Ortega: Why so many prisoners dead?

 

to CHUCK RYAN: 

"Please stop killing your prisoners"

Arizona Department of Corrections: 

Central Office, Phoenix

(November 22, 2011)

I disagree with Carl on this one - I think omitting witnesses, etc from suspicious death reports - that is, them "selectively" - does constitute falsification of a public record, which is a class 6 felony. I've read enough of the ADC's death records, and talked to enough family members and corrections officers, to be convinced that such damage control is itself criminal activity, and should be treated as such.

Here's the moving slideshow of prisoners put together by the AZ Republic for this series...check it out at the source. 

--------------------------

DOC fails to list cause of death in 28 cases.

Bob Ortega
AZ Republic
June 2, 2012

The Arizona Department of Corrections listed no cause of death for 28 inmates who died during the past two years, stating only that the deaths were under investigation. No further information has been released.

In response to public-information requests submitted by The Arizona Republic seeking information about 36 inmate deaths, Corrections provided records for 10 cases. Those records often lack details such as how much time passed before medical responders were summoned and when they arrived to aid a prisoner.

Interviews with families, inmates and prison staff and records from county medical examiners and other sources yielded information about all but eight of the 36 inmate deaths. But Corrections officials have not released any information on those eight deaths, which include four that have been "under investigation" for more than 18 months.

In Arizona, correctional-death investigations are handled internally rather than by a police agency, as occurs in some states. The shift supervisor writes a draft report, which must be approved by administrators in the central office before it's published. The department's Office of the Inspector General assigns an investigator.

"The cleanup starts the moment the incident is reported: eliminating flag words, eliminating individuals who may be relevant to the situation, cut back the witness list," says Carl ToersBijns, a retired deputy warden who served at Eyman state prison. He emphasized that he doesn't believe reports are falsified but are written selectively.

"By the time it's finalized, the incident report is so clean and sterile you won't know what happened because it's already been filtered. The direction is given ... was it deliberate, accidental, suicide, homicide? They try to fix and create a summary for that report that they can defend," he says. "There's a couple of reports where the investigator had doubts and it was overwritten. A lot of drug overdoses are suicides; a lot of 'natural deaths' are people who have been suffering medical conditions but finally just expired. It's not reflected on those reports and never will be reflected in the news reports. Only the ones who were there know what happened."

Corrections officials say their reports are accurate.

The prisons of Chuck Ryan: Arizona's other death row.

AZ Crime Victims Memorial: Wes Bolin Plaza, AZ State Capitol

March 9, 2012

 

Mother of Dana Seawright, homicide victim, and aunt of Tony Lester, suicide victim, 

protesting the continuing abuse and neglect and violence 
perpetrated on prisoners of the state of Arizona. 

Both men were in the care of the AZ Department of Corrections when they died...

The intro to the following series from Bob Ortega and the AZ Republic on Chuck Ryan's growing body count. Fantastic work by all involved in the research, editing , and of course the writing of these pieces - but especially Bob Ortega.  

Here's the moving slideshow of prisoners put together by the AZ Republic for this piece... 

----------------from the AZ Republic-----------------

 Arizona prison system sees high number of deaths.
Bob Ortega
Arizona Republic
June 2, 2012

Arizona's prison system has two death rows.

One is made up of the 126 inmates officially sentenced to death -- 123 men at the Eyman state prison in Florence and three women at Perryville. Seven convicted killers from that group have been executed over the last two years.

The other death row, the unofficial one, reaches into every prison in Arizona's sprawling correctional system. No judge or jury condemned anyone in this group to death. They die as victims of prison violence, neglect and mistreatment.

Over the past two years, this death row has claimed the lives of at least 37 inmates, more than five times the number executed from the official death row. Among them are mentally ill prisoners locked in solitary confinement who committed suicide, inmates who overdosed on drugs smuggled into prison, those with untreated medical conditions and inmates murdered by other inmates.

Unlike state executions, these deaths rarely draw much notice. Each receives a terse announcement by the Department of Corrections and then is largely forgotten.

But correctional officers and other staff who work with inmates say many of these deaths are needless and preventable.

Arizona will spend $1.1 billion this year to lock up its 40,000 prisoners.

But there is another cost, one measured not in dollars but in human lives.

Over four days, an Arizona Republic investigation will reveal a prison system that houses inmates under brutal conditions that can foster self-harm, allows deadly drugs to flow in from the outside, leaves inmates to die from treatable medical conditions and fails to protect inmates from prison predators.

Today, The Republic focuses on suicides in the prison system, where there have been at least 19 in the past two years. Arizona's official prison-suicide rate during that period was 60 percent higher than the national average. But suicides in prison are likely underreported, according to critics.

More than half of the suicides involved inmates in solitary confinement, including some with serious mental illnesses.