Senate Bills 1145 and 1188: WRITE! CALL!

This editorial about pending budget cuts is much better articulated than I would be able to do. Here is the link to the AZ State Legislature to advocate. It looks like we have to choose between prisoners, the mentally ill, the elderly, the young, and the abused. It's a false dichotomoy, though: prisoners are the elderly, the young, the abused, and the mentally ill. They represent the frailties of all of us.

Argue against selling death row to the lowest bidder while you're at it. Private Corrections Institute has some good resources on prison privatization, and they've been actively fighting it in Arizona. The Senate is looking at it to save money in the next round of budget cuts.

Among other troubling things, the strike everything amendment proposed by the majority party would PROHIBIT anyone from providing medical care to prisoners at a higher standard than the federal government requires. Imagine that. I want to save your mother's life and have the tools to do so, but Arizona won't let me unless the feds require it. How cheap can they get?

It would also mandate that the AZ Department of Corrections contracts out several state prisons - including the Perryville complex - to cut costs. Check it out. (Here's the Democrats' press release of the same day.)

By the way, thank you, Ann Rider.
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Support For Mentally Ill is Essential.
Arizona Republic
Opinion: Ann Rider
June 2, 2009

The tragic death of Marcia Powell, a mentally ill woman who died in an outdoor holding pen at Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville, may be only the beginning. The Arizona Senate, in cutting over $76 million of funding in Senate Bill 1145 and Senate Bill 1188, may sentence people with psychiatric disabilities to the streets or prisons for support.

In this newest round with the budget, the Republican Senate proposes to cut eligibility for services to only individuals below 100 percent of Federal Poverty Level.

One of the proposals is to change the law that supports community services for individuals with mental illness, so that the state "may" provide services.

This means all services statewide will be eliminated for about 67,500 individuals.

Tens of thousands of people won't be able to fill their prescriptions; the medications they need are not cheap. They're not available at Walmart for $4. These tens of thousands of people will quickly become very ill and where will they go?

Already, hospitals deny evaluations because there is no benefit for treatment, so what will happen when your loved one begins to feel despair and considers suicide? Unless you have very good health insurance, there will be no services.

In Maricopa County, approximately 19,000 individuals are class members in the Arnold vs. Sarn lawsuit, which forced the state to provide community services. Because of this lawsuit, thousands of people receive services that help them go back to work, find independent housing, and reclaim a full life in the community. These services allow people to actually recover and become productive citizens.

SB 1145 impacts the possibility of recovery in several ways. First, by changing "shall" to "may," the state "may" dismantle a public behavioral-health system built over decades. This cuts not only services, but thousands of jobs. Second, by denying services to tens of thousands of people, we ensure that instead of creating productive citizens, we create disability for life.

This picture is not just possible; this is what will happen unless this Senate action is stopped. People with mental illness are not lazy; they are not shirking their responsibility. For the most part, they do everything they can to overcome great difficulties and find a meaningful life, just like everyone else. But without services and supports, it's impossible.

The cost down the road is horrendous too, within a few months. Where will thousands of people go? To jail for crimes such as panhandling. Locked in a hospital, if we can find beds. Onto the streets.

We must do better. There will be many more Marcia Powells before this is all over, unless we consider other options for balancing the budget. There are reasonable alternatives to these drastic cuts.

We must support options that keep our state thriving - for everyone.

Ann Rider is director of Recovery Empowerment Network, a statewide coalition of people recovering from psychiatric disabilities.

Latest from the Phoenix New Times

Thank you, Stephen Lemons, for staying on top of the latest news about Marcia Powell - and for trying to get to the bottom of it. I've learned to check out the Phoenix New Times first for my news on the issues involved in Marcia's death.

In this column Lemons explains the significance of the county serving as fiduciary and guardian for Marcia. An interview with a cell mate also reveals the vibrant side of Marcia we didn't know.

Perhaps no one better exposes the many manifestations of the prison industrial complex than homeless mentally ill drug-addicted prostitutes, particularly those with developmental disabilities and HIV who are also pregnant. From inadequate access to prenatal care, income supports, intensive community-based treatment and case management, and affordable housing to frequent institutionalization in jails, psychiatric hospitals, and homeless shelters, they do the route, stopping in at emergency rooms and free clinics from time to time. They are adjudicated as abusive parents before they even give birth. Explicit agreements are reached between outpatient service providers and criminal justice officials - social workers, probation agents and judges - that such women might be better off in jail for awhile if no appropriate treatment settings existed that would help them "stay safe". I know, because I have been party to such discussions, not always coming down on the side of individual liberties.

I suspect that a map of Marcia Powell's life could likewise tell a lot about where our foster care, mental health, and criminal justice realities fall short of their promises. We pour just enough money into community mental health here to provide contract agencies like Magellan (and Value Options before them) with considerable profits, but never enough to filter down to keeping people like Marcia from ending up in prison for minor offenses.

Or perhaps its simply that our contracts with major mental health service providers don't prioritize reducing legal system involvement quite so much as they prioritize reducing psychiatric hospital days - a near-universal practice which simply pushes more people with serious mental illness out of treatment settings and into criminal courts where they don't eat up all the corporate profits - the cost of warehousing them comes out of someone else's budget instead. As a society we'll allocate billions to militarize our police and refine ways of legally torturing and punishing people, but we don't see public health care and programs addressing economic inequality as both economically sustainable and politically desirable.

I don't know how much longer we can afford to ignore the truth - that fighting poverty and hunger will do far more to bring down crime than will fighting the poor and the hungry. In the end it is not our public programs that are unsustainable, it is our banking system and the "free market" - and war on several fronts - that has been consuming public resources.

If we took those funds and invested them with a goal of building communities without cages, we'd see very different things prioritized. Education. Universal health care. Affordable, supported housing. Treatment programs for people who are dually diagnosed. Minimum income guarantees for the disabled, the unemployed, and the unemployable. Strong unions for workers so they can bring home a living wage. Adequate food for growing children and impoverished seniors. An emphasis on doing outreach to assure that people in the community are getting their needs met, rather than opening up an office and waiting for people to come in.

Deconstructing the prison industrial complex and interpreting its implications for the voting public isn't easy. Being "tough on crime" is a simple jingle which still sells (crime is still code for people of color - increasingly so for latino immigrants). Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the prison industrial complex sucks the life out of communities that feed it bodies as well as those that feed it guards and public resources. Just how this happens and what it has to do with globalization is explained most thoroughly by Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore in "Golden Gulag", and most concisely in editor Lois Ahrens' "The Real Cost of Prisons Comix".

Prison abolition, then, is central, not peripheral to the larger dialogue on global justice because it involves not just tearing down prison walls, but also building up the kinds of communities that can respond more directly and immediately to the needs of its citizens than can the state, seeking to prevent trauma where possible, rather than simply bracing for it as if this institutionalized cycle of violence will never be broken.