Great interview with Carl Toersbijns on the Lou Show. In 2010 Carl retired from his job as Deputy Warden at the state supermax facility, ASPC-Eyman, where many prisoners with mental illness are managed in solitary confinement instead of in a mental health care setting. Since retiring, Carl's written a couple of books about his career in corrections, and has been blogging and advocating for prisoners with serious mental illness. He's also repeatedly called for his old boss Chuck Ryan to be fired or resign. Here he addresses the abusive culture of the ADC, the role that Chuck Ryan may have had in setting the tone at Abu Ghraib, and the needs and rights of prisoners with mental illness. Please take the time to listen to this show, and go like the Lou Show on Facebook afterwards - Lou's really been great working to help us expose and reduce the abuse of state prisoners.
AFSC-TUCSON: AZ DOC's DEATH YARDS
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Deaths in Custody: Otto Munster, 40.
Otto Munster
On Monday, March 5, another prisoner of the State of Arizona died by
apparent suicide. Otto Munster had just turned 40 when he was sentenced
to the Arizona Department of Corrections in September 2011. The judge
made a special stipulation in his sentencing orders
that he receive mental health and substance abuse treatment services in
prison - recommendations like that from judges are seldom ever
followed, though - they mostly serve to ease the conscience of the
person sending a mentally ill prisoner to something other than the
psychiatric hospital they think they should be in instead.
I don't know just how vulnerable a prisoner Otto Munster was - I can
find no information on him other than his criminal and court records. He
was apparently mentally ill, however - dually diagnosed with a
substance abuse disorder as well. Otto apparently had no prior criminal record in
Arizona, but was arrested in March 2011 for several charges including
armed robbery and aggravated assault. Based on the police report and a motion by the defense counsel, Otto was ordered to
have a psych evaluation for competency (known in Arizona as a Rule 11)
before any further legal proceedings. That means he was stuck in Joe's
jail untiol he pled guilty and was sentenced - about six months. The initial evaluation resulted in a split
decision by the doctors, so he had a third one, at which he was finally
found competent enough to plead guilty to the crime he was charged with
when he was deemed too ill to stand trial.
The ADC itself reports that 75% of incoming prisoners are there for
offenses related to their substance abuse, but only 2,302 (out of the
60,000 people they handle every year) ever got any kind of substance
abuse treatment from them in all of 2011 (that's in the small print on
the back page of this brochure).
That figure includes the treatment provided to all those DUI offenders
we supposedly lock up in special private DUI prisons, too, as well as
every meth addict that comes through - despite the ADC's billion-dollar
budget, prisoners just aren't getting what they need to be come decent
citizens, folks, even when they beg for it.
Chuck Ryan's Arizona Department of Corrections has only two
priorities, neither of which is rehabilitative or treatment-oriented.
They serve to punish and incapacitate people, that's all. That's why
they're dying inside at such a clip behind bars, now, and why they come
back to us in worse condition that when they went into prison in the
first place.
Judges need to stop deluding themselves and their defendants that prisoners will actually get their mental health or substance abuse treatment needs met by the state if placed in custody. In all probability, they will be more traumatized than healed by their experience in prison - if they survive it. At least 40% will come out infected with the Hepatitis C virus, too (half not even knowing it). HCV is a serious epidemic behind bars that the ADC has refused to fully address - which means it's also a major public health problem festering in our communities, where 95% of state prisoners eventually return to.
Judges need to stop deluding themselves and their defendants that prisoners will actually get their mental health or substance abuse treatment needs met by the state if placed in custody. In all probability, they will be more traumatized than healed by their experience in prison - if they survive it. At least 40% will come out infected with the Hepatitis C virus, too (half not even knowing it). HCV is a serious epidemic behind bars that the ADC has refused to fully address - which means it's also a major public health problem festering in our communities, where 95% of state prisoners eventually return to.
And so, it's easy for prisoners in Arizona - especially the seriously
mentally ill being sent there on the false belief that they'll be
"cared" for and safer there than if left on the streets, like Shannon
Palmer - to quickly fall into a sustained state of terror, hopelessness
and despair. According to the ADC website, almost immediately after
arriving in prison, Otto Munster began to pick up disciplinary charges.
From what's visible, it looks like most of those charges were aggravated
refusals to follow an order - usually the order to house. Most guys who
rack up disciplinaries for that are fearing for their lives and
refusing to be in General Population; I wouldn't be surprised if we find
out that this is the predicament Otto was in.
Otto also initiated a petition for post-conviction relief,
meaning he changed his mind about his plea deal and wanted a trial. He
had to initiate that without legal assistance, however, and appears to
have struggled to meet the requirements of the court for doing it
properly - though Judge Paul McMurdie seemed to be trying to accommodate
his mental illness by allowing his petition to proceed anyway; he even
appointed an attorney to represent him (most post-conviction relief
petitions I see are done without help). Otto likely discovered what I
just explained about state prison as soon as he arrived and was
horrified that he agreed to do five years there. He barely even made it
five months. I suspect he was requesting protection from another
prisoner or a gang when he died.
When a prisoner requests protective segregation, they usually go into
the detention unit of the prison they're at, or they go to
ASPC-Florence, where both Rosario Rodriguez-Bojorquez and Duron Cunningham
were at, awaiting determination of their protective segregation
requests, when they killed themselves in September 2010. That's where
Otto was incarcerated when he killed himself this week as well. The ADC
should know by now that when they tell vulnerable, frightened prisoners
they won't be protected from targeted violence, they need to be alert
for a self-destructive response. Especially after guards mocked Shannon Palmer's
pleas for safety and he was castrated by his cellmate at ASPC-Lewis
(also in September 2010), the level of terror among the men has
skyrocketed.
Death by hanging is understandably seen as a far more preferable out than dismemberment by another prisoner or a brutal rape and beating by a gang.
Death by hanging is understandably seen as a far more preferable out than dismemberment by another prisoner or a brutal rape and beating by a gang.
AZ State Capitol, PHX
March 6, 2012
Arpaio's Deaths in Custody: Misogyny back on trial.
This guy Vogel - who should have been taken by the cops to the psych
hospital, not to jail, died over ten years ago after fighting off a
bunch of guards trying to dress him in pink - and yet they still do this
kind of
thing to frightened, vulnerable, mentally ill prisoners today.
Apparently when this case first went to court, his trauma from that
incident wasn't really fully explored - the 9th Circuit Court seems to
think that the use of the pink underwear is indeed abusive, however, and
relevant, so it's being returned to the lower courts for a new trial -
with Arpaio as the defendant. As articulated by Justice Noonan:
"Unexplained
and undefended, the dress-out in pink appears to be punishment without
legal justification," he wrote. "It appears to us that this question is
still open for exploration at trial on remand."
To use
the color pink - long associated with the feminine - as a means
of humiliating male prisoners is pathetic and disgusting and says a lot
about not just Arpaio's homophobia and hate for people who are
gay/transgender/queer, but his deep contempt for women in
particular. How can women with any political awareness at all justify
allowing Arpaio and the MCSO to continue like this?
I have a hard
time understanding how the women in this state - Republicans and Dems
alike - have tolerated Arpaio's
misogyny for so long - much less why so many vote for him - except that
the women here have been very well-trained to comply. Women's rights
organizations in Arizona who aren't actively working to end mandatory
the pink underwear in the county jail are as much a part of the problem
as Sheriff Joe himself is - they should be supporting this suit. The use
of pink - the feminine - as something to abuse people with is not a
petty issue - it's a symptom of the toxic attitudes towards people (not
just prisoners) that defines the MCSO's culture, and it's killing folks.
"Corrupt Joe"
Wells Fargo/Arpaio HQ
June 7, 2011
-------from the Courthouse News Service (great resource)-----
March 7, 2012
(CN) - The 9th Circuit ordered a new trial Wednesday in the case of a schizophrenic Arizona man who had a fatal heart attack weeks after he was forced to put on pink underwear in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's notorious county jail.
Maricopa County authorities stopped 36-year-old Eric Vogel in 2001 while looking for a burglar in his Phoenix neighborhood. Vogel, who had a lifelong history of mental illness and social isolation, had left the home he shared with his mother that morning for the first time in years. When the officers questioned him, he struggled, shouted "kill me" and said he needed to talk to the president. The deputies arrested him and booked him in Arpaio's jail for assaulting a police officer. Vogel was transferred to the psychiatric unit after he told a psychologist that he was at the World Trade Center and getting messages from satellites, but not before being subjected to a "dress-out" in which four officers forced the struggling inmate to change into pink underwear and other jailhouse garb.
Arpaio famously requires of all Maricopa County Jail inmates to wear pink underwear.
Vogel spent a week in the unit before his mother bailed him out. A short time later, he was in his mother's car when she had a traffic accident. Police at the scene warned Vogel that there was a warrant out for his arrest for spitting on an officer during the "dress-out." Vogel left the scene and ran for approximately 5 miles. He died the next day of acute cardiac arrhythmia.
Vogel's mother sued Maricopa County and Arpaio for violating federal civil rights law and other statutes, including the Americans With Disabilities Act. Yavon Wagner, Vogel's sister, stepped in as the plaintiff when her mother died shortly before the trial.
Vogel allegedly thought he was being raped by the officers, and that they were dressing him in pink underwear as some sort of preparation for a "gang rape." Vogel had been obsessed with the humiliating jailhouse incident, and that the lingering trauma of the dress-out had contributed to his death, according to the complaint.
At trial, however, Senior U.S. District Judge Earl Carroll barred Wagner from testifying about her brother's state of mind, finding it hearsay. He also prohibited mention of "rape," "gang rape," and "pink underwear," finding no evidence that Vogel had known the underwear he was forced to wear was indeed pink. The court also limited expert testimony as to the possible effects of the dress-out and about an alleged connection between schizophrenia and cardiac arrhythmia. At the trial's end, "the District Court abruptly eliminated the plaintiff's opportunity for rebuttal argument," according to the ruling. A jury found for the defendants.
But the 9th Circuit voted 2-1 on Wednesday to reverse the verdict and order a new trial. The San Francisco-based panel found that the lower court had committed a fatal error by limiting the plaintiffs' testimony, and had done so again by refusing to consider the psychological implications of pink underwear.
"Indisputably, Wagner could have testified at trial about the impact the jail incident had on Vogel, how his mood was following the incident, how disturbed he seemed, and even what he thought happened to him during the incident, all without putting inadmissible hearsay before the jury," Judge John Noonan wrote for the majority. "None of this testimony would have been put forth in order to establish the truth of what he had said. Wagner proposed to testify about how extremely delusional Vogel was following the incident, and more importantly, the emotional impact the incident had on him, including how humiliated he now felt by the pink underwear. She was not asserting the truth of anything that Vogel said had happened to him in jail."
Because of the "symbolic significance" of the color pink in American culture, the jury should have been permitted the jury to consider the "impact of the dress-out on Vogel apparent from his conversation with his sister," the panel found.
"When a color of such symbolic significance is selected for jail underwear, it is difficult to believe that the choice of color was random," Noonan wrote. "The county offers no penalogical reason, indeed no explanation whatsoever for its jail's odd choice. Given the cultural context, it is a fair inference that the color is chosen to symbolize a loss of masculine identity and power, to stigmatize the male prisoners as feminine."
"That Vogel was delusional does not mean that he was incapable of seeing," Noonan added. "If you pricked him, he bled. Just as his eyes saw the pink, so his mind made the association of the color. So at least a jury could infer from the impact of the dress-out on Vogel apparent from his conversation with his sister."
Noonan suggested further that the District Court may want to consider the legality of Arpaio's underwear rules on remand.
"Unexplained and undefended, the dress-out in pink appears to be punishment without legal justification," he wrote. "It appears to us that this question is still open for exploration at trial on remand."
Writing in dissent, Judge N.R. Smith argued that the majority had failed to "correctly construe the hearsay rule," and had neglected to give "the proper deference to the District Court's other evidentiary rulings."
Neither John Curtin, who represented the plaintiffs, nor Maricopa County's attorney, Eileen GilBride, could be immediately reached for comment.
Link to Court Opinion
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Prisoners file class-action suit against Arizona Department of Corrections
HOORAY!!!!
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-----
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.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
More than just a number: Watching Tony Die, Part 3.
Deaths in Custody: Anthony Clayton Lester (9/15/10).
The Highly Preventable Suicide of Tony Lester (1/8/11).
Waiting in the Silence: Remembering Tony Lester (6/16/11).
Watching Tony die: The Halloran Investigation and feedback (11/11/11).
(the above post has the links to both of Wendy's first two pieces on Tony)
The conviction of Tony Lester: A juror's regrets (1/2/12).
Below
is the third part of the CH12 / KPNX investigative series: "Watching
Tony Die". Wendy Halloran has done an outstanding job challenging the
Department of Corrections' treatment of prisoners with serious mental
illness, and even dug deeper to look at the sentencing reforms needed to
spare people like him inappropriate terms of
incarceration...unfortunately, our legislature has pretty much
obliterated chances for that again this year, however.
Those folks with loved ones in prison need to watch this clip and please email connect@ad.gannett.com to register your feedback. Especially with the current conditions in the state prisons, it's important for the media to know that these lives matter.
Those folks with loved ones in prison need to watch this clip and please email connect@ad.gannett.com to register your feedback. Especially with the current conditions in the state prisons, it's important for the media to know that these lives matter.
ALSO REMEMBER
the FOLLOWING UPCOMING EVENTS:
Friday, March 9 at 10am
AZ State Capitol/Wes Bolin Plaza.
Thursday, March 22, 6:30pm
Maryvale Community Center
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