent" - it is past, and too late to respond.
Employees are routinely ordered to falsify documents and when they
proactively seek to report identified hazards, they face punishment and
retaliation. Obtaining an accurate account of the range and extent of
violations will be difficult from records alone. It is unlikely that
ADOC will disclose information without well-planned intervention by
authorities.”
These are strikingly similar to the allegations that prisoners make,
which are often dismissed as “unsubstantiated”. The Governor completely
ignored the union’s letter, by the way, so its not the credibility of
the source that's really the issue - it’s simply a critique she doesn’t
want to hear.
In addition to the letters I get from current AZ DOC prisoners, I’ve
reviewed hundreds of death reports since the the start of the current
administration. I call tell you that prisoners routinely die of both
indifference and outright abuse here, and Charles Ryan’s DOC sometimes
uses their Criminal Investigations Unit to cover up homicides they
didn’t feel like pursuing or listing for the feds as such. Like PC and SP. The AZ DOC’s inspector general’s office didn’t
even have the decency to tell PC's mother that his death was more
likely than not a homicide, instead of a suicide. They just left her
believing her child had taken his life. Fortunately, PC’s mom never
bought it and had her own autopsy done - which revealed that there was
plenty of evidence he was murdered the DOC never even bothered to look
at...
I dont know if the CIU is corrupt or just has an irresponsible ethos
that has no regard for the survivors of victims of violence in their
custody. Maybe they are all just lazy - though I suspect the Ryan
administration calculated that they would be more liable to a mother
whose child was murdered instead of one whose child committed suicide in
custody, and decided that if she wasn’t going to sue over a suicide,
they better not tell her it was murder, or someone will start to dig...
In any case, the DOC can’t be trusted to investigate themselves and
be forthright with their discoveries, and the ACLU is already busy with
the health care and psychiatric concerns, including the abuse of
solitary confinement for mentally ill prisoners. That’s why we need the
feds in on this matter of prisoner safety and prison rape now. Charles
Ryan’s Criminal Investigations Unit has no credibility with the
prisoners, the staff, or the advocates who know what’s going on in
there. Nor do his media and legislative liaisons - they outright lie to
the public and elected officials about the heinous behavior of their
employees and the corporate jackals who feed off the imprisoned
population. Just ask the journalists who have been covering the DOC
under Ryan’s tenure - like
KPNX’s Wendy Halloran, who won an Emmy for pursuing the truth about the suicide of Tony Lester, or the
AZ Republic’s Bob Ortega,
who did a fantastic series on “Arizona’s Other Death Row” - that is,
the mainstream prison population, which he noticed was dying by suicide,
drug overdose, and homicide at unusually high rates after Ryan had been
in charge for awhile.
I once had a contact at the DOJ’s Special Litigation Section - Aaron
Zisser. I even sent him all the death records my mother bought from the
AZ DOC for me to analyze. But I think Special Litigation abandoned AZ
awhile ago, perhaps thinking the ACLU et al have it covered. Not hardly.
And Ryan knows no one will hold him accountable for prison rape if the
feds don’t - just look at his annual reports. For the
past two years in the Five-Year Plans,
Director Ryan has managed to invisibilize rape victims in his custody -
its not even an institutional goal to reduce the incidence of sexual
assaults in the prisons anymore, much less a priority.
Do you understand where I’m coming from here, Mr Holder?
(section edited out)
By the way, Arizona’s sole Protection & Advocacy authority, the
AZ Center for Disability Law, won’t help or visit or investigate abuse reports from SMI prisoners under any circumstances. It appears that they only joined
Parsons v Ryan
in name because they were coerced into doing so. Now, they are the only
ones in this state with the authority to get into those prisons on
demand to see disabled individuals reporting abuse, and yet they
adamantly refuse to exercise it. Is that legal, for a P&A agency to
flat out discriminate against an entire population of disabled people
solely because the institution housing and abusing them is a prison or
jail, instead of a school or a nursing home? If they refuse to exercise
that authority, another agency should be identified that will do so, and
should be funded to do so. That’s got to be unconstitutional.
Along those lines, I want to quote from a letter I received from the
women’s prison just yesterday - this is from (a prisoner) on Death Row,
in a building where other maximum security prisoners - like the mentally
ill - are held as well. She (wrote)
despite risking retaliation from the state because she is so troubled by
what she’s hearing and is afraid the women who cry and plead all day
and night are too mentally impaired, traumatized, and intimidated to
know how to get help themselves via the grievance process and courts…
“They have watch cells below us and I’m very concerned about our
mentally ill being pepper-sprayed and drug around naked by male guards
and videoed by male guards over the simplest issue. They yell at the
mentally ill, scare them. then when they don’t comply (usually strip
out) they spray them. They are forced to strip out 3-4 times a day with
male guards walking all over. I hear some of them crying “I don’t want
to get naked”. I understand security, but not these measures on the
mentally ill…”
That sounds like a violation of the agreement the DOC made with the
AZDOC some 15 or so years ago to keep a sexual harassment/abuse CRIPA
complaint from proceeding to trial, is it not? Let me remind you that I
myself have a major mood disorder and PTSD - is this the kind of
treatment I can expect as an American citizen in our women’s prisons,
should I ever find myself there?
(She) also reports the male officers don’t announce themselves on
Lumley. That comes as no surprise - as indicated by the good governor’s
letter to you, the DOC doesn’t think it’s necessary for them to do so,
even though they are citing women for sexual offenses if they
accidentally expose themselves while changing, or toileting, or
showering. You know as well as I that most women in prison - especially
the severely mentally ill - are already traumatized. Best practices
would not say that security demands the male guards come through without
announcing themselves. Best practices in corrections now would look at
trauma-informed care
more closely than the security aspect of that and say those women are
being routinely retraumatized and violated by the AZ DOC’s policies and
practices for no good penological reason. They are just not wanting to
make sure female staff are available at all times for the women
prisoners, though they are quite plentiful in the men’s prisons.
Well, I’ve covered a lot of ground, and there still so much more. I
wish we could meet to discuss PREA and CRIPA matters further in person,
but I know you have a lot on your hands already, so please have the
appropriate staff contact me as soon as possible about this matter - I
and the prisoners are requesting a DOJ CRIPA Investigation into these
patterns and practices of violating prisoners civil rights, as well as
the Governor’s decision to not bother with PREA mandates anymore. At the
very least, you should call her out on that.
Thank you so much for reading this through, Mr Holder, if you’ve made
it this far. I will be eagerly anticipating your reply. So will the
prisoners and their loved ones.
Sincerely,
Margaret Jean Plews
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