The Voice for AZ Crime Victims is not Steve Twist...

 

 Some of the  68 names of the AZ DOC's victims of violence, neglect and abuse over the past 3 1/2 years, 

from the roof of Phoenix's Firehouse Gallery during the opening of "Patriotic Descent".

(June 9, 2012)

The letter and video link below came to me as a response to the editorial in the Arizona Republic today by Mr. Steve Twist, titled: "Ariz. prisons are humane, secure despite criticism". As implied, the letter is a defense of the state-as-perpetrator, not an argument that human life and rights should be vigorously protected.

Mr. Twist is a founder of the conservative Goldwater Institute, and the former assistant attorney general who authored the AZ Victims Bill of Rights, a constitutional amendment passed in the early 90's which explicitly excluded anyone "in custody for an offense" (as well as their survivors, if the crimes perpetrated against them result in death) from the legal definition of victim - and thus from all resource the state allocates to help victims cope with the devastating consequences of assault, rape, murder and other such serious crimes.

The letter was composed for the occasion by a real-life survivor of the state's cruelty and neglect; she lost her brother to it. Michelle gave me her blessings to post it widely - this is one of the voices we can trust. Please pass it on.

---------------from Michelle Lependorf------------------- 

Saturday, June 16, 2012

The recent articles written by Mr. Ortega in The Arizona Republic were primarily aimed at highlighting the deficiencies in health care provided to Arizona’s most seriously ill prisoners, those having severe mental and medical conditions.  It was fact-based, investigative reporting and not a media campaign or ACLU conspiracy aimed at generating sympathy and support for reduced prison terms or less restrictive environments within Arizona’s prisons.

The focus of the articles written by Mr. Ortega was not to question the housing protocol within the Arizona Department of Corrections.  Rather, it was to highlight the deliberate indifference shown to inmates who suffer from serious medical conditions wherever housed within Arizona’s prisons.  These inmates have been systematically, persistently and consistently denied or delayed meaningful and effectual medical care, the result being that far too many are dying, many of whom have not been incarcerated for violent, predatory crimes and who have not been perpetrators of inmate on inmate violence.

If officials within the Arizona Department of Corrections are, as is claimed by Mr. Twist, aware that “a significant percentage of those who live in Arizona prisons are in poor health when they enter prison,” don’t these same individuals have a heightened duty to ensure that an adequate health care system is in place to address the needs of these individuals?  This includes, at a minimum, ensuring that properly trained staff are in place and available to deliver the sophisticated health care required by such a high-risk prison population.  


Despite Mr. Twist’s assumptions to the contrary, there is a vast low-income segment of society that exists outside of the prison environs.  In that segment of society, there are a statistically larger number of individuals suffering from poor health conditions, as compared to more affluent segments of society.  This is primarily due to a lack of resources, high unemployment, low education levels, poor diet and nutrition, lack of health insurance and, perhaps, to some degree, genetic predispositions from the continuity of poor health conditions inherited by each successive generation.  That does not mean, however, that such individuals do not deserve adequate and effective medical care.  Should we deny or delay medical care for such individuals because they are born into and continually exist within a segment of society that renders them more susceptible to healthcare challenges?  Why can we not expect the same level of care for prisoners who enter Arizona’s prison systems with existing chronic conditions?  It may be true that many prisoners are entering into Arizona’s prisons “suffering from a litany of conditions.”  However, that does not mean that such individuals should not expect to receive or are undeserving of quality medical care – care that is delivered when it is needed and when it can make the greatest difference in the life of an inmate.  In fact, perhaps addressing the needs of such individuals would go a long way to improving conditions in the medically underserved communities from which these individuals come, as Mr. Twist claims. 

Given the threat it poses to public health in general, the failed healthcare system in Arizona’s prisons can no longer be denied, ignored or tolerated on the premise that prisoners, by virtue of their past misdeeds, are not deserving of adequate healthcare.  Although many in society believe that prisoners are not entitled to the same standard of medical care as individuals who have never been convicted of a crime, this view fails to take into consideration the high cost to society of substandard medical care provided to prisoners.  Inmates with serious illnesses or contagious diseases, who do not receive proper medical treatment while incarcerated, will eventually return to their communities.  When they do, they will likely be more unhealthy, unable to work and, more importantly, ineligible for health insurance.  This, in turn, will surely place a greater strain on the state’s already scarce resources.  So denying very ill prisoners adequate medical care is simply akin to being penny-wise and pound-foolish. 

What Bob Ortega’s articles make clear is that we have a failed health care delivery system in place within Arizona’s prisons.  It is a substandard, inhumane system that is responsible for the needless suffering and deaths of thousands of inmates.  For anyone who believes otherwise, the next time you or someone in your family becomes ill, by all means, opt for an exam with one of the paramedical professionals in Arizona’s Department of Corrections.  Mr. Twist, with his twisted notions, should be the first one to do so! 


For those of you who need further proof of just how inhumane healthcare is in Arizona’s prisons, you can get a first hand glimpse by clicking on the following link: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-755489.

Michelle Lependorf is a NJ lawyer and the sister of Ferdinand Dix, a former AZDOC inmate who died while incarcerated in Arizona from undiagnosed, untreated metastatic small cell lung cancer.

Ortega: AZ Prisons deadly for the sick.

AZ Crime Victim's Memorial

Wes Bolin Plaza, Phoenix

March 9, 2012

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

-------from the Arizona Republic--------

Arizona Prisons Can be Deadly for the Sick
by Bob Ortega
Arizona Republic
June 4, 2012



For two years, Ferdinand Dix repeatedly filed requests with Arizona's Tucson state prison staff, asking to be examined for a chronic cough, shortness of breath and loss of appetite.

When Dix, who was serving five years on forgery and drug charges, finally received a checkup, the doctor didn't notice cancer had caused his liver to swell to four times its normal size. He told Dix to drink energy shakes.

It wasn't until he was "nonresponsive" and had been transported to an outside hospital that Dix was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer. He died a few days later, on Feb. 11. He was 47.

Dix's case is cited in a federal lawsuit accusing the Arizona Department of Corrections of medical neglect. It's a charge the system has faced before, from activists, inmates' families and at least one Arizona lawmaker.

Citing the litigation, Corrections officials declined to discuss Dix's care.

A review by The Arizona Republic of deaths in state prisons over the past two fiscal years found at least four inmates, in addition to Dix, whose medical care was delayed or potentially inadequate leading up to their deaths. The records of these cases, together with interviews of officers, medical staff and inmates point to a system in which correctional officers routinely deny inmates access to timely care, and in which treatment sometimes falls short of accepted standards.

These deaths are among dozens of examples of preventable deaths uncovered in a broad investigation by The Republic into high rates of suicide, homicide and accidental deaths in state prisons.

Corrections Director Charles Ryan denies that health care in Arizona's prisons is inadequate or that there is an institutional indifference toward ailing inmates.

But Corrections officials do acknowledge that a long-planned privatization of prison medical care has made it difficult to fill vacancies. They also say care has been hobbled for more than a year by cuts to outside contractor payments, which state lawmakers imposed two years ago.

Allegations of substandard care, however, predate those developments. For example, the suit in which Dix is named -- filed in March by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Prison Law Office of San Quentin, Calif., -- lists dozens of allegations of inmates waiting months for medicine or medical treatment, and suffering permanent damage and disfigurement as a result.

"Our correctional health care is shocking; it's unacceptable," Rep. Cecil Ash, a Mesa Republican, told his fellow lawmakers last year.

Ash warned that providing inadequate care not only harmed inmates, it also exposed the state to costly lawsuits. His effort to fund improved care for prisoners garnered little support in the Legislature.

"They're out of sight, out of mind. And they don't vote," he said of inmates.
There is also a general lack of public sympathy for prisoners, particularly those who have committed heinous crimes.

Take Carey Wheatley, a convicted child molester serving a life term. He was 49 when he died of pneumonia on April 24, 2011, while in solitary confinement at the Florence state prison. For days leading up to his death, nurses offered him only the pain reliever acetaminophen, according to the Pinal County medical examiner's report.

Medical experts say antibiotics or antivirals are the standard course of treatment for bronchial pneumonia.

When Daniel Porter, who shot to death two clerks at a Circle K store in Tucson in 1986, was sentenced in 1992 to life on two murder charges, he begged to be put to death. But the Superior Court judge ruled that the murders were the result of mental illness -- paranoid schizophrenia -- which caused Porter to believe the clerks were trying to poison him. He also noted that Porter had been beaten and sexually abused as a child by his father and stepfather, and had been in and out of mental hospitals beginning when he was 13.

When Porter died, it was the result of hyponatremia, a chronic sodium deficiency that causes excessive thirst. Porter drank gallon after gallon of water for days, while correctional officers yelled at him to stop drinking or occasionally hit him with pepper spray, according to a report by Corrections investigators. He died in solitary confinement at Eyman state prison on Feb. 20, having literally drunk himself to death with water. Corrections officials listed his death as "accidental."

"His sodium deficiency was well documented," said Porter's sister, Elaine Faith.
"That he was allowed to go two, three days drinking that much water and they knew about it and didn't take him in because he needed IV therapy."

"I know nothing can bring my brother back, but prisoners deserve at least humane medical treatment," Faith said.

Kenneth Lucas, 65, died Oct. 4 at the Eyman state prison of a heart attack -- "natural causes," according to Corrections. But according to the same lawsuit that cites Dix's death, when Lucas collapsed in his housing unit the day before, other prisoners yelled to officers to contact medical staff but officers didn't take action.

Another inmate, finding no pulse, performed CPR, and Lucas began breathing again.

Officers then took him to the medical unit, where an appointment was set for a few days later. He died before he could be seen by medical staff.

The inmate who had performed CPR on Lucas was disciplined for breaking a rule that prohibits inmates from performing medical procedures, according to the lawsuit.

A Corrections spokesman declined comment on the case, citing the litigation.
Donna Hamm, a former state judge and prisoner advocate, said incarceration is the punishment for prisoners, not inadequate health care. And Arizona has a constitutionally mandated obligation to provide adequate care to prisoners, she said.

"The delays are just incredible," she says. "I've advocated for people who've been diagnosed with a lump or growth and who are supposed to be biopsied and have to wait six months, eight months, extraordinary amounts of time before being diagnosed."

A class-action ACLU suit alleges that medical and mental-health care in Arizona's prison system is so inadequate as to be unconstitutional and demands improvements in access to and quality of care, and "timely and competent" emergency response.

By the end of June, Wexford Health Sources Inc. of Pittsburgh will assume responsibility for medical and mental-health care at Arizona's state prisons under a three-year, $349 million contract. Wexford's contract includes performance standards for inmate care, including deadlines for inmates to be seen following a request for care and guarantees that prescriptions will be filled within a specific time.

The Department has struggled in the past two years with a medical-staff vacancy rate consistently higher than 20 percent, among other problems. Corrections spending on medical care fell 27 percent from fiscal 2009 to 2011, to $111.3 million, or an average of $3,258 an inmate.

Critics, though, citing Wexford's mixed record elsewhere, are skeptical about whether it will improve care. Regardless, Daniel Pochoda, the ACLU's Arizona director, said the change in management won't alter the legal demands for improvements in the suit.

Michelle Lependorf, the sister of Ferdinand Dix, said that she hopes the lawsuit leads to improved care.

"The real Ferdinand was loving, charming, fun to be around and caring," she said. Because of poor medical care, "the person they turned him into was angry, in pain, suffering and mistreated. ... He should have had a chance to live. They gave him none."

Prisoners file class-action suit against Arizona Department of Corrections

HOORAY!!!!

Arizona Department of Corrections - Central Office
Phoenix (November 22, 2011)

Please, families, tell your loved ones behind bars that help is really on the way. It's going to take a long time for anything to change through the courts, though, so you need to tell prisoners to be patient and "No more suicides!" At least have them write to me before they give up for good... 

--------from the National ACLU's website, at long last. Thanks to all the partners taking this state to task for their abuse and neglect of our most vulnerable prisoners-----

PHOENIX – Prisoners in the custody of the Arizona Department of Corrections receive such grossly inadequate medical, mental health and dental care that they are in grave danger of suffering serious and preventable injury, amputation, disfigurement and even death, according to a federal class-action lawsuit filed today by a legal team led by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Prison Law Office.

The lawsuit also charges that thousands of prisoners are routinely subjected to solitary confinement in windowless cells behind solid steel doors, in conditions of extreme social isolation and sensory deprivation, leading to serious physical and psychological harm. Some prisoners in solitary receive no outdoor exercise for months or years on end, and some receive only two meals a day.

“The prison conditions in Arizona are among the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Donald Specter, executive director of the Berkeley, Calif.-based Prison Law Office. “Prisoners have a constitutional right to receive adequate health care, and it is unconscionable for them to be left to suffer and die in the face of neglect and deliberate indifference.”

Specter was the lead counsel in Brown v. Plata, a similar case from California in which the Supreme Court last year reaffirmed that prisoners have a constitutional right to adequate health care.

“Courts have consistently ruled that solitary confinement of people with mental illness is unconstitutional because it aggravates their illness and prevents them from getting proper treatment,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “Even for those with no prior history of mental illness, solitary confinement can inflict extraordinary suffering and lead to catastrophic psychiatric deterioration.”

Critically ill prisoners have begged prison officials for medical treatment, according to the lawsuit, only to be told to “be patient,” that “it’s all in your head,” or that they should “pray” to be cured. Arizona prison officials have repeatedly been warned by their own medical staff of the inadequacy of the care, echoing complaints from prisoner advocates and families that prisoners face a substantial risk of serious harm and death. Yet, they have failed to ensure that minimally adequate health care is provided as required by the Constitution. 

In one particularly tragic case, a prisoner at the state prison complex in Tucson died last year of untreated lung cancer that spread to his liver, lymph nodes and other major organs before prison officials even bothered to send him to a hospital. The prisoner, Ferdinand Dix, filed repeated health needs requests and presented numerous symptoms associated with lung cancer. His liver was infested with tumors and swelled to four times its normal size, pressing on other internal organs and impeding his ability to eat. Prison medical staff responded by telling him to drink energy shakes. He died in February 2011, days after finally being sent to a hospital but only after his abdomen was distended to the size of that of a full-term pregnant woman. A photograph of Dix shortly before his death appears in the lawsuit.

Jackie Thomas, one of the lawsuit’s named plaintiffs who is housed in solitary confinement at the state prison complex in Eyman, has suffered significant deterioration in his physical and mental health as a result of being held in isolation, where he has become suicidal and repeatedly harmed himself in other ways. Prison staff have failed to treat his mental illness, improperly starting and stopping psychotropic medications and repeatedly using ineffective medications that carry severe side effects. Last November, Thomas overdosed on medication but did not receive any medical care.

“Faced with such gross indifference on the part of prison officials to the needs of prisoners with mental illness in their care, it was essential we get involved,” said Jennifer Alewelt, staff attorney with the Arizona Center for Disability Law, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “Prisoners with mental illness can be particularly vulnerable, and we must do everything we can to ensure their mental health needs are met while incarcerated.”  

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona against Charles Ryan, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, and Richard Pratt, the department’s interim director of the division of health services, the lawsuit asks, among other things, that constitutionally adequate health care be made available to prisoners, that medications be distributed to patients in a timely manner, and that prisoners not be held in isolation in conditions of social isolation and sensory deprivation that put them at risk of harm. The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages.

“Arizona has used the absence of transparency to callously ignore the basic needs of persons entrusted to its care, at times with deadly results,” said Daniel Pochoda, legal director of the ACLU of Arizona. “Absent court intervention the health and well-being of thousands of prisoners will continue to be sacrificed to economic expediency.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Arizona has the sixth-highest incarceration rate in the nation.

Other attorneys on the case are Daniel C. Barr of Perkins Coie LLP and Caroline Mitchell of Jones Day.
A copy of the lawsuit is available here and here.

Deaths in Custody: Deliberate Indifference to Ferdinand Dix.

For those of you who think that the health care in prison is free and guaranteed, think again. Medical co-pays can cost a weeks' pay, and the negligence one must contend with inside costs prisoners plenty. This is why the ACLU National Prison Project and the Prison law Office are about to sue the State of Arizona.

After receiving the following video, I asked the sender how she knew him:

"He was my brother.  I spent 36 hours watching him die in a hospital in Tucson, shackled hand and foot to the hospital bed, even though he was basically vegetative/comatose and had tubes coming out of every orifice – and I mean every one of them.  It was very sad and painful to see.  I just could not believe how he looked, with his belly so distended, filled with tumors in his liver.  I could not understand how anyone inside that Tucson prison could see a man, like my brother, walking around that prison complex looking like he looked and not instinctively known or felt like: "Hey, that inmate needs to see a doctor and get some serious treatment!"  I just can't believe that people like that exist.   Just where do they find these people who work within the AZDOC?  Did no one who examined him in the medical clinic think that his belly looked a bit odd?  Did they bother to touch it, particularly given his complaints about not being able to eat?  My mother was just now telling me how she remembers in some of his letters and phone conversations he would say, "Momma, I'm just so hungry and I can't eat anything."  Peggy, his liver was so big it had literally compressed his digestive organs and made it such that he could not eat.  Can you imagine a human being walking around like that, for Lord knows how long, feeling so hungry and feeling like nothing was being or could be done about it?"

video by Michelle Lependorf



Survivors of police and prison violence, abuse, and institutional indifference are often isolated, and may be vulnerable to state oppression if prisoners or their survivors try to sue for violations of their civil rights. Please, if you find yourself in that situation, contact me (Peggy at 480-580-6807 / prisonabolitionist@gmail.com). I can put you in touch with other families for support, we can work on getting your narrative out there, so there's more than just a criminal record or mugshot telling your loved one's story, you can help in the larger fight against state violence.

ASPC-Tucson Deaths in Custody: Ferdinand Dix.

 

Ferdinand Dix was given six years in Arizona's state prisons for drug crimes and forgery, but he suffered and died horribly from cancer over the course of his first two years behind bars. He died on Valentine's Day of last year. His mother narrates his suffering most poignantly in her lawsuit against the state of Arizona and ADC Director Charles Ryan for gross neglect...I'm only including the pertinent excerpts.