ASPC-Lewis/Bachman Homicide in Custody: Alexander Clark, 27.

This comes from the Facebook page tonight of KPNX/CH12 Investigative Reporter Wendy Halloran. This is really, really troubling to see. If there's anyone with direct information about Alexander Clark or what happened to him, please contact Peggy at arizonaprisonwatch@gmail.com or 480-580-6807.

This occurred on a Protective Custody yard, which this prisoner had recently arrived at (1/14/14), almost one year after receiving an internal disciplinary ticket for "sexual contact"- which is probably what forced him into PC in the first place.  That's all I've really been able to discern about this incident that hasn't already been posted, in any case. 

Condolences to this young man's family; please also feel free to contact me if I can be of any help.
                         

 ------per Wendy Halloran (KPNX/CH12) as of 03/18/14 11pm---

re: 03/17/14 homicide at ASPC-LEWIS/Bachman Unit

Fight between 12 Mexican American inmates at ASPC-Lewis in Buckeye leads to homicide of inmate Alexander Clark. Here's some inside information. The Arizona Department of Corrections reports the following incident on 03/17/2014 – 2059 Hours  

In the report's summary it read: 

On 03/17/2014, staff initiated ICS (incident command system) when they observed approximately 12 Mexican American inmates fighting on the red recreation field. 

• Verbal directives and officer presence in the area stopped the fight. 

• TSU (tactical support unit) team members who were working at the Stiner unit responded to help control the incident. 

• Alexander Clark 208882 Mex. Amer., age 27, was transported via ambulance to West Valley Hospital in Goodyear for treatment of multiple puncture-type injuries. 

• Per the hospital doctor, Clark was pronounced deceased at 1940 hours. 

• Staff members from the CIU (criminal investigation unit) are on-site at the unit. 

• Clark's next-of-kin were notified. 

• Ibraham Badri 208275 Mex. Amer., age 25, and Victor Irvin 260996 Mex. Amer., age 26, were also transported to the hospital for precautionary evaluation of head trauma

Deceased was identified as: 

Alexander Clark 208882

Custody: Medium PC

Institutional Risk: 4
Earned Release Date: 03/07/2016
Sentence Begin Date: 12/01/2005

Offense: Armed Robbery / Kidnapping / Aggravated Assault

Deliberate indifference to violence against queers in prison.

Excellent article exposes the brutality of prison life for many gay and trans prisoners, while humanizing the remarkable spirit of survivors of prison violence. We're having a very hard time here in Arizona getting these prisoners protection, too.

Here's a page of resources for prison rape survivors in Arizona, if you or someone you know  needs support.

Prison Legal News is the single best subscription deal for prisoners - $30 a year keeps them informed about their rights.

Prison Legal News
P.O. Box 1151
Lake Worth, FL 33460

------from Prison Legal News---------

Prison Sexual Abuse Survivor Speaks Out
by Alan Prendergast
(article was originally published at Denver Westword News on February 3, 2011)

In January 2010, Scott Howard, a 39-year-old federal prisoner, made his way briskly into a hearing room in the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building in Washington, D.C. He was neatly dressed in blazer, slacks and tie, and quite nervous about what he was about to do. He was determined to not think about it too much, to just get it over with – like so much else that he’d been through over the past few years.

The room was teeming with Department of Justice attorneys, law enforcement agents and corrections officials. Not exactly Howard’s kind of crowd; he’d tried to tell his story to such people before, only to be labeled a liar and a whiner. But the participants also included members of Congress, medical professionals, prison activists, counselors and sexual-assault survivors.

They’d all come to take part in a “listening session” on the wishfully titled Prison Rape Elimination Act. Passed in 2003, PREA created a national commission to study the causes and costs of sexual assault behind bars and to come up with federal policies to attack the problem. Seven years and several blown deadlines later, backers are still waiting for United States Attorney General Eric Holder to adopt new standards incorporating the commission’s findings.

Howard had been invited to join the discussion because of his experiences behind bars – in particular, the three nightmarish years he’d spent in Colorado state prisons, doing time for fraud. It would be the first time he’d ever discussed his ordeal publicly.

When his name was called he went to the microphone, trying to keep his hands steady as he studied the pages in front of him. “Thank you for allowing me to participate,” he began.

He explained that, although living in a halfway house, he was still in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons: “Before I was taken into BOP custody, however, I served time in the Colorado Department of Corrections, and it was there that I was repeatedly raped, assaulted and extorted by members of a large, notorious gang.”

The gang was the 211 Crew, a white supremacist group found in many Colorado prisons. 211 leaders pressured him for money and demanded that he help them in an ambitious $300,000 fraud scheme; their threats soon turned into physical attacks, then sexual assaults. He was forced to perform oral sex on gang members and anally raped.

“I spent well over a year trying to get protection by writing to officials,” he said. “My efforts to report were mostly fruitless – and often put me at greater risk. Because I am openly gay, officials blamed me for the attacks. They said as a homosexual I should expect to be targeted by one gang or another.”

Howard didn’t tell the whole squalid story. He didn’t mention the evidence of staff involvement with the gang that made his efforts to seek protection even dicier. He didn’t go into how, once he finally started “naming names,” as prison investigators demanded, they accused him of crying rape to cover up his own criminal activities. He barely referred to his last day as a Colorado prisoner, when, he says, he was put in a cell with one of the gang leaders and sexually assaulted again. Despite being a bare summary, the statement was still graphic – and powerful. At times his voice choked up, but Howard kept reading.

When it was over, he sat in the gallery and listened to other testimony by experts and survivors. Then the DOJ officials began asking questions, and some of the questions were directed at Howard. He was astonished. They’d actually paid attention. They’d even taken notes.

“That was very important,” he says now. “Having people listening to me and asking questions – it made me feel like I was being taken seriously at last.”

A lot of people are taking Howard seriously these days. Since his talk in Washington a year ago, he’s emerged as a highly visible “survivor speaker” for Just Detention International, a nonprofit active in the campaign to stop sexual abuse in prison, and a caustic critic of Colorado’s DOC and its treatment of rape victims. Last summer he settled a civil rights lawsuit against several DOC officials for $165,000.

The settlement came as Howard’s attorneys were seeking a hearing to investigate how and why the Colorado Attorney General’s Office had failed for years to produce a critical document in the case – a 2005 entry in Howard’s prisoner file that corroborated his claims of seeking help and being ignored. The document, which only surfaced after a private law firm got involved in the defense of a second Howard lawsuit, also casts doubt on the veracity of several sworn affidavits filed by case managers and supervisors claiming that Howard never told them that he was being threatened and extorted.

Winning his case was a major victory for Howard. Finding the proof that he wasn’t lying was even greater vindication, though. Behind bars, all kinds of crimes are committed in secret, and prisoners soon learn to keep quiet about them. Exposing the most heinous violations can be almost impossible when staff attitudes about rape and homosexuality are as convoluted as those of the predators – and Howard says that’s what made the Colorado prison system particularly dangerous for him.

“In Colorado, corrections officers labeled openly gay people as troublemakers,” he says. “You can’t believe them, they get in relationships and then claim rape – and so on. The message goes out to the inmate population that these are people to victimize because they already have a bad reputation among staff, and nobody’s going to believe them.”

• • •

Almost from the moment he hit the yard at the Fremont Correctional Facility in late 2004, Scott Howard knew he was in trouble. The medium-security prison was run differently from anything he’d seen before. And too many people he didn’t know already knew who he was and what he’d done.

Fremont wasn’t Howard’s first rodeo. He arrived there in the middle of a ten-year tour of state and federal prisons, the result of a fraud spree in Colorado, Wisconsin, Tennessee and elsewhere. His criminal history also involved jail stays in Florida and Texas, where he reportedly tried to post as bond collateral the car he was accused of stealing.

Howard grew up in a small town in Tennessee, where his sexual orientation was a poor fit with the prevailing Baptist culture. He left home, acquired a taste for gambling and the high life, and was busted in Florida in 1991, at age 21, after he stole a friend’s credit card and used it to hire a limo. He soon graduated to computer hacking and more sophisticated forms of identity theft.

In the late 1990s, Howard discovered major security flaws in the payroll systems of large corporations, which often relied on outside agencies to issue paychecks to temporary staff. He used a Trojan program to steal data from corporate websites, then submitted payroll requests to staffing agencies, either in his own name or someone else’s. It was a surprisingly simple and lucrative scam, as long as he moved quickly to the next pigeon before the fraud could be detected.

“It was a traveling crime,” Howard says. “It took me to thirty cities in a year. I was in my twenties, and it was fun back then. It was also very stupid and very high-risk.”

The scam unraveled in Wisconsin in 1999. A woman at a temp agency noted that Howard’s zip code didn’t match the address he submitted with a check request. When he came to pick up his money, he was arrested. A check for $40,000, issued by the Hershey Corporation, was found in his pocket.

Sentenced to eight years, Howard soon came up with an even more audacious plan to collect cash while behind bars. He filed a bogus tax return, claiming a $17,155 refund – and the Internal Revenue Service actually paid it. The next year he asked for $1.2 million, complete with forged letters on charity letterheads acknowledging enormous contributions.

This time the IRS took a closer look. Howard soon had federal time piled on top of his state sentence. But first he had another stint in Colorado, stemming from a payroll fraud in Denver that had been uncovered after his Wisconsin arrest. That’s what brought him to the yard at Fremont – and a sense of impending doom.

As a gay man who’d already spent substantial time behind bars, Howard thought he knew how to keep out of trouble. He’d seen plenty of intimidation and gang-related fights at other lockups, but nothing like the atmosphere at Fremont. Prisoners sporting black eyes in the lunch line were a common sight. Members of the 211 Crew commanded their own set of tables in the dining hall, known as the Four Corners, and charged weaker white prisoners tribute for the privilege of living in one of “their” units.

The 211s were particularly vocal about their hatred of homosexuals and sex offenders. Howard observed several openly gay and transsexual prisoners at Fremont. They were not in a good place. “All of these people were paying rent and being beaten,” he says. “If you were smaller, or suspected of being gay, or a pretty-boy type – anything of that sort got back to them.”

Gangs are a fact of life in prison. But Howard had never seen one that operated so openly, with so little official interference. “You had good officers and even overzealous officers, but most of them were older and very nonchalant about what was going on,” he says. “They told me, ‘This is prison. This is not a playground. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t have come here.’”

Officially, the 211 Crew is far from a pervasive presence in Colorado’s prisons, with roughly 300 “confirmed” members in a population of more than 20,000. Howard insists the actual numbers are much higher, and the gang clearly had a particular interest in him. Within a few days, three members approached him, beaming friendship, and asked about “all that cash” he’d scammed from big companies and the government. They seemed extremely well-informed about his attempt at a big tax refund, which had made headlines. Despite Howard’s denials that he’d been any kind of financial genius, he was soon fielding daily questions about tax fraud.

The conversations quickly got less genial. Howard made little attempt to disguise who he was in prison – in one court filing, his attorneys describe him as “obviously gay” – and the gang members soon had their suspicions confirmed. They frequently intercepted other prisoners’ mail, on the lookout for money order receipts or other helpful intel, and one of the items they came across was a gay magazine a friend had sent Howard.

John Anderson, a veteran 211 shot-caller known on the yard as Ghost, informed Howard that homosexuals had to pay rent. That meant buying canteen items for 211 members and sending money orders to addresses Ghost provided. “In the beginning, it was twenty dollars here or there,” Howard says. “Then it got more intense.”

In Howard’s second month at Fremont, Ghost demanded that he send out a $500 money order. Howard demurred; where was he going to get that kind of money? Ghost punched him in the stomach and the face and told him he had two weeks.

A few days later, Ghost was back in his face, demanding twenty bucks in canteen items to pay a debt the shot-caller owed to a rival gang member. Howard insisted he had no money.
“Find it,” Ghost snapped.

The next day, when Howard failed to make the required purchases, Ghost told him they were going to go see Allen Hernandez, alias “LBow,” the man Ghost owed. Once they were in LBow’s cell, Ghost informed him that Howard was going to settle the debt with a blow job. While Ghost stood lookout, Hernandez forced Howard to his knees and told him to open his “faggot mouth.”

Howard asked to be let go. Hernandez laughed. “You gotta beg me for it, bitch.”

The assault lasted a few minutes, Howard says. LBow ejaculated, pulled up his boxers and sweatpants, and told Howard to “get your bitch ass out of my cell.”

On the way back to his own unit, Ghost hissed at Howard, “Don’t you say a fucking word to anyone, or I’ll fuck you up.”

Howard went to his cell. He showered. He cried. He felt sick and deathly afraid.

He couldn’t escape the 211 Crew, but for the next few days they were oddly friendly to him. They approached him on the yard and at meals. Ghost introduced him to other 211 “brothers,” who asked him more questions about his tax scam.

Just weeks earlier, prosecutors in Denver had issued indictments against 24 members of the gang, on charges ranging from a 2001 prison murder to drug-related street crimes.

One of those named in the indictment was the group’s leader, Benjamin Davis, who’d launched the gang at the Arkansas Valley prison in the early 1990s after a racial beating. (The name “211” supposedly refers to the robbery section of the California penal code).

Davis was now stuck in the state supermax and facing more time, so the Fremont contingent was working on a plan to raise cash and get him “a fucking great attorney,” Howard learned. They wanted to file bogus tax returns, using the personal data of various sex offenders, minorities and other lowlife prisoners that couldn’t be traced back to them.

Howard told them he didn’t think it would work. A fucking great attorney would cost a lot more money than the $17,000 he’d collected in Wisconsin. The gang members listened soberly, nodded and walked away.

But Ghost didn’t care for Howard’s tone. He told him so a few days later, pulling him aside after breakfast to let him know he’d been disrespectful to his brothers. He demanded that Howard settle another debt with canteen items, this time for fifty dollars. Howard said he didn’t have it.

No problem, Ghost told him. Howard would settle the debt the same way he had with LBow. Frantic, Howard said he didn’t feel well. Ghost pulled a shank out of his pocket and made it clear that it was Howard’s choice whether it ended up in his ribs or not.

“You’re going to suck that dude’s dick to pay this off for me,” he said quietly, “and for being a smartass to my brother.”

Howard went to the cell of a prisoner named Griego and did as he was told.

In mid-February 2005, Howard made up an excuse to see his case manager, Jerry Morris. Terrified of being labeled a snitch and what Ghost might do to him, he didn’t say anything to Morris about the assaults.

“Outside this guy’s office are twenty or thirty inmates waiting to see him,” Howard recalls. “There’s no way to close the door, so everybody can hear what you’re saying.”

Morris would later insist that Howard didn’t advise him of any threats or problems that day. Howard claims that he asked for protection from 211 without going into any specifics, but Morris told him that “homosexuals usually have problems with one gang or another.” Howard could do his best to “get along,” or he could be a “whiner” and end up confined indefinitely in administrative segregation.

Howard didn’t know what to do. He was afraid to tell even his parents, since phone calls were monitored. He decided to notify one friend on the outside about the extortion and urge her to write a letter to the warden, asking that he be moved to another prison. A few days later he was summoned to a meeting with another case manager, Dave Mason, who asked about the letter and if he was being threatened by 211.

Howard broke down and admitted it. He began to talk about the assaults, he says, when Mason interrupted him. “That’s all I want to know,” the case manager said, and made a phone call to a supervisor to relay the information.

Four days later, Howard was abruptly transferred. He went from Fremont to the Sterling Correctional Facility, a sprawling complex housing 2,500 prisoners. Although technically a high-security prison, surrounded by an electrified “kill” fence, Sterling has a range of security levels for offenders classified from minimum to “close.”

Howard had no problems at Sterling the first two months he was there. He was placed in a highly monitored unit, with limited movement and cameras and emergency call buttons in the cells. But when he was moved to a lower-security wing in late April, he discovered that he’d gone from one 211 stronghold to another.

Official DOC reports indicate that there were fewer than 25 members of the 211 Crew at Sterling at the time, all of them housed in either high-security units or administrative segregation. Howard says the actual figure was closer to a hundred, an assertion supported by internal documents and even some staff testimony. Many of them could be found in Sterling’s less secure areas, readily identifiable by their shaved heads and copious tattoos of swastikas, shamrocks and even “211” and “CREW.”

The group was running large football and baseball pools, collecting as bets the tokens prisoners used to buy sodas. They had allies in the computer lab, including the notorious Simon Sue, who at seventeen had masterminded a triple homicide in the tiny settlement of Guffey. Although not a gang member himself, the diminutive Sue helped the gang produce authentic-looking property sheets, Howard says, to explain away the extra radios, clothing and other extorted goods in their cells.

Howard was recognized the first day he hit the yard. Two 211 members approached him. One, who’d been at Fremont, greeted him with a wolfish smile.

“Ghost has friends here,” he said.

• • •

Based on surveys of prisoners in jails and state and federal prisons, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that at least 88,500 adults endured some form of sexual abuse while incarcerated in the American corrections system last year. The surveys provide just snapshots of the prisoner population on a given day. A recently-released Department of Justice report places the total number of incidents in 2008 at 200,000.

The number of reported sexual assaults in prison is, of course, lower than the survey totals. Much, much lower. Extrapolating from the BJS figures, Colorado’s prison system would be expected to have between 600 and 800 sex abuse victims a year. Yet in a Prison Rape Elimination Act cost impact study, the DOC claims only twelve confirmed incidents of sexual assault in 2008 and five in 2009. That works out to about 25 to 50 reports a year, since fewer than 20 percent of allegations of sexual violence are ever substantiated by investigators.

Corrections officials protest that meeting the PREA standards could cost hundreds of millions of dollars; but reformers say that lack of aggressive enforcement in prison assault cases costs society in other ways, from the spread of sexually communicable diseases to lawsuits. According to a DOJ report, a 1 percent reduction in the annual rate of prison sexual abuse could lead to a “monetary benefit” to society of between $157 million and $239 million.

Rape and coercion have long been regarded as an inevitable part of prison life, particularly among the most targeted populations – prisoners who are young and slight of stature, effeminate or gay, the mentally ill and first-timers. Yet the national commission established by PREA found that a number of fixable problems, from poor staff training and inadequate screening of vulnerable prisoners to overcrowding and an almost complete lack of prosecution of perpetrators, could and should be addressed to reduce the rate of assault.

Howard’s journey through Colorado’s prisons points to another problem the commission report scarcely mentions: the utter indifference of many staffers. Howard met with several case managers and supervisors at Sterling and filed grievances over his placement there.

The officials have divergent stories about what happened in those meetings and how explicit Howard was about his plight. But their tendency to downplay his complaints and insist that he “name names” helps to explain why the system’s number of reported assaults is so low.

The day the 211 member recognized him on the yard, Howard went to case manager David Backer to seek a transfer to another unit. According to Backer’s own paperwork, Howard told him “he had a high profile case and that the 211 gang attempted to extort money from him in the past.... He claimed he did not feel in danger or threatened by anyone at the time of our interview.

“He was also informed if he did have problems he would be asked to go on tape as to who was threatening him.... He stated he would never do this and would pay them off first. He then left my office.”

Howard says Backer ignored his claims of being extorted and prostituted at Fremont; the case manager told him he should have “kept a low profile.” Howard filed a grievance, which led to another meeting with Backer and two supervisors, Joseph Halligan and John Clarkson. Accounts of what transpired at that meeting vary greatly; in a later deposition, Halligan conceded several times that Howard said he felt “threatened,” then reversed himself and insisted that Howard did not express any concern about threats at that time.

In a written response denying the grievance, Clarkson acknowledged that Backer had been mistaken about requiring a taped statement. But Howard would have to identify who was bothering him before any action could be taken.

“We do have to have names,” Clarkson wrote. “We cannot keep you away from all 211 members. We do not place inmates in administrative segregation to protect them from other inmates, so that is not an option, either.”

But naming names, Howard insisted, would only expose him to more trouble. As the impasse continued and Howard filed more appeals, he was once again hit up by gang members for canteen items and pressured to raise money for the 211 leader’s legal fund through tax scams. As a kind of test run, he filed a bogus income tax return under his own name and received a refund check for a few thousand dollars. The money went to 211 members and outside affiliates.

In August 2005 Howard finally was moved to another unit at Sterling – but not for his own safety. The official reason was that his security classification had changed, based on his convictions in other states. But Backer also told him he’d “filed way too many grievances,” Howard says.

“He is a very needy inmate and is a strain on a case manager after awhile,” Clarkson wrote in one log entry.

Howard admits that he was, in fact, trying to overload his handlers with grievances in order to get transferred. “If you file enough, they want to get rid of you,” he says.

But the plan backfired. In his new unit, Howard was shaken down by a 211 shot-caller named Simon Shimbel, who informed him he would once again be paying rent: $25 a week.

Respectful at first, Shimbel’s attitude toward Howard soon turned ugly. He showed him a letter he’d received from Ghost, essentially giving the Sterling chapter the okay to do what it liked with Howard. “Make him cover debts with his ass,” Ghost wrote.

According to Howard, Shimbel took the directive to heart. He dragged Howard into the unit bathroom’s back stall, punched him in the stomach and ordered him to sit on the toilet with his feet up, so no one could see him from outside. He then forced him to perform oral sex until Shimbel ejaculated.

Howard told no one. After going several rounds with administrators over naming names, he didn’t expect any help from staff. He’d signed extradition papers that would take him out of Sterling for at least a few weeks to deal with court matters in Tennessee, and he was hoping to just hang on until the orders arrived. That 211 shot-callers could simultaneously proclaim their hatred of “fags” while engaging in sexual acts with said fags no longer baffled him. Logic was not the gang’s strong point. Intimidation was.

A week or so after the bathroom blow job, Howard says, Shimbel and another 211 member escorted him to a cell after the 10 p.m. head count, supposedly so that he could help a “homie” write a letter and get a discount on his rent. Howard had a pretty good idea what was about to happen but didn’t see any way out.

The homie turned out to be Phuong Dang, a member of a Vietnamese gang. Dang began by demanding oral sex, Howard says. After a few minutes he stopped, pulled up his pants, and stepped out of the cell for a moment, asking the 211 lookouts for lotion. He found some, returned, and ordered Howard to bend over a desk and spread his legs. He sodomized him for several minutes, then withdrew.

“Not bad pussy,” he said, and left the cell.

Told by Shimbel to get cleaned up, Howard retreated to the bathroom. He sat on a toilet and wept.

His orders for Tennessee arrived three days later. The respite gave him two months to try to figure out what to do. But the gang was busy in his absence, too. When he returned to Sterling, several 211 members surrounded him and showed him a single piece of paper. They figured it would persuade him to get busy raising the big cash needed for the defense fund.

There were two notable things about the document, an intake form from Howard’s own file. It had to have come from a staff computer, which meant the Crew had a DOC employee working with them, either for pay or unwittingly. And it contained the names and address of Howard’s parents, listed as emergency contacts. Someone was waiting on the outside, one of the group explained, to see if Howard was going to do what was expected of him.

Howard understood. “My family had never done anything to anybody,” he says. “To know they could reach out and touch my parents – that was a big move on their part.”

Over the next few weeks Howard collected personal data the group had stolen or extorted from sex offenders and other patsies. He even got the names and vitals of death row prisoners in Tennessee. He filled out fraudulent W-2 forms until he had a vast array of them, enough to raise $275,000 in tax refunds, to be funneled to a phony tax-preparation company that Howard had created, and ultimately to the 211 Crew. The packet was sitting on his desk, ready to be mailed to an outside confederate, but Howard kept stalling for more time.

On January 3, 2006, two officers conducted a surprise search of Howard’s cell. They found the bundle of tax return forms, listing 35 prisoners – some of them not even in Colorado. Howard says he didn’t tip off the staff himself, but he wishes the raid had been more discreet.

“They sent the gang coordinators,” he says. “The minute the 211 guys saw that, they pushed me in a corner and asked, ‘Who the fuck have you been talking to?’”

Howard, who has a history of heart trouble, suffered a panic attack that night – the first in a series of convulsive, paralyzing episodes that made him feel like “a mouse in a corner.”

Exhibiting high blood pressure and tachycardia, he was taken to the hospital for observation and remained there for several days.

During that time, Howard decided to name names and try to get out of Sterling. He met with IRS agents, staff brass and an investigator from the DOC Inspector General’s office.

He told them the tax scam was supposed to raise money to hire Harvey Steinberg, the prominent Denver criminal attorney, to defend Benjamin Davis. He told them about the extortion. And eventually he told them about the sexual assaults, naming Shimbel and Dang and Hernandez and Griego.

The last bit of information spilled out first in a conversation with a female IRS agent, who asked him what was “really” going on. “I started crying,” he recalls. “I told her, ‘I’ve been raped. I’ve been beaten. You people have no clue what’s going on here.’”

Larry Graham, the investigator from the Inspector General’s office, was highly skeptical of Howard’s claims. He thought it was suspicious that Howard made detailed sexual assault allegations only after the incriminating tax-fraud materials were found in his cell.
 
Graham first learned of the claims from a draft of the lawsuit Howard soon filed, acting as his own attorney, in a desperate effort to get a judge to order his removal from Sterling.

There was no DNA evidence, no contemporaneous outcry, nothing but “ice-cold” accusations that the accused prisoners could easily deny, if anyone bothered to ask them.

In Graham’s view, Howard was a smart con artist trying to game the system. Or, as he put it in one e-mail to another DOC official, “Mr. Howard is an admitted homosexual whose other talent is tax fraud ... he made an unprovable report of past sexual assaults by 211’s here [at Sterling] and at Fremont. I’m still working on that, but doubt if it will go far.”

In another e-mail, Graham all but dismissed Howard’s story as a ploy for leniency: “Mr. Howard seems to think he can just say the mean old 211 guys made him do it and walk away.”

Yet Howard did have proof of gang involvement in the tax scheme and other businesses.

He helped investigators locate a computer disk that contained evidence of falsified property sheets, payments to the gang by other prisoners and other incriminating data. He turned over an intake sheet on another prisoner that could only have come from a staff computer. But his allegations of staff involvement were deemed “bogus” just the same.

“Even after naming all the names, they just sent me back to my cell,” Howard says now. “I told a captain these people were going to kill me if I didn’t come up with $300,000 by March. Her response was, ‘Let’s see what happens in March.’”

Reluctantly, it seems, administrators made note of Howard’s “custody issues,” listing a couple dozen prisoners he should not be housed with, and shipped him off to the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility. He stayed there for several months, filing a blizzard of grievances and complaining about sightings of gang members who might retaliate against him. One grievance challenged DOC’s unwritten rule of making cell assignments by race; Howard figured he would be better off with a Hispanic or African-American cellie than a white one who might be in touch with the 211 Crew.

But word of his snitching at Sterling eventually drifted into Arkansas Valley, and Howard was transferred again. This time he was sent to one of the most violent prisons in the state.

“I was sent to Limon, God knows why,” he says. “It was already all over the compound that 211 was going to kill me.”

In a corridor at Limon, Howard locked eyes with Allen Hernandez, alias LBow – one of the names on the list of prisoners from Fremont and Sterling who weren’t supposed to be in contact with him. Howard fell to the floor and vomited. He lasted two weeks at Limon before he was shipped out again.

He was at Buena Vista only a few days when a 211 member from Sterling who’d been directly involved in the threats against Howard was moved into the same unit. That night he was subjected to a torrent of screams and taunts from neighboring cells. “They were calling me a snitch and a whore and a fag,” he says. “They were making arrangements to sell me to the black dudes on the tier. The officer station is right there. They could hear it, but they didn’t react at all.”

The experience triggered another panic attack, a trip to the emergency room – and another grievance. “A mistake was made in moving the offender you mention to BCVF after you were already here,” a supervisor responded. “This I can verify was a very unusual situation and should not have happened.”

But unusual situations continued to dog Howard, right up to his last day as a guest of the State of Colorado. On September 18, 2007, while waiting to be picked up by federal marshals and start serving his federal sentence for tax fraud, Howard was escorted past several vacant cells at the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center to a holding cell containing one other prisoner: Simon Shimbel.

“I can’t go in there,” Howard said, stopping dead at the door. “He’s a custody issue.”
 
The female sergeant escorting Howard ignored him and beckoned to the control center to open the door. Howard begged her to check the computer, which would show that he could not be housed with Shimbel.

The sergeant refused and told him to get in the cell. “You ain’t on parole yet, you know,” she said. Disobeying her order could delay his release from DOC indefinitely.

He went in. The door slammed behind him. Shimbel immediately got in his face. “I got ad-segged for that,” he said, referring to the stretch in solitary that Howard’s statements to investigators had cost him.

Howard curled up on top of the toilet, keeping his eyes down, while Shimbel berated him for being a snitch. Shimbel knocked him on the floor.

“The only reason I don’t choke you the fuck out is I’m leaving,” he seethed.

Shimbel checked the window to make sure no one was watching. Then he unzipped his pants. “Do what you do,” he said.

Howard says Shimbel struck him on the back of the head until he started performing oral sex. After a couple of minutes he knocked Howard to the floor again and ejaculated into the toilet. “Can’t give you any of this,” he muttered. “You’ll go to the pigs.”

Howard jumped up and hit the cell’s emergency button. When a voice came on the intercom asking him what the trouble was, he shouted that he needed his dress-out clothes. The door opened. The marshals were already coming down the corridor.

Howard and Shimbel were transported to the marshals’ office in the same car. He didn’t get a chance to report the alleged assault until Shimbel was gone – bound for Australia, to serve time for a prison escape there. Shifted temporarily to the Jefferson County jail, Howard spoke to several officers and medical personnel before someone took a report.

A jail sergeant called corrections officers at DOC to check Howard’s account of being sexually assaulted while in their custody.

“The guy’s a drama queen,” he was told. “Don’t worry about it.”

• • •

Howard’s lawsuit was thrown out by U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham, then reinstated by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded that there was evidence that prison officials at Sterling knew Howard “faced an ongoing risk from a prison gang with a substantial presence” and failed to take reasonable steps to protect him.

After that ruling came down, Howard managed to get the civil rights law firm of Killmer, Lane & Newman, whose client list ranges from Ward Churchill and Richard Heene to several death row prisoners, to represent him. The case soon became a costly, heels-dug-in wrangle over who had bigger credibility problems: convicted fraud Scott Howard or see-no-evil, cover-your-ass corrections officials.

It was the state’s position that Howard had never told case managers at Fremont and Sterling about ongoing gang threats, extortion or sexual assaults – not until after he was caught red-handed with the tax data in 2006. His transfer from Fremont to Sterling had not been for security reasons, but because he was accepted into a “life learning program” at Sterling. His complaints about his placement at Sterling were not because of 211 threats, but because he wanted to get back to his “paramour” in another unit.

The official version took some bizarre turns. One officer maintained that 211 members at Sterling had such an aversion to homosexuality that one of their members was stabbed over a forbidden tryst; thus it was unlikely that gang members would sexually assault Howard or pimp him out to other gangs. Case manager Backer maintained that complaining about custody issues – for example, saying that gang members are trying to kill you – is somehow different from snitching. Backer had “never seen an inmate get retaliated against” for seeking protection, so why didn’t Howard speak up?

Case manager Halligan insisted that extortion was no big deal, either. “In my experience, threats of extortion and extortion itself rarely leads to violence in DOC,” he stated in one affidavit. “Nearly all such activity is resolved by the inmates themselves.”

After months of discovery and depositions, Howard’s lawyers found numerous holes in the official story, but nothing that proved Howard’s version. “That was a weakness in our case,” attorney David Lane says. “We had no corroboration of any kind that he’d ever made a report. But then lo and behold, there was a memo from his case manager that the attorney general’s office never gave to us. And it was the smoking-gun document of the entire case.”

Howard had filed a second lawsuit after his encounter with Shimbel on his last day in the DOC. A private law firm defended that case, and it produced many of the same documents the Colorado Attorney General’s Office had handed over in the original case – with one glaring exception. A transfer form signed by Fremont case manager Dave Mason had surfaced in the second wave. The form states that one of the reasons Howard was being moved from Fremont to Sterling was because “other offenders” were pressuring him for money. Handwritten and circled on the form is a number: 211.

Weeks before that document was found, Mason had filed an affidavit in the case denying that Howard had ever told him about any threats or extortion. Other officers filed similar affidavits, insisting that nothing in Howard’s file or their discussions with him pointed to a gang problem. Yet the form backed up Howard’s account of his meeting with Mason and the reasons for his subsequent move to Sterling.

Howard remembers seeing the form for the first time last spring and realizing he was on the brink of vindication. “That was the healing point for me,” he says now, “to find this document that shows I wasn’t lying.”

Lane was more furious than elated. In thirty years of practicing law, he insists, he’s never seen a more serious violation of discovery rules. “In the entire world of documents, there was only one that we did not get – and it was the one that blew their case out of the water,” he says. “I believe the attorney general’s office intentionally hid this document. But no one’s been held accountable for this.”

In a court filing, the AG’s office maintained that the omission was “inadvertent,” the result of a copying glitch by a paralegal, who omitted several other less relevant pages when copying Howard’s DOC file. “If Mr. Lane believes there was an ethical violation, he has an obligation to file a grievance,” says AG spokesman Mike Saccone. “If he’s still carping about this and hasn’t done that, I think that speaks volumes.”

Lane did push for an evidentiary hearing in the matter, but within a few weeks the parties quietly settled the case for $165,000. “I was disappointed in the amount,” Lane says, “but Scott wanted to move on with his life.”

Moving on has been difficult for Howard. While the lawsuit was under way, he was inundated with materials reminding him of the details of his assaults. He still suffers from post-traumatic stress. He has bad reactions to encounters with white guys with shaved heads, and for a time avoided contact with white people whenever he could.

“Some days are good, some days are bad,” he says. “Part of my healing process was to forgive people. Am I mad at staff? Do I think they could have prevented it? Absolutely. There were times when I was so upset, I didn’t know if I could go on with it. But I either had to let them get away with it or continue the fight.”

DOC officials didn’t respond to requests for comment on the Howard settlement or any policy changes it may have inspired. In 2007, 211 Crew founder Benjamin Davis, despite his insistence that he’d distanced himself from the gang, was convicted by a Denver jury on charges of racketeering, assault and conspiracy and had an additional 96 years tacked onto his sentence. But the 211 Crew and other gangs continue to be active in Colorado prisons – even if many of their activities are, as the man says, “resolved by the inmates themselves.”

Howard now works as a production manager for a company in the Midwest. He’s been invited to speak at an upcoming gathering of the American Correctional Association as well as a national convention of sexual assault response teams. After years of being afraid to speak out, his name and photo and battles are showing up in Just Detention International fundraising appeals and on the New York Review of Books blog.
 
“This has turned into my fight,” he says. “I know a person at Fremont who’s going through the same thing right now and is being ignored. I really didn’t seek this, but I can be a voice for those who aren’t being heard.”

Violence still climbing in AZ State prisons...

I've been perusing the Arizona Department of Corrections' (ADC) website of late and came across this report with a few things worth sharing. As many regular readers are aware, the ADC is the only state agency this year to have received an increase in their funding, placing their annual budget at about $1 billion. This came despite a decrease in the number of prisoners committed there by the courts since 2009. In fact, the ADC is getting a whole lot of new stuff despite the public's decreasing demand for their services.



To convince us of their dire need, Chuck Ryan and the state's prosecutors have been clamoring all year that 94% of ADC prisoners are "violent or repeat offenders" (as if Vicodin addicts and serial rapists pose an equal threat to the rest of us) and therefore MUST be imprisoned for our safety (see this long report - read between the propaganda, if you can). They argue that our high incarceration rates over the past decade are responsible for a falling crime rate (which was actually seen nationally due to many factors).



In truth, though, there's been a marked decrease in violent offenders among new prisoners being admitted over the past 2 years, so it's not going down because they're all getting put away. Far too many of our resources continue to go towards imprisoning people who have smuggled themselves over the border or worked hard at a job no one else wanted too many times - over 6,000 of our prisoners are foreign nationals - most of whom we just plan to deport after we expend a fortune punishing them.


Actually, contrary to what Chuck Ryan's public claims would lead one to believe, 36% of the state's prisoner population is considered so low-risk that they're in minimum security settings - which means they could be safely walking among us right now. That's over 12,000 people who don't REALLY need to be locked into their beds at night (at about $20,000/year per prisoner) for the sake of public safety.


So why aren't we talking sentencing reform at the legislature this year instead of building 5,000 new prison beds? There's plenty of evidence of the meddling of the private prison lobby and American Legislative Exchange Council in our lawmaking activities here. But there's also a large contingent among law enforcement and corrections - such as ADC Director Chuck Ryan - leading us even further down the path of mass incarceration with fear, not reason. Whether crime goes up or down, their constant refrain is that we need more prisons and police - even when our school budgets are being ravaged.



Charts are from the ADC's 2011 "Data and Information" report. Increases in violence over the past 2 years appear to be more dramatic than the changes in prisoner population and and apparent increase in the staff/prisoner ratio. Despite ADC claims that the violence grew due to budget and staffing cuts, there aren't a significant number of additional CO positions slated to be filled this year.







While there's no hard evidence that Chuck Ryan has - across his career - actually served to reduce crime in Arizona by fighting to secure longer sentences for vast numbers of petty criminals, there's ample proof that he's having a harder time than his predecessor did maintaining a safe environment for both prisoners and staff behind bars. Under his tenure, suicides and homicides have skyrocketed, and assaults are up all over.



Indicators of prison violence are projected to jump even more next year. One would think the ADC would set goals to reduce those rates, not project increases. Sadly, they seem far more concerned with bringing down health care costs than reducing prison violence - even that which is against their own people. In 2009, as Ryan's predecessor was leaving office, 1 in 40 prisoners and 1 in 17 staff were involved in an assault. Things have deteriorated so badly under his directorship that in 2012 1 in 23 prisoners are expected to be involved in fights and assaults, and 1 in 16 staff will be attacked.





Assaults on both prisoners and staff are expected to jump again in 2012. Nothing in the ADC's current 5-year plan addresses how to reduce the assault, suicide or homicide rates. Dora Schriro's reports, on the other hand, looked at these concerns closely.









Meanwhile, prisoners and their families have been told that their lives are of no value to the rest of us short of the revenue that the commodification of their bodies and the enslavement of their labor produces. Visitors have to pay for their security clearance now, rehabilitative programs have been gutted, prisoner pay was cut while medical visit co-pays increased, account deposits are being assessed a new fee, only 2 meals are served each day on the weekends, and women are dying while begging to see a doctor. Things are so bad now that the ACLU National Prison Project and the Prison Law Office are actually talking about suing the ADC for injunctive relief due to the gross medical neglect of their general prison population, as well as the abuse of solitary confinement for prisoners with psychiatric disabilities. That's pretty serious.

AZ prison violence: higher security yards are least secure...

The guys are also writing to me more for help getting protective custody throughout the system, saying that the gangs run all the 3 and 4 yards (medium and maximum security) - and few are getting it, despite being assaulted repeatedly. The guards are often part of the problem - several stood out of the way for Dana Seawright's murder, and I know of at least one guard who was prosecuted for taking a $1000 bribe to let someone try and kill a friend of mine for being gay. Look at the assault statistics for different custody levels - they tell the story of prison violence spiraling out of control.


All that those violent perpetrators seem to be getting from being in Chuck Ryan's custody, frankly, is target practice on vulnerable prisoners like Shannon Palmer, carelessly housed among the most dangerous. That way both the thugs and the brutalized are good and ready for us when they get out. That's neither tough nor smart on crime - It's just hardest on the most easily victimized prisoners, like the very old, the very gentle, and those with psychiatric, developmental, and physical disabilities - many of whom landed in prison due to the shredded safety net in our state, not due to their inherent criminality.


I suspect from all that I've seen that the violence among prisoners in our state institutions is actually serving a purpose for the ADC. The gangs keep prisoners divided by race and high on heroin so they can't unite against the real enemy and resist the conditions of their confinement. Fear keeps people spending all their energy just surviving prison life, too, and posits other prisoners as sources of danger while making it appear as if their only hope for safety will come from the institution (often in exchange for something), if it comes at all.


In order words, the gangs and yard leaders are in on it with Chuck in a very convenient relationship. How ironic that they're the ones demanding to see guys' police reports for evidence they haven't snitched on anyone when they're the main parties in collusion with the guards and ADC brass. Gang members and leaders make a show of resisting authority, but they are hardly the enemy of the state, by any means. They are in bed with them. Feel free to tell them I said that, too. Too many prisoners are being tattooed and led astray by the very rats who sell all of you out to maintain their own comfort and safety every day. If you were to unite amongst yourselves and start organizing around a new analysis of power inside, you might have a chance at disrupting that particular culture.


So spread the word and call them on their shit, guys - not only does the police report they insist on seeing fail to identify those who turned state's evidence later (everyone pisses their pants when they get busted, so they know you're likely to have something in that report they can make a big deal of), but they have no business questioning your integrity when they've been collaborating with the police state for a long time now. The gang violence also makes you all look bad out here, dehumanizing prisoners for those of us who wish to ignore your desperate predicament. In every way, those guys are just doing prisoners as a whole harm - and doing Chuck Ryan a service by keeping you down so he doesn't have to. They keep his guards in line, too.


On that note, I encourage folks to check out the ADC's website for more information about how our tax dollars are being spent fostering even more criminal activity - and destroying the lives that might be salvaged -behind bars. Here are their collected reports and statistics. The Corrections at a Glance monthly briefs are especially interesting for what they show the ADC isn't doing for the 75% of prisoners these days who come in with drug problems. Even the drunks aren't getting treatment. Given the physical state of most of the prison system, it kind of makes you wonder where all that money has been going...

Deaths in Custody: National Day of Remembrance For Murder Victims.

I spent some time this past week combing through resources for homicide survivors, trying to pull together something useful for survivors of prison violence today. I was pretty discouraged surfing murder victims' rights pages. It was the victims' rights movement that successfully helped pass a law in Arizona - and across the country - that even further marginalizes prisoners who are victims of violence - and their survivors.

More specifically, the Arizona Constitution explicitly precludes anyone who was victimized "while in custody for an offense" (or their survivor, if they died as a result) from being covered by any provisions of the Victims' Rights Amendment. How then, can they possibly hope to embrace, assist, or represent families of prisoners like Dana Haywood Seawright, Shannon Palmer, James Jennings, and Jeremy Pompeneo - all whom were murdered in state custody this past year. They have long since relegated prisoners to a status undeserving of having equal human rights when it comes to life and safety. The movement left these people behind without any apparent thought.

As a consequence, when Kini Seawright was on the verge of homelessness this year after her son Dana's homicide destroyed her life, the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission refused to provide her with access to any state-funded victims rights' services because she didn't qualify as a real victim. Dana was killed in prison by the West Side Crips for being friends with a Mexican - he was defying the racism and the gangs, not running with them. He was trying to take a class at Rio Salado and wanted to get some kind of counseling for his manic-depression and childhood abuse issues. He was beaten into a coma and stabbed repeatedly for refusing to carry out a gang-ordered hit to prove his racial loyalty. He died four days later.

Dana's homicide case was closed by the Department of Corrections' own Criminal Investigations Unit without any suspects being referred for prosecution - or even being given a ticket for the assault causing Dana's death. His mother has been working actively to get an outside law enforcement agency to re-open the case in light of evidence that guards were complicit in Dana's death. She's also suing the state of Arizona, as well as a number of individuals who appear to be liable for his murder. In the meantime, however, she suffered severe financial hardship and social isolation, for which she is not eligible to receive state assistance designated for helping victims of violent crime in such situations. An excerpt from the e-mail to that effect is here:

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

Sent: Tue, June 28, 2011 8:23:36 AM
Subject: RE: Kini Seawright

I have received a response to my follow up inquiry. After clarification it is ACJC’s position that the compensation program is only accountable to those statutes and rules that directly govern the Compensation Fund. Therefore, under program rules Ms. Seawright is not a victim pursuant to the definition of “victim” in A.A.C.R10-4-101(29). She is a “derivative victim” under ACJC’s rule, A.A.C.R10-4-101(10)(a), however, she is not entitled to a compensation award pursuant to A.A.C. R10-4-106(A)(3)(b) because the victim of the criminally injurious conduct was serving a sentence of imprisonment in a detention facility at the time of his death. Therefore, the prerequisites for a compensation award have not been met in this case...



Program Manager Crime Victim Services

Arizona Criminal Justice Commission

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

I can't believe that was the intentions of the victims' rights advocates in Arizona who helped get that initiative passed, but that was the consequence.

I've blogged about the Victim's Rights Amendment in the Arizona Constitution before - read my letter to the Arizona Department of Corrections on the matter here. I hope to spend more time getting organized behind a movement to change it. There are far too many families like Kini's being wrongfully punished and exiled under it. Failing to protect victims in custody gives license to law enforcement to use excessive force, and for prisons and jails to mete out cruel and unusual punishment as they see fit, not as the judges ordered. It suggests that toll of violence on one group of homicide victims and their survivors is less important than when it hits the rest of us. The state victims' rights amendment creates a sub-class of citizens whose victimization - usually at the hands of the state - we are willing to not only ignore but actively minimize. It serves to reduce the states liability profile when people are hurt in their custody - including pre-trial detention, when we're supposed to be presumed innocent.

I urge those of you concerned with the civil rights of prisoners and their loved ones to contact your state legislators and ask for help changing the definition of a victim to include those in custody for an offense. The legislature is empowered to extend victims rights to everyone - it doesn't have to go to referendum. Tell your legislator that victims of state crimes matter, too. He or she can be reached at:

Arizona State Legislature
1700 W. Washington St.
Phoenix, AZ 85007


cc your letter to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Eddie Farnsworth, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ron Gould, and someone there who might really care: Mesa Representative and Chair of the House Health and Human Services Committee, Cecil Ash.

Finally, if you are a survivor of prison violence or have lost a loved one to it - or simply want to make a difference - please feel free to contact me. My number is 480-580-6807. I'm organizing with families now who want to see an end to the neglect, abuse, and violence now.

Suicide Watch: Too many AZ prisoners dead.

Today is:

Suicides at the Arizona Department of Corrections, January 2009-July 2011 (Chuck Ryan's tenure):

Jan - June 2009 (5 suicides in 6mos):
Angela Soto (MexAmer, 28) Harvey Rymer (W, 33)
Angel Torres (MexAmer, 32) Dung Ung (AsnAmer, 32)
Caesar Bojorquez (MexNatl, 37)

July - June 2010 (9 suicides in 12 months):
Erick Cervantes (MexAmer, 30) Douglas Nunn (W, 33)
Hernan Cuevas (MexAmer, 18) Monte McCarty (W, 46)
Patricia Velez (MexAmer, 24), Jerry Kulp (AfAmer, 17)
Jessie Cota, (MexAm, 28) James Adams (W, 46)
Eric Bybee (W, 32)

July - June 2011 (14 suicides in 12 months):

Tony Lester (NA, 26) Robert Medina (MexAm, 29)
Geshell Fernandez (NA, 28) Patrick Lee Ross, (AfAmer, 28)
Lasasha Cherry (AfAmer, 23) Rosario Bojorquez-Rodriguez (MexNat, 29)
Duron Cunningham (AfAmer, 40) James Galloway (W, 54)
Ronald Richie (W, 42) Susan Lopez (MexAmer, 35)
Michael Tovar, (MexAmer, 20) Carey Wheatley (AfAmer, 49)
Michael Pellicer (AfAmer, 35) Luis Moscoso-Hernandez (MexNat, 28)

In the first 2 1/2 years of his tenure, Chuck Ryan presided over 28 suicides. That's almost one per month. During that time the prison population remained relatively stable - even dropping a bit last year. In the 2 1/2 years that preceded Ryan, under Dora Schriro, there were only 12 suicides - less than 1 every two months.

Additionally, both Shannon Palmer and James Jennings were murdered by their cellies because Shannon and James were psychotic and isolated with intolerant cellies (in Shannon's case, his cellie was also psychotic).

Most suicides occurred in higher security settings and isolation cells - as best as I can tell, all but one of the women who killed themselves in their cells were in some kind of solitary confinement.

Several things that I know of changed when Chuck Ryan took over the ADC that may have affected these outcomes. According to retired deputy warden Carl Toersbijns, almost immediately the policies for how to house certain prisoners together changed (two other prisoners - not mentally ill, were subsequently murdered by cellies), and a suicide prevention program that used prisoners as aides to help identify and support other suicidal prisoners was cancelled, despite the relatively low cost of the program.

I haven't cross-referenced the prisoner population by race and don't have some other stats for before Ryan took over. But the suicides that occurred on his watch are by and large young minorities. The white prisoners (and one African American) who took their own lives tended to be older men facing long sentences for violent crimes; a couple of pedophiles were among them. The youthful ages and minority status of the rest - and the relatively short sentences they had by the time they died - are quite disturbing.

From the data above, I would argue that the mental health of young minority prisoners seems to be taken less seriously than that of white prisoners, across the board. This is often the case in the "free world", as well - though on the outside, white males tend to have the highest, not the lowest, suicide rates. Minorities, by the establishment, are perceived as dangerous to others more so than to themselves, whether or not an individual's case or evidence exists to support that.

It is not uncommon, though, to find that many prison suicides are by individuals with a history of violence - at least two of the women who killed themselves had a history of assault in prison - which may be why they were in maximum security at the time they died. Unfortunately, maximum security means more isolation and restrictions, not necessarily closer supervision. Punishing prisoners by cancelling visitation and phone privileges seems like a set-up for more anti-social behavior, and undermines the rehabilitative process - two good reasons why the new $25 fee for visitors should have never been imposed, as it will cost prisoners a certain amount of community support and pro-social relationships (which are often so important to maintain to prevent further violence against others or oneself).

A significant number of the prisoners who suicided struggled with a previously-diagnosed psychiatric disorder. The prison psychiatric care is substandard, though, and access to the prison psychiatric facility where serious therapy is done is extremely hard to gain. Susan Lopez, for example, hung herself after two days of begging for help - including psychiatric hospitalization, and being ignored. That goes for most of the states jails, too. Just a week before she did herself in, Susan had been in the Greenlee County Jail where she was brutally strapped into a restraint chair by guards for being agitated on the phone and having a panic attack. She was sent to the hospital for unknown reasons soon after that traumatic incident.

I've heard numerous stories in the past year of how prisoners aren't getting their psychiatric meds, presumably because of the budget cuts. Tony Lester was off all his meds and getting psychotic when he cut his throat. Shannon Palmer and his cellmate, Jasper Rushing, were both seeking protective custody due to their paranoia when they were housed together, and neither - according to their families - were on anti-psychotic medicine at the time Shannon was murdered and castrated. The cell they were placed in should have only held two men for no more than 24 hours, because it was originally built to keep just one man in solitary. Instead, they were kept in that tiny cell together - without light or psychiatric care - for three weeks. When Shannon handed the guards a kite begging them to let him out of the cell with Jasper - just a day or two before he was killed - they simply laughed at him. That kite has not yet been found. I suspect this is typical of how the mentally ill in Arizona State Prisons are treated today.

Carl Toersbijns, the retired DW I referenced earlier, has done extensive blogging on the treatment of the seriously mentally ill in Arizona's Department of Corrections - check out his site here. He's also written quite a bit about alternative programming and policies that may hep reduce both the suicide and homicide rates among prisoners with psychiatric disabilities, while also improving the level of care for other at-risk prisoners. Before retiring, Carl worked in the Supermax, ASPC-Eyman, where many mentally ill prisoners are driven to psychosis and despair in isolation instead of being in a treatment setting; he knows of what he speaks. Unfortunately, the ADC seems to regard him as a traitor for his criticisms, and hasn't picked up on any of his suggestions.

In the face of the criticsm many of us have had about their suicide rates and psychiatric programs, the ADC released the following letter to the Mental Illness and Criminal Justice Commission defending themselves by minimizing our concerns and profiling a token program or two that few prisoners can even qualify for. See that memo here.

Read it for yourself, but there is no good explanation that I can see for why the suicide rates have skyrocketed under this administration - and since they fail to even acknowledge how much they are failing, I'm not optimistic that they will properly analyze those deaths and come up with more effective suicide prevention practices. Rather the memo justifies the policies and practices they currently employ, avoids confronting the possible reasons for high suicide rates, and attempts to marginalize the rest of us from the conversation as being ill-informed or even malicious. Let me remind folks that Carl Toersbijns has decades of corrections' experience, including extensive work with mentally ill prisoners, and is particularly familiar with Arizona's Special Management Units.


Finally, while the memo argues that Director Ryan implemented programmatic and staffing changes in 2010 to respond to the high suicide and homicide rates (which they wouldn't even really admit to), the data since then shows an even higher body count than before. And in no place in the ADC's response is there a satisfactory discussion of the mental health and treatment needs of women prisoners, who are the most neglected...nor does it explore the stats that concern community advocates by race, crime, custody level, or age. As long as they deny the problems they have delivering adequate mental health care to prisoners, they won't be able to effect meaningful change.

Therefore, as I've done so often lately, I'm urging readers - especially the survivors of these prisoners - to contact Representative Cecil Ash at the Arizona State Legislature. Representative Ash is chair of the House Health and Human Services Committee, which seems to be the most appropriate place from which to organize a legislative investigation into the deaths and the poor mental health care in the state prisons. Ask him to convene legislative hearings into the state prisons (including testimony from prisoners and their families). The legislature has the authority to open an investigation, compel testimony, and bring many more resources to the table than those of us in the community can. Time is running out before the next prisoner takes his or her life, so please put the pressure on now. Rep. Ash can be reached at:

AZ State Legislature 1700 W. Washington St Phoenix 85007

Cecil's email address is cash@azleg.gov - but handwritten letters in the US mail make more of an impact - emails are too easily lost.

If you are the survivor of prison violence, then I'd also suggest that you try to make an appointment with him to advocate for an agency-wide investigation into the practices and patterns that are causing this level of violence and despair in our prisons to grow. He's a sincere man - very interested in the plight of our prisoners and their families - and will give you the time of day if he has it. The legislature's phone number is 602-926-5999.

Feel free to contact me with any questions - or even criticisms - regarding this post. Blessings and condolences to all of you who have lost a loved one to prison violence, abuse, or neglect. If you want to organize with other such families, please let me know.

Take care,

Peggy Plews
480-580-6807
prisonabolitionist@gmail.com

"Fight Real Power"
Sandra Day O'Conner Federal Courthouse
November 13, 2010 (Phoenix)

Another young prisoner dead: Carlo Krakoff

ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
1601 W. JEFFERSON
PHOENIX, ARIZONA 85007
(602) 542-3133
www.azcorrections.gov

JANICE K. BREWER CHARLES L. RYAN
GOVERNOR DIRECTOR

For more information contact:
NEWS RELEASE
Barrett Marson
bmarson@azcorrections.gov
For Immediate Release
Bill Lamoreaux
blamorea@azcorrections.gov

August 1, 2011
Inmate Death Notification

Tucson, Ariz. – Inmate Carlo Krakoff, 36, ADC #253282, was found unresponsive in his housing unit Sunday. He was pronounced dead by medical responders.

Krakoff, sentenced out of Maricopa County, was serving 13 years for armed robbery. He came to ADC May 7, 2010 and was housed at ASPC-Tucson’s Santa Rita Unit.
The death is under investigation by the department.

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

Carlo was a child actor, whose parents pleaded in his criminal case (he was convicted of robbing multiple pharmacies for oxycodone) for drug treatment, not prison...here's his facebook, with a photo of him as a kid. Our condolences to his family. Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any support to you through this difficult time. Many survivors of prison violence (suicide, homicide, and abuse/neglect) have begun organizing to support eachother and change things. Carlo's family is more than welcome, whatever the circumstances of his death.

Take care,

Peggy Plews
480-580-6807