Transinstitutionalizing the mentally ill: still filling the prisons.

Nationally, 4 times as many mentally ill people are now in prisons than in hospitals.
Arizona ranks as one of the worst offenders...

(image from Correctionsone.com)

I've seen this journalist doing research in the field - excellent reporting. Between her and Bob Ortega, the prisons have been getting a close look at by the AZ Republic these days. What's about to happen here is catastrophic. The Arizona Department of Corrections is the last place we should be sending people with mental illness - and it's the next place many will be heading. Someone has to fill all those new private prison beds, after all...the good prisoners will go to them, and the mentally ill will be kept in the fire traps they call state prisons.

Paul Rubin's Phoenix New Times article about the murder of Shannon Palmer comes to mind when I think of people who never should have been in prison to begin with - and wouldn't have, if our mental health system wasn't already so damaged and our communities so gutted of basic resources. Phoenix is so certain that more police are the answer that they're taking it out of the food tax - thank God we have the resources to arrest the poor when they steal to feed their families now.

Anyway, if we don't spend our tax dollars in the community folks - BEFORE people feel the need to call the police - we'll be spending it keeping a lot of these folks in horrendous conditions behind bars. We already are, sadly - for every one mentally ill person we hospitalize in Arizona, we put over nine more in jail or prison. Only Nevada is more brutal to their mentally disabled.

Needless to say, our disability rights advocates in this state have a lot of catching up to do if they're going to protect these folks all the way to prison and back. Most seem to stop at the courtroom door, I'm afraid...

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

Mental-health cuts: Experts fear long-term costs

Mary K. Reinhart - Sept. 22, 2011 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

Arizona taxpayers are providing fewer services to fewer people with serious mental illnesses than they were last year, for annual savings of roughly $50 million.

But the short-term savings from state budget cuts threaten to have long-term consequences for patients, providers and the community, mental-health experts say.

The budget reductions eliminated services for about 12,000 Arizonans who don't qualify for Medicaid, removing the foundation of a system intended to keep the seriously mentally ill, healthy and out of emergency rooms, hospitals, jails and prisons.

State lawmakers instead provided money for generic medication and additional funding to beef up a statewide crisis-response system to help prevent people from falling through the cracks. But in the 15 months since this population lost case management, brand-name prescription drugs, therapy, transportation and other benefits, more than 2,000 people have stopped receiving any state-funded services and are unaccounted for.

Local and county jails, emergency responders and hospitals often shoulder the costs when people with untreated serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, fall into crisis.

The precise financial costs to those entities are unknown, but health professionals do know that it's far more expensive to treat people who have spiraled into crisis than to keep them stable. And once in crisis, health professionals say, it's more difficult for people to rebound, which means those higher costs continue to recur.

"It's a penny-wise and pound-foolish approach," said Bill Kennard, former executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness' office in Phoenix. "More people in jail and prison with mental illness, more time that law enforcement spends dealing with a health issue as opposed to a public-safety issue."

The costs

The state has not conducted an analysis that compares ongoing treatment with crisis costs.

But a March 2011 study that examined proposed mental-health cuts in Texas put the average daily cost of services at $12 for adults, compared with $401 a day in the state's mental hospital, $137 a day for a jail inmate with mental illness and $986 for an emergency-room visit.

The study, by Health Management Associates for the Texas Conference of Urban Counties, also showed that gaps in services put those discharged from psychiatric hospitals and jail at greater risk of relapse, readmission and recidivism.

Janey Durham, who is in charge of a workshop program at Mesa's Marc Center, said she lost 120 people to the budget cuts, including a man diagnosed with schizophrenia who deteriorated almost before her eyes. The non-profit agency center provides job training and other services to the mentally ill and developmentally disabled.

Durham said the man, a former alcoholic in his 50s, worked hard at his job in the manufacturing warehouse, at maintaining his sobriety and in treating his mental illness. But soon after the budget cuts forced him to switch to a generic medication, Durham said, he stopped taking his medication, started drinking again and grew increasingly paranoid, plagued by voices in his head.

Over the past year his erratic, disruptive behavior led Marc Center employees to call Mesa police at least once. He is believed to be homeless, she said, but contact with him has been sporadic since last winter.

Clarke Romans, who runs the NAMI office in Tucson, said a once-eager volunteer has been reluctant to leave her house since last summer, when her anti-psychotic Seroquel was replaced with a generic drug. Many of the most commonly prescribed brand-name psychoactive medications have no generic equivalent. Generics in some cases are less effective or have side effects that deter people from taking them, health officials say.

"She's been suicidal. She has not been able to come in and volunteer. She kind of hides in her house," Romans said. "These are people who are suffering in silence."

Before the budget cuts last July, individuals with serious mental illness were entitled to a full array of community-based services, from supportive housing to intensive case management and in-patient hospitalization, regardless of their income.

Mental-health advocates argue that city and county law enforcement, hospitals, jails and homeless shelters have picked up some of the costs of caring for the seriously mentally ill who lost benefits. Over the past year, many of these venues have seen an increasing number of people with severe mental illness.

State lawmakers made the cuts to help close a $1 billion deficit in fiscal 2011. House Appropriations Committee Chairman John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said the state's financial crisis forced lawmakers to cut $3 billion over four budget cycles, and all of the cuts carried some consequences.

"The question is, are the consequences so dire that it shouldn't be done? We don't believe so," Kavanagh said. "The changes really were not dramatic. . . . We're still providing these people with treatment."

Treatment, recovery

Publicly funded mental-health treatment can be highly effective, and the vast majority of people can improve their quality of life and relieve symptoms, such as hallucinations or depression, with consistent therapy, medication and other support.

But experts say treatment and services must be comprehensive and consistent.

"I don't think these kinds of services are luxuries for people with mental illness. They are part and parcel of their treatment for an underlying disorder," said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, a Columbia University psychiatry professor and past president of the American Psychiatric Association. "Unless you provide a package of services, just throwing pills at them isn't going to do it."

Those who work closely with the mentally ill say that is the situation for thousands of Arizonans who are ineligible for Medicaid. And they worry that people who stopped showing up at their assigned clinics may have become incarcerated, homeless, hospitalized or homebound.

Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor and nationally known expert on homelessness, said studies show people with serious mental illness who are not receiving regular, supportive services are more likely to become homeless.

Culhane's own research has shown that it costs less to provide apartments and other permanent housing for people who are homeless than to provide emergency shelter and services. People with serious mental illness who become homeless, he said, "have significant secondary costs," including emergency, hospital and incarceration costs.

Once they have fallen into crisis, the road back to recovery can be much harder.

"Untreated psychiatric illness is just more difficult to treat," said Dr. Jason Caplan, chief of psychiatry at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center. "You have an increased risk of relapse. It's just harder to get you back."

Repeat visitors

Case management was a key benefit lost to the non-Medicaid mentally ill. Among other things, caseworkers helped people who were jailed or hospitalized to transition back into society and tried to prevent their relapse.

People often lose their housing while they're locked up and, if they're on probation or court-ordered treatment, they have a list of rules to follow upon release.

Now, there is no one to meet people as they are released from jail or a psychiatric hospital.

In Maricopa County, 54 people with serious mental illness were released to the street or to a homeless shelter in the past year after being stabilized at one of the Valley's two urgent psychiatric care facilities, according to Magellan, the for-profit contractor that administers behavioral-health care in the county.

Dr. Dawn Noggle, mental-health director for Correctional Health Services, which provides health care at Maricopa County's jails, said the seriously mentally ill are staying in jail longer. And, she said, police have arrested some more than 30 times for a variety of crimes, mostly low-level non-violent offenses, such as trespassing or theft, or probation violations.

Incarceration and prosecution of the mentally ill doesn't just affect taxpayers who foot the bill, she says.

"What happens after they get felonies? And there is an incredible impact on families," she says. "It's not just the immediate financial costs. It's the social costs as well."

There also are repeat customers at the county's psychiatric hospital, where the budget cuts mean court-ordered evaluations must be completely redone for people discharged only weeks earlier. Staff at the county's Desert Vista Behavioral Health Center, which handles involuntary commitments, say it's a new phenomenon.

In the past, people were typically court-ordered to continue treatment for at least a year, long after they were discharged from the hospital. Since the budget cuts, judges have been dismissing court-ordered treatment for non-Medicaid patients upon their discharge, reluctant to require them to participate in services, such as therapy and job training, they no longer have. Within months, some of those people are brought back for a new evaluation, a costly legal and medical process that delays treatment for several days.

"It's taking an enormous amount of resources to redo something that's already been done," said Sherry Fraley, legal-services manager.

Reach the reporter at 602-444-8603.

AHCCCS Transplant funds restored, at a high cost to others.

"The dying are taxpayers, too."
AZ State Capitol/Wes Bolin Plaza
February 28, 2011

http://www.azahcccs.gov/shared/Downloads/News/MedicaidReformPlan.pdf

Under the plan that restored these cuts, over a hundred fifty thousand "childless adults" in AZwon't receive AHCCCS coverage when they get ill, "saving" the state $190 million. Folks whose medical bills reduce their spendable income to less than 40% of the federal poverty rate are also screwed ("saving" the rest of us $70 m).

Not only do we lose federal funds for health care now, but it's guaranteed that we'll be spending more than twice as much incarcerating the mentally ill patients who lose their benefits and can no longer obtain the medications or treatment they need when they decompensate - because the people who voted for this woman are much more willing to spend their taxes on prisons (which so many profit from) than health care for the poor...no wonder we have one mentally ill person in our hospitals for every ten we decide top incarcerate, with little or no care.

That's appalling.

Give my Taxes to AHCCCS!

Thanks a lot, Brewer. You're a real swell human being.

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

Janice K. Brewer, Governor
Thomas J. Betlach, Director
801 East Jefferson, Phoenix, AZ 85034
PO Box 25520, Phoenix, AZ 85002
Phone: 602-417-4000

AHCCCS
www.azahcccs.gov
Our first care is your health care

ARIZONA HEALTH CARE COST CONTAINMENT SYSTEM
DATE: April 7, 2011

TO: Interested Stakeholders
FROM: Marc Leib, MD, Chief Medical Officer

SUBJECT: Transplant Restoration

AHCCCS RESTORES COVERAGE OF PREVIOUSLY COVERED TRANSPLANTS FOR ADULTS

As part of the recently enacted budget, the Arizona Legislature adopted Governor Brewer's Medicaid Reform Plan which restores funding of previously covered transplants for adults that were eliminated effective October 1, 2010. Retroactive to April 1, 2011, AHCCCS will once again cover the following transplants for members 21 years of age and older:
•
Pancreas-after-kidney transplants
•
Liver transplants in patients with Hepatitis C
•
Allogeneic unrelated hematopoietic cell transplants
•
Heart transplants in patients with non-ischemic cardiomyopathies
•
Lung transplants
•
Heart-lung transplants

Transplants that were not covered by AHCCCS prior to October 1, 2010, including pancreas only transplants, partial pancreas transplants and pancreas islet cell transplants, are not affected by this legislation. Those transplants remain non-covered. In addition to the medically necessary transplants covered for adults, AHCCCS continues to cover all medically necessary, non experimental transplants for members under the age of 21 years as required by EPSDT.

Coverage criteria for restored transplants will be the same as the criteria in place prior to October 1, 2010. Physicians with patients they believe meet the criteria for any AHCCCS covered transplant should contact the AHCCCS health plan in which the patient is enrolled to refer the patient for transplant evaluation.

For more information, please see the AHCCCS website at:

http://www.azahcccs.gov/reporting/legislation/sessions/2010/BenefitChanges.aspx#transplantRestoration

Jared Loughner and The Deranged State of our State.

-----------From Democracy Now-----------

Jared Loughner, Mental Illness and How Budget Cuts

Have Slashed Behavioral Health Services in Arizona

January 11, 2011

AMY GOODMAN: While federal investigators and the news media try to uncover the motivation behind the attack, the picture emerging of Jared Loughner is of a severely disturbed 22-year-old who was behaving in an increasingly erratic manner. YouTube videos and other internet postings under his name suggest an obsession with bizarre anti-government grievances, including ramblings about currency policies and language control through grammar. Acquaintances in Arizona said Loughner had distanced himself from friends and family members in recent years.

In September, he was suspended from Pima County Community College after five run-ins with campus police for disruptive behavior, being thrown out of class, students saying they were afraid, professors saying that they were afraid of him. College administrators told him he needed clearance from a mental health professional saying he would not present a danger to himself or others before he could return to classes. Pima County behavioral health officials have no record of Loughner seeking treatment in the public system overseen by the Arizona State Department of Health Services.

Saturday’s attack and Jared Loughner’s apparent mental health problems have shone a spotlight on issues surrounding mental health treatment in Arizona. The state made drastic budget cuts to behavioral health services in 2010. The unprecedented cuts slashed all support services for non-Medicaid behavioral health patients and took away coverage for most name-brand drugs. As many as 28,000 state residents were affected. Meanwhile, Arizona is facing even bigger budget cuts this year and is facing an estimated $1.4 billion deficit in 2012.

H. Clarke Romans is the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona. He’s joining us from Tucson.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about your response to what has taken place.

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, our response so far has just been to point out that the availability of services has diminished due to these budget cuts, and although there’s no direct link, it just makes it less likely that people would be able to get services, even if they overcome the stigma of admitting or acknowledging that they have these illnesses. It just makes the availability of services even more difficult to obtain.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to happen now, H. Clarke Romans?

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I think that the legislature has taken a simplistic approach to solving the budget crisis, with respect to mental health services, at least. What we’re finding in the community is that the costs were not really eliminated; they were just pushed down to less visible areas in the community, and we’re responding to the difficulties with the most expensive form of services that the community has to offer to people. That’s emergency rooms, hospitalization, law enforcement intervention. So, the communities are spending the money, even though it appears that the lawmakers believe that they have actually cut the budget and saved money. It’s just coming out of a different pocket down at the community level. And I think that we need to acknowledge that it ultimately is less expensive in the community to offer necessary services. And this is all without respect to the devastating impact this has had on people’s lives.

AMY GOODMAN: What had been the effect of the budget cuts, specifically?

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I can give a number of examples, but in particular, people who have a serious mental illness diagnosis beginning last July were denied any further coverage in a number of areas—case management, brand-name medications, access to support groups, transportation subsidies, and more recently, housing subsidies. So these individuals who have the most serious forms of mental illness were essentially, except for generic medications, were basically pushed out of the system. And these are individuals who have a serious illness, who, in many cases, were managing with a support network, are now being pushed to the point where they can’t manage. So they’re decompensating. There’s suicide attempts. There’s one woman that we know that’s very ill, but she’s been managing OK. She’s now been hospitalized for 36 days over the last six months.

AMY GOODMAN: These budget cuts under Jan Brewer—she, in particular, the Governor, must understand, with her son Ronald in a state mental facility for, what, 20 years after being convicted of sexually assaulting a woman, but was by reason of insanity, was the ultimate verdict. So she knows and was a mental health activist herself, the Governor.

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Yes, she was. And frankly, to my surprise and many other of my colleagues, I don’t think she put up a strong enough battle to, you know, at least protect or minimize the effect on mental health services. I think she succumbed to the—kind of the ideologues who were pushing a different agenda. And she did make some statements that she wanted to protect mental health services, but ultimately I think she succumbed to the other political pressures.

AMY GOODMAN: What about your own story, H. Clarke Romans, how you got involved with the Alliance on Mental Illness?

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I’m a member of a club that no one wants to belong to. And people become members when things happen to them like happened to my family. My son Kenneth was a smart, athletic, good-looking, popular young man, when his behavior became a little unusual. And we didn’t know what was going on. And eventually—we were living in Belgium at the time—a school counselor at the International School of Brussels called us up and said, "Gee, I think maybe Ken should be out of school for a while." And we were like, "What?" So we went to the school. Ultimately we took Ken to the doctor, a psychiatrist. And the doctor told us Kenneth is suffering from the symptoms of schizophrenia.

Well, I’m a highly educated, intelligent man. I couldn’t spell "schizophrenia," let alone have any idea what a devastating effect that was going to have on Kenneth, on the family, and for the rest of his life. And so, even though my son was killed by a drunk driver here in Tucson on September 11th, 2001, I’m still involved, because I think the indignities that Kenneth suffered in his life were not right, and I don’t want to see that happen to other people.

AMY GOODMAN: What about schools reporting? I mean, the teacher who alerted you, that’s very important. But here was Jared Loughner in college. Every classroom, it seemed, the kids, the students, the professors were concerned. They were scared. He was very disruptive. What does it mean for a school to get involved? And why don’t they? I mean, in this case, Pima County Community College says they did. They kicked him out.

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I think there are two levels here, and the rules of the game are very different. When students are in high school and they’re minors, the school and the parents have a little more control. I mean, a few articles that I’ve read so far in the local paper indicate that some of these behaviors were already manifesting themselves in the—in high school. I mean, I read some of his high school classmates reported, you know, unusual behavior.

The difficulty for secondary schools is that if the teachers bring things to the attention of the parents and the parents take it to heart, that the school becomes financially responsible for a lot of assistance that the student might get. And due to budget cuts, a lot of principals and teachers, more or less, are instructed: don’t get involved, because if you do, the school is going to be financially responsible. And the schools are under tremendous financial pressure. So I think that’s a negative influence on the teachers. Even though school counselors and teachers deal with these students every day, they’re under kind of physical constraints.

When you get to college, it’s a different story, because, you know, by that time, generally the students are considered adults. The parents really don’t have any specific legal authority to force the person to do any particular thing. And only if a person is petitioned into the hospital due to their persistent behavior, there’s no way to force them to get treatment. They can be persuaded, and the college and the parents, I believe, have a role, a potential role, in persuading an individual to get help. I don’t know if the college did anything other than react to the negative behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Pima County Sheriff Dupnik, he made the comment about the hate-filled language coming out of TV, radio, the talk shows. You have Jesse Kelly, the opponent of Congressmember Giffords, who put out a slogan that said something about targeting, taking on Giffords and bringing your M16 to a rally for Kelly. H. Clarke Romans, what this kind of explosive language does?

H. CLARKE ROMANS: Well, I think that it doesn’t help, particularly people who may have thought disorders or mood disorders, the part of their brain that would exercise caution—I mean, anybody that hears that kind of language may react to it. But people who are suffering from these mental process disorders don’t necessarily have the part of their brain that would set the boundaries. The cautionary or the commonsense parts of their thinking are not functioning properly. So, this kind of language has a much greater impact on individuals who are in that situation than on the average person who has, you know, the control of their thought processes and has in place the normal cautionary and restraining parts of the thought process. Many of these individuals, that part of their brain is not functioning properly, with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. There’s all kinds of thoughts going on, and the normal constraints and rational thinking processes aren’t there. So when you pour gasoline onto a hot situation, the likelihood of a fire is a lot greater than if—you know, if things are not so, you know, combustible.

AMY GOODMAN: Just to be exact, what her opponent, the Tea Party-backed opponent of Congressmember Giffords—and let’s remember that Congressmember Giffords’ father said—walked into the hospital and said that the Tea Party was her enemy, that he blamed the Tea Party. But Tea Party-backed candidate, Jesse Kelly, said, "Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

H. Clarke Romans, I want to thank you for being with us, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona.

State of Arizona Health Care: Killing us Softly.

Once in awhile someone at the Arizona Republic writes a decent editorial. This is one of those times. For anyone who has any doubt about the selfishness and brutality of our current Arizona legislature and governor - the Republican Party elite - read on.

The Governor just signed a new bill this week, by the way, that restores some of the other health care funds that the legislature cut this spring. The legislature reversed itself only because the feds required it in order for them to keep getting medicaid funding - not because they were concerned about all those sick citizen children they screwed.

The long and short of it: these people have very little regard for life, American or otherwise. They would kill us by withholding medical care just as readily as they would leave migrants in the desert to die, all for the sake of protecting their own assets - while levying even more taxes on ours.

Happy Hepatitis Awareness Month, by the way, dear Governor. And tomorrow begins Women's Health Care Week. These Americans - and many more in this state - will suffer terribly and die because of you and your party. Even your NRA membership can't cover up your betrayal of our citizenry - much less the rest of humanity.

Please, America:
Nothing but grief trickles down in this state, and
they're going to criminalize and kill us for resisting anyway.

BOYCOTT ARIZONA. 
Kick her out of the union, if possible,
for treason against the People.

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

Some budget cuts are death sentences

by E. J. Montini - May. 7, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

 

One of the strongest arguments for immigration reform is that Americans must take care of Americans first.

So why aren't we doing it?

Some of the best doctors in Arizona told state legislators that if they cut transplant services from the AHCCCS budget, hard-working Arizonans will die.
 

The legislators cut the services.

The doctors and the people who work with their patients tried a different tack, pointing out that the cost of keeping sick patients alive until they die is more expensive in the long run than providing transplant services.

The legislators cut the services.

The doctors were from University Medical Center, Banner Good Samaritan and the Mayo Clinic.
They laid out their case in coldly understandable terms, writing, for example:

"As of 19 April 2010, there are 51 AHCCCS patients on the liver transplant

wait list with Hepatitis C. Of those patients waiting, approximately 17 of those patients will die this year if transplantation is not a covered service. Based on the current average reimbursement rate for transplantation ($149,670), the estimated cost savings to AHCCCS will be $2,544,390."

That is the short-term saving.

It is difficult to determine the long-term cost to the state of caring for patients who slowly wither away. It could take years.

The doctors ran to same numbers for heart-transplant patients, lung-transplant patients, pancreas-transplant patients.

The legislators cut the services.

And Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill into law, eliminating AHCCCS coverage for the operations.

Before all this occurred, I wrote a column about one of those patients, a man who has been receiving medical treatment under AHCCCS, Arizona's Medicaid program.

"I can't work anymore and we ran out of coverage a while back," he told me. "It's terrible needing help. It's not what I wanted. But when you run out of money, what can you do? If I don't get a transplant, I guess the state won't have to pay for me or worry about me until I walk into an emergency room close to dying. They can't turn me away then."

People like Charlie Thomas, a transplant social worker, have been dealing with the threat of these cuts for years, always managing to stave them off. Until this time.

This time, legislators needed a quick fix.

"The people who benefit from these transplant services are people who were working, paying taxes, being good citizens and then got sick and lost everything. They're us," Thomas told me.

Still, the services were cut.

The transplant physicians and hospitals are hoping they'll have a second chance to make their case before the new rules go into effect in July. Before people die who could otherwise be saved. They believe they have the scientific data and the economics on their side.

One of those hoping to get the Legislature to reconsider is Leo Corbett, a former state senator and one-time Republican candidate for governor who knows what it means to make tough budget decisions. He's also a heart-transplant recipient.

"I'm not sure that legislators got all the information they needed to make an informed decision," he told me. "It seemed to have been in the hands of the bean counters rather than the policy makers. I believe this can be resolved in a fiscally sound manner that still serves the need of these patients. I hope so, anyway. I believe, like a lot of people, that a society or a state is judged by how it treats its poor people. For most of these folks, the illness took all they had."

Reach Montini at 602-444-8978 or ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

AZ LEGS: VOTE the Child-abusing Bums Out.

Actually wrote this a couple of days ago, but dropped it in my draft bin because I haven't been able to really finish anything coherently lately.  Anyway, cleaned it up just a little. Here it is.

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

Here's an excerpt of the document from AHCCCS (10/9/09) expressing concerns about the long term economic consequences of canceling the Kids Care program, or making it less accessible to economically marginal, struggling families. From that report:

"...According to Kaiser’s statehealthfacts.org Arizona has the 5th highest rate of uninsured children in the nation (for 2008). If this program is eliminated, AHCCCS estimates that Arizona would move to the third highest rate in the nation and would have over 18% of children between 0-18 uninsured.

The Institute of Medicine notes that uninsured children are more likely to be hospitalized for preventable conditions and for missed diagnoses of serious or life-threatening conditions. These avoidable costs are shifted to hospitals and providers as uncompensated care, and to the public as a hidden tax through increased premiums. .."

I can't believe any of these legislators are really getting that much support from their constituents for these cuts - at least, not the constituents they affect directly. A few noisy, selfish Tea Partiers with plenty of time on their hands. Boy, those people are so anti-American in their rhetoric about their rights, and their policy demands - they really do stink like white supremacists, misogynists, and generally mean-spirited people. 

It's really disturbing that legislators are hopping on their bandwagon and affirming the values they espouse, which is that in America, the right of the "person" to profit far exceeds any rights of anyone to access health care. In fact, the Corporate "person" has far more rights than many human beings when it comes to protecting their interests in US courts.


I would think there would be some kind of legal challenge Arizona citizens could raise to the AZ Republican Party/Legislative Caucus' absolute refusal to consider the needs or hear the voices of those who are typically Democratic party voters - the poor, minorities, working class. In fact, by totally ignoring the appeals and concerns of the Democrats on these budget cuts, I think the Republican leadership in both the house and senate has been engaging in explicit efforts to deprive the majority or people in Arizona of their right to be represented - to be considered - in the crafting of new legislation or the termination of life-sustaining resources.


The recent party line votes getting some of the more racist and fascist bills through committees these past two weeks has been troubling, as we know that there's a much wider chasm where the Republicans have been polarized within their own circles - this feels a bit like 1994 - god spare us from another Contract on America, please. We're still helping the wounded and burying the casualties from all that bad legislation Gingrich's congress wrote and Clinton's sorry, cheating ass signed off on: PROWA, NAFTA, AETA, PLRA, etc. Boy did he ever do a lot of damage as president. And he failed to release all the political prisoners - freeing only a token handful compared to the friends and elites who received pardons from him, like Rich.


There are so many more people, now, with wrongful convictions' claims dragging for years through the courts as they grow old in prison - missing the best and most productive years of their lives by being exiled and isolated from their families and communities; others in for acts of economic desperation are missing critical opportunities to earn the money they need in order to take care of their kids, pay the restitution/court fess/jail expenses they're responsible for, and build up some financial security for later years. Most people in prison want to be self-sufficient citizens able to survive on what the market will pay them - but we've institutionalized so many other sanctions against "criminal" and "drug offenders" in society that we place huge barriers in the way of them being able to be successful from here on out.


The reality of freedom after prison is that ex-cons - felons - are going to get turned away from all sorts of job opportunities, denied emergency shelter or program enrollment in some cases, hassled by their POs to jump through more hoops or go back to bringing in money for the state or prison corporation, either through their cheap labor or their consumerism (they're gouged at the canteen; it's a racket). And if they're on probation, they're just as likely to get violated and jailed for falling behind in restitution even if they're otherwise doing well, as they are to get sent back to prison for new and violent crimes. 

The machinery this legislature crafted was designed that way - the restitution program in Arizona is exponentially punitive, not producing anything remotely like "restorative justice" processes in our community. It sets offenders up for crushing, impossible debt, and encourages victims to be vindictive.


The State will never invest the necessary resources to fully support re-entry programs that actually reduce recidivism, and to allow for the community to create more alternatives to incarceration when a member commits an offense against another. The primary objective of restorative justice, to simplify it, is to help communities, survivors, and even perpetrators of violent crimes heal from the trauma of the violence the accused's conduct visited on everyone, as well as to reduce the risk of the real bad guys hurting anyone else.


The challenge is to do it without coercion, and as a collective to confront the ones among us who don't uphold - don't even recognize - their own responsibility to keep the peace and protect the vulnerable, as well as those among them who have an explicit and dangerous self-serving agenda. There are very real criminals that need to be segregated from society right now for our own protection. Some are already in prison; some are high in the offices of power. It's the ones in power - the law-abiding citizens with guns - that we need to be concerned about, lest we wake up to find one morning that our nation is once again being driven by by demagogues...

Since those folks don't give up power without a fight, doing this without coercion is going to be tricky, to say the least. But since I really have no power with which to coerce anyone, that seems to be where I'll have to start.


I think I may have some burned bridges to rebuild. Hmm.

Budget Education not Incarceration!

UPCOMING EVENTS


December 10: International Human Rights Day
December 15: Fifth Special Legislative Session Begins
December 17: International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (Tucson Memorial Service).
December 18: SWOP-Tucson Demonstration at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Phoenix.

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I must say that the Arizona State legislature we've put up with the past few years has to be the most mean-spirited body of lawmakers in the country - and boy, have they been vicious going after the teachers and the unions...This is about the School Board association taking up more of an advocacy role, which is great because it embraces a broad spectrum of people with interests in the schools. 

I'm still impressed at how the AEA came out fighting this year - good organizing, way to keep us all posted, smart strategy of finding common ground with other groups and building alliances. We're going to need all the organizing you've done to get those selfish, racist right-wing extremists out of power, now. They'd sooner build more prisons than pay for all-day K...that's troubling.

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Budget cuts inspiring advocacy for schools 

by Emily Gersema - Dec. 6, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

School-boards group offers class on legislative process

Frustration has simmered among school supporters this year since state lawmakers began slashing the K-12 budget, most recently cutting $144 million from a fund that pays for desks and other classroom needs to offset a state revenue shortfall that tops $2 billion.

The pre-Thanksgiving budget cut was one of several rounds this year that have inspired parents to attend the Arizona School Boards Association's new statewide workshops on grass-roots advocacy.

ASBA spokeswoman Tracey Benson said the organization, a non-profit representing school boards across the state, has held nine workshops on advocacy so far this year in all but a few Arizona counties.

It's the first time the organization has led such an effort, and it taps into the emotional fight over school funding

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ASBA workshops have attracted huge turnouts "even in areas you wouldn't expect," Benson said.

About 45 people came to the workshop this fall in Safford, said Beth Sauer, the ASBA government-relations analyst who leads the workshops.

At other workshops, "we average about 20 to 25 people," she said.

Sauer said the idea for the workshops came up last year when association President Bob Rice suggested at a retreat that the organization start forums to inspire a grass-roots effort.

The goal is to teach community members to start putting pressure on state legislators or members of Congress to protect or promote certain issues, such as K-12 school funding.

As the workshop presenter, Sauer offers attendees basic tools for either advocating alone or forming coalitions. She also explains to community members the process of bill drafting and legislation, describes several efforts that can be made to fill in legislators on the potential impact of new bills as they move through the process, and gives tips for approaching and contacting legislators who could help their cause.

Sauer noted 2010 is an election year - an opportune time to meet with legislators.

The ASBA is a non-partisan organization that does not take positions on how supporters should vote. Its workshops have attracted parents who have cited budget cuts as the main reason they are interested in taking a stand for their districts... (continued back at the Republic)