Grieving Susan Lopez: Prisoners have families, too...

The following note was left this afternoon on my Prison Abolitionist blog, under the "comments" for the main post on the suicide of state prisoner Susan Lopez in March. An additional story was added by a prisoner who knew her on San Carlos, before ASPC-Perryville transferred her to a higher custody yard, Santa Cruz.

My condolences go out to Rick Lopez, Susan's and Rick's respective kids, and the extended Flores family; they've been through a lot lately.

"Prisoners have families, too."
Maricopa County Jail: Tent City.
April 5, 2011.

Left with Broken Hearts,


If only you would of known what a beautiful person Susan Lopez our daughter was, full of joy, she had the most sweetest heart, enough love for everyone, and now shes gone from our lives, but will live forever in our hearts, because of the prisons lack of medical attention our daughter is gone.


Whoever is responsible for the neglect of our daughter may god forgive you. you will have to answer to god, for all vengeance are his.


we love you Susan forever you will live in our hearts..............


love mom and dad :(

Rick Lopez at Central Property:
Retrieving Susan's things.
ASPC-Perryville
Goodyear, AZ
Apr 23, 2011

MI in CJ System follow-up; Alan Keesee charged with assault.

Thank you Mr. Montgomery.

I asked Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery about this tonight - looks like I fell behind on that one. He's already charged former detention officer Alan Keesee with assaulting William Franklin Hughes, III last fall, in the psychiatric wing of the Lower Buckeye Jail, in a tag team attack on the bound prisoner with officer Kevin Gerster.

In fact, as you can see from the calendar below, he did so over a month ago. Can't believe it's almost time for the May Day Rally already, and this is the first time I've checked up on that in so long.

Keesee just had a preliminary hearing today - check here for updated minutes. Be at his future dates if you can, and write about it for the rest of us. I'm just starting to discover I can't be everywhere at once anymore...

Thanking a prosecutor may seem like a funny thing for an abolitionist to do, I know. Remember that I'm just another traveler on this journey - not the guru. I don't know yet what restorative or transformative justice looks like for people in uniform who abuse the vulnerable like that - at this point, I'm reserving a few cells for them.

Those men betrayed all of us when they assaulted William - anyone's child or brother or mother could have been him, dragged off to jail instead of the hospital in a disorganized, confused mental state, be it due to a psychiatric or developmental disability, Alzheimer's, or a brain tumor. Such abuse of power is among the worst kinds of crimes, I believe; unfortunately, our state constitution assures that victims like William - and like Marcia Powell - are the least protected. We need to change that, folks...

Mr. Montgomery had some interesting remarks at last night's meeting, which I'll report more on soon. I was mainly grateful that he recognizes that too many folks with serious mental illness are ending up in the criminal justice system who could have been successfully treated in the community, if we put more of our resources at the front end - in mental health, rather than the back end - in the prisons. The police officers discussing the specially-trained crisis-intervention units that divert people with mental illness from the CJ system at their level (where it needs most to be happening) argued that the program demonstrated an increase in participant involvement in outpatient mental health services among high-risk homeless adults, and a decrease in criminal activity.

Unfortunately, while the police arm of the effort is still fully operational, the agencies providing the community support staff it depends on have been hit by cuts, so nighttime outreach isn't what it needs to be. The trick is how to redistribute all these resources when the AZ Department of Corrections maintains an investment in maintaining their own status, power, and funding. The whole CJ system as currently designed reinforces the perpetuation of the status quo, when "public safety" is positioned first and foremost in the dialogue as the state's primary responsibility to the people - and is put out there as a police matter.

In fact, the public welfare depends on education, health care, inpatient psychiatric treatment options, affordable housing, and a range of supports being available at the community level to meaningfully decrease the incidence of crime and victimization. Those are always the first to go in economic downturns, though - not because we don't have the resources, but because we're driven by fear and defer to the "experts" in power in our collective decision-making, instead of allowing our public policy to be crafted by both our values and non-partisan research, based on principles of evidence-based practice...

Anyway, thank you, Mr. Montgomery, for so graciously letting me know that you're already on top of prosecuting some of these abuses of power in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. If you drop his office a line this week, please let them know the community appreciates seeing things head in that direction. Their contact info is:

Maricopa County Attorney's Office
301 W. Jefferson St.
Phoenix, AZ 85003

The number for victims' services (the public seems to be a legitimate victim in this case) is (602) 506-8522.

Let your voices be heard on this, since William doesn't have the right to have his heard by the court, under the AZ Constitution...then give your legislators a piece of your mind about what changes need to be made in the Arizona Revised Statutes to keep us all safe from the likes of Gerster, Keesee, and Arpaio. Send hard copies to legislators - if you have a personal connection to this issue, hand write it - those kinds of letters have the most impact. Their address is:

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

602) 926-3559 (Leg INFO LINE)

Make sure to cc your letters to Cecil Ash, Chair of the AZ House Health and Human Services Committee. Ask for him to convene legislative hearings on the AZ Department of Correction's deaths due to prison violence, suicide, and medical neglect, while you're at it.

Mr. Montgomery said he'd explain after the meeting why these officers aren't being charged with higher level felonies under the vulnerable adult statute for the assault on William while he was in the psychiatric wing in handcuffs and shackles (how much more vulnerable can a person be?).

I had to leave early, though, with the mother of prison homicide victim, Dana Seawright, so will follow-up on that issue in a separate post. Dana's mom, Kini Seawright, had the chance to confront ADC Director Chuck Ryan with her grief during the Roundtable - he was in the audience when she stood and told her story.


We thought he was going to flee the scene at first, because he saw us chalking the walk out front and headed back to the parking lot, but he returned and toughed it out: he's either more brave or more heartless than I thought. More on that in a later post, too.


Kini will be speaking about her experience as both an ex-felon and the mother of a prison homicide victim at the May Day Rally this weekend at Margaret T. Hance Park, PHX (by the Central St. Library) somewhere around 1:30pm.

Big Daddy comes to town: ACLU National Prison Project

ACLU-Arizona: "Demolish the Prisons"

Ringed by the names of those who have died in AZ State custody

of neglect, suicide, and violence since Jan 2009.

Phoenix, AZ (April 25, 2011)

The National ACLU's David Fathi and the Prison Law Office's Don Specter are in Phoenix this week, finally. As I write, they should be wrapping up interviews of prisoners at the AZ state supermax facility in Florence, ASPC-Eyman.


The National ACLU had already made the misuse of isolation and detention for managing symptoms of mentally ill prisoners a national priority, so this shouldn't be a surprise for the ADC...nor should the fact that they're interviewing some of my correspondents. Apparently their arrival is causing quite a stir, though - the guards are the ones who called Fathi "Big Daddy". They had a bit of cleaning up to do for their arrival, I imagine.




No deal is done yet - they're still just exploring the evidence and talking to possible litigants and witnesses, as far as I know. They need to see that there's a social movement here that will support their intervention, so step up with the actions and agitation. Remember to come to the following events:

Today, April 26, 2011

5:30-7:30

MI in the CJ System Roundtable:

Punitive or Restorative Justice?

ASU Art Museum
1th St/Mill Ave
Tempe

Sunday, May 1: May Day Rally.

REALLY, REALLY FREE Store 11:30

Speakers 1:30

Margaret T. Hance Park

south of the Phoenix Public Library, Central St, Phoenix

PRISONER RIGHTS ARE WORKERS RIGHTS!!!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

5:00 pm

ANGELA DAVIS

Neeb Hall, ASU-Tempe

Those of you in prison but not at Eyman, take heart - we've got a whole lot going on both out here and behind bars now, and you won't be left behind. Be persistent keeping me posted about how things are in there - but by all means, direct your eyewitness correspondence about conditions of confinement to the ACLU-AZ (PO Box 17148, Phoenix, AZ 85011), not me, right now. I have the ACLU's assurances that they won't lose any letters, and they'll no doubt try to help me find solutions to the things they can't address, to the extent that such a role is appropriate for them.



Learn to grieve things properly, and keep the frustration and violence down. Help each other out more than usual; you need to not only get through this, but you need to be vocal and visible, now that there's a light shining in there, and responsible with your complaints.




Thanks go out to the prisoners willing to put themselves out there for the rest of the folks right now, as well as to Dan Pochoda and Darrell Hill at the ACLU-AZ, and Mary Lou Brncik, Carl Toersbijns, Patti Jones, and Ken Jacuzzi, especially, for being such aggressive advocates for prisoners with serious mental illness.

In Loving Memory: Duron Cunningham, 40.

Duron's mother, Saundra, recently sent me this flier from his memorial service in St. Louis, Mo., held in October, 2010, a few weeks after his suicide; I took liberties with the colors. Duron was a Hebrew Israelite, which meant he would have likely been socially stigmatized by other prisoners, particularly gang members, for not being a Christian in an environment where such things matter. He killed himself after a period in prison during which he'd been raped on one occasion and set up subsequently by a guard he complained about to be beaten as a snitch.


This tragedy didn't need to happen. Duron had sent letters to the ACLU after his rape, and his mother had contacted everyone from the ACLU to the DOJ to the Arizona Attorney General's office for help while he was still living; the only answers they got were denials of responsibility to intervene, when they got responses at all. They weren't even referred to someone else who could help - they were supposed to be it, from all that the rest of us are told. No one else will help victims of violence in custody, it appears - not even DES' adult protective services' if the prisoner is severely mentally impaired and reports being assaulted or neglected, as far as I can tell.


I've heard that from other prisoners as well - I lost a little credibility early on by urging them to contact the ACLU and the Feds about some of what I was hearing from them; most knew well enough to leave them alone - or at least not to have any expectations. I think litigating Joe Arpaio took a lot out of the AZ ACLU - that SOB is trying to exhaust our collective resources to force him to respect the human rights of his prisoners, using our tax dollars in the process. As a result, there hasn't been much left to deal with the state prisons - then came SB1070.


I don't know what the DOJ's excuse is, though. Holder has plenty of money to piss away busting up medical marijuana dispensaries set up under state laws, and spying on anti-war demonstrators - there's no reason they couldn't be looking at the AZ state prisons right now, as far as I'm concerned - except for the politics of it all...maybe Obama doesn't wan to look like he's picking on our poor state too much - his administration did give Brewer permission to dump all those patients from the state medicaid rolls.



Things are changing now, though, folks, so hold on to yourselves and your cellies - if you're friends - for dear life. It's not just that the ACLU is stepping up to the plate here, it's that the community is mobilizing behind prisoner rights.


* The Phoenix May 1st Coalition has offered a spot on the May Day Rally stage for families of those who have died in the custody of this state in recent years, concurring that there can't be much of liberation movement for workers if we leave our slave labor force behind in the struggle. Please come meet them at 1:30, May 1st, in Margaret T. Hance Park (by the public library and the 202, off Central) in Phoenix.


* Local disability rights activists and former ADC officials have been prominent in the fight for the decent treatment of prisoners with serious mental illness, particularly those confined in Supermax or detention/isolation cells. A Community Roundtable has been organized at the ASU Art Museum this Tuesday, April 26, at 5:30pm to bring light to the needs of the mentally ill in the criminal justice system .


* The families of the dead are reaching out to those of the living, and some prisoners are putting everything on the line for the chance of making tings a little better for the next one to fill their shoes and cells....


So, hang in there, prisoners and families. Help is on the way, but most of the work will still have to be done by you - especially now. Hammer the ACLU-AZ, the DOJ, AZ Representative Cecil ASH, and the media with letters about the conditions of confinement, the violence, the gangs, and the poor medical care, even if you've done so 100 times before with no response - now's the time when it might really count. Their contact info, again, is below. Keep a copy of what you send, and make one for me if you want me to post it.


That much, at least, I know Duron's mom and dad would want you all to know, before moving on...this stuff needs to change.

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

Rep. Cecil Ash
Arizona State Legislature
1700 W. Washington St.
Phoenix, AZ 85007
(602) 926-3160
cash@azleg.gov


ACLU-AZ
PO Box 17148
Phoenix, AZ 85011
602.650.1854
info@acluaz.org


DOJ - Civil Rights /
Special Litigation Section
950 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Patrick Henry Building
Washington, DC 20530
(202) 514-6255
toll-free at (877) 218-5228

FAX - (202) 514-0212
Alt. FAX - (202) 514-6273
Email - Special.Litigation@usdoj.gov


Stephen Lemons
Phoenix New Times
PO Box 2510
Phoenix, AZ 85002
Phone: 602-271-0040
Fax: 602-340-8806

APRIL 23, 2011: DREAMSCAPE, Phoenix.

Word is that this is worth going to after the SB1070 protest...

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

"Dreamscape" (good blog post about it) addresses issues of racism, police brutality, and injustice against 'minorities' in the United States. Using a hip hop style including a DJ, dance, poetry, and theatre, "Dreamscape" tells the story of a 19-year old black woman shot to death by police, while she slept in her car. All too familiar to Phx these days...

Up and coming Tomas Sosa of Soul Phenomenal opens the show with spoken word! DJ Alkeme spinning outside. Live graffiti art and dance. Join in!

Dialogue to follow. Come prepare to speak your mind!

Saturday, April 23
7 pm (show)
6:30 pm (arrive early for the outside pre-show)
$8 advance/ $10 door

For tix: 480.227.6842 or azdreamscape@gmail.com

3rd Street Theatre (Between Roosevelt and McDowell on 3rd Street)