Arpaio Better Clean Up That Jail...

No matter how the MCSO wants to make the loss of accreditation last year out to be a problem of just Correctional Health Services, it goes way deeper than that - right to the heart of how much contempt Arpaio and his gang of thugs treat prisoners and families with, as well as those who advocate for them. 
   
This article is kind of suspicious for what it lacks: more info on the atrocious care people received because of gross medical negligence and incompetence, indifference among guards when prisoners have been sick and begging for help, and the overall environment in the jails creating life-threatening emergencies. This version of this report would have us thinking that the only thing causing Correctional Health Services’ to fail in providing even the basic constitutionally mandated standards of medical care to prisoners, in fact, is their lack of modernization and efficiency. 

Wake up, Arizona Republic! How can you swallow that without a question?


If it weren’t so criminal it would be almost comical to watch MCSO make themselves out to be the victim who was left out of the loop, here - they were really trying to improve health care services and championing prisoners’ rights in there, I’m sure. Sheriff Joe has staked his reputation on how cheap he be, how cruel he can be, and how racist and misogynistic he is in a way that so bizarrely appealing to some people that even a handful of Latinos and a whole lot of women adore him.

Adore him. Hmm. He’s as sweet and cuddly as a slave holding minister who pays someone else to do the whipping while he and his buddies Thomas and Pearce figure out how to rein in the ones they can’t enslave - especially us women...hmm. Criminalization and mass incarceration seems to have been working pretty well for them – why veer from that plan? That “Safe Cities” thing Pearce has got going on - It’s scary. Kind of Red Scary. Read about it a couple of posts down.

All this about the communication problem, by the way, is smokescreen: the real problem at the jail across the board is the dehumanization of prisoners and the county's unwillingness to provide people with the medical care they need despite being so quick to deprive them of their freedom. They don’t even provide them with basic daily necessities, in fact, if they don’t feel like it. 

Here’s dinner conversation from the women’s jail, to give you a good sense of just how dehumanized they are over there. Not long ago a friend went to visit her daughter there, and found her wearing clothes that had been blood-soaked for two days. She didn't have money in her jail account to buy personal hygiene supplies, so she was at the mercy of guards (who undoubtedly mocked her) as to when she received even a napkin, a shower or fresh clothes. Guess she pissed the wrong one off. Or maybe they really just collectively didn’t give a shit, or do that kind of thing for entertainment. Toilet paper is rationed and must then be paid for, too. And, of course, you get a bill for your room and board as you leave.

That kind of humiliating treatment sounds like the rule there, not the exception - if you're a poor woman, anyway. How can they treat women that way and there not be outrage in this community? Is it really ignorance? If so, then I think it is by choice, and the media has played along. Something is wrong with the women in power, here – with all of us - to be letting this happen to our sisters every day without lifting a collective voice in resistance to it. That’s a fundamental violation of basic human rights - leaving a prisoner that way, without the resources to even keep herself clean. We would be outraged and calling the US State Department if they did that in Burma to our comrade Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. They're doing to our sisters and moms and daughters right here.

Then there's the fact that such gross neglect also puts every single guard and prisoner in there at risk. If this is standard operating procedure for the MCSO, public health had better expect more of a HEP C problem than they already know about. What exactly is the jail policy about disinfecting and containing areas affected by blood and bodily fluids? Surely they have one. Surely it is also in their policies that “women prisoners should have unrestricted access to personal hygiene items as needed to prevent risk of bloodborne disease transmission when menstruating.” Simple enough. Feel free to use that, Joe, if you don’t quite know how to word it. You’ve got about a week to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

As for the rest of this article – of course the county bureaucrats and administrators don’t care about those of us who are really struggling out here. Except Mary Rose Wilcox. She gets credit for kicking Sheriff Joe’s ass even though he’s trying to imprison her. 

Anyway, we bought medical care for prisoners on the cheap because the feds made us, otherwise they’d get no care at all. The same with the state (actually, they pay far more than they should for what they get, but you know how important it is to let business turn a little profit - who cares at whose expense they make it?). So, we got what we paid for, and we were just fine with people dying it until the program was disaccredited. I guess that increases the probability of a lawsuit. 

MCSO tried to shut prisoners up when they complained before it got that bad, but there’s still a mile long trail of grievances and lawsuits reflecting a pervasive pattern of neglect and avoidable injury and deaths. MCSO has been party to it all along - as has the rest of county government, it appears. They knew exactly what was happening to our prisoners, and they let it happen anyway, as if once we're criminalized - or even just accused - we're all suddenly disposable people. They should all take responsibility for changing that. We are human, too.

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Maricopa County jail workers lacking health-care tools

Information on inmates not gathered, stored or shared properly, report says

by Yvonne Wingett and JJ Hensley - Jan. 7, 2010 12:00 AM

The Arizona Republic .

Maricopa County jail workers don't have the tools to collect and manage health-care data for inmates, according to a report from a consulting group the Sheriff's Office brought in last summer.

The report from the National Institute of Corrections found the same systemic problems that have plagued the jail health-care system for more than a decade: Detention officers and health-care workers have a difficult time communicating with each other, and their reliance on handwritten medical records and a patchwork of computer systems can lead to medical problems for inmates.

The report, which the county released to The Arizona Republic in response to a public-records request, also noted the system struggles because there are no contracts or working agreements between sheriff's personnel and employees of Correctional Health Services, the agency that provides health care in the jails.

The Sheriff's Office requested the report to ensure employees were gathering the health-care data they needed from the 130,000 inmates who move through the system each year, Deputy Chief MaryEllen Sheppard said.

The consultant's recommendations likely will fall by the wayside, just as other expert advice has, until Sheriff's Office officials and health-care workers resolve their legal battles over control of the jail health-care system.

Sheppard said the consultants, from a governmental group that assists correctional agencies, did not charge for the review and were brought in after Correctional Health Services lost accreditation last year.

"To have accreditation be pulled, that was a blow. We didn't want to be in that position again," Sheppard said.

The lack of accreditation is at the heart of a lawsuit Sheriff Joe Arpaio filed in the fall, requesting that a judge take responsibility for inmate health care from Correctional Health Services and give it to the Sheriff's Office.

The report was compiled using documents, interviews, data and visits to the jails from June 15 to 18. Several of the findings mirror those in a Republic investigation of Correctional Health Services.

With a budget of about $49 million, Correctional Health Services treats the sick and injured, tracks medical conditions, and prevents diseases inside of the county's six jail facilities.

The National Institute of Corrections' report cited the lack of an electronic-records system to centralize and manage patient paperwork as a key problem. The county Board of Supervisors has not acted on repeated recommendations to install such a system, even when faced with hundreds of lawsuits involving inmate health care, the loss of accreditation and consultant recommendations.

Top county officials this week said that they continue to explore ways to come up with the millions of dollars needed to buy and maintain an electronic system.

Poor communication between the Sheriff's Office and Correctional Health Services also is identified in the report as a key problem.

The Republic investigation found that the same communication breakdown has led to persistent miscues and errors in treating patients in a timely manner, accurately diagnosing conditions and adequately treating inmates as required under the Constitution. Health-care-related lawsuits and settlements from inmates and their families have cost taxpayers more than $13 million in the past 10 years.

Sheppard said the lack of communication also left sheriff's officials feeling blindsided when they learned last year that the National Commission on Correctional Health Care had stripped the county's jails of accreditation.

Sheppard said she asked the National Institute of Corrections to review the system to ensure sheriff's administrators wouldn't be caught off-guard the next time the system's supposed shortcomings were exposed.

"It shouldn't be a surprise to get an evaluation that says standards aren't being met. In my opinion, we should have the data systems in place to monitor our own practices," Sheppard said.

Correspondence from Betty Adams, the director of Correctional Health, indicates that she reapplied in August for accreditation from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care. On Dec. 24, Adams submitted paperwork to the state Department of Health Services, saying that an outside agency, CorrectHealth, reviewed jail health-care operations to comply with state law.

Wade Swanson, director of the county's civil-litigation department, said the county would not release a full copy of the CorrectHealth report, saying it is not a public record: "That is information we believe is protected."

Adams said she was unavailable for an interview; she did not respond to a request to make another health-care official available for questions.

While improving communication holds the key to improving health care in the jails, according to the report, those efforts are complicated by the sheriff's pending lawsuit.

Sheppard said the two sides had improved information-sharing, but the information flow to the Sheriff's Office has dried up following an audit the county commissioned in November.

"Is it 100 percent where we want to be? No," Sheppard said. "But to suggest that there hasn't been improvement, I don't think that's fair.

Maricopa County Jail

No sooner were we celebrating a small victory ending the use of outdoor cages in AZ state prisons then the story hit about Maricopa County Correctional Health Services inadequacies (Read this article!). At least there's already been an inquiry and a number of good recommendations made. The question is why our board of supervisors isn't following them. They've been warned of possible grave consequences to prisoners if they don't. Since 1998, we've had to shell out $13 million for legal fees and claims settlements to families, and we still haven't responded to expert recommendations for getting our health services for prisoners into decent shape. We even lost accreditation by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care last fall.

This one can't be blamed on Sheriff Joe. He may control the jails and therefore the living conditions, but not the budget or operation of Correctional Health Services. It looks like gross negligence on the part of the county administration and supervisors for not funding those services adequately. I guess the question is: who has to die for them to take action?

And who has to care? People are still on hunger strike over the conditions in the county jail, and we aren't all taking the day off of work to go storm the MCSO or Board of Supervisors meetings, though a core group of activists and community members have done so more than once this spring. What does it take for them to be listened to?

The hunger strike is about Arpaio's racial profiling as well as the jail conditions themselves. I can't believe he's so powerful that the Board of Supervisors quake (except Wilcox - she deserves a little credit). Not only is that guy being investigated for civil rights abuses, but he's often featured in the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Hatewatch" blog. History will not look kindly on Arizona for electing him. And for giving him a gun.

Which gets back to the racism issue. In most cities "criminal" is code for "black". Here it's code for "illegal immigrant" (or "Latino"), the worst kind of criminal one can be, short of being a felon. Characterizing the immigrants in jail detention as both "illegal" and "felons" or "facing felony charges" is deceptive. Many - if not most - are in pre-trial holding. What is the "felony" most undocumented immigrants are charged with that makes them such a danger to society that they have to be dressed in pink underwear? Smuggling themselves? That's our legislature's response to illegal immigration?

We originally came up with that law to protect people from human smugglers, not to ensnare them for "conspiring" with one to get them over the border. If threatened with a felony charge for just being here, why would an undocumented immigrant ever go to police for help if their loved one was raped or murdered by a coyote? That's about as brilliant and believable as charging a bunch of Food Not Bombs members as terrorists under the Minnesota version of the PATRIOT Act. That's not what the people intended. Stealing other people's identity so they can work? How lethal is that? Their employers should be paying taxes into their victims' social security accounts.

But calling them both "illegals" and "felons" seems to work to dehumanize people. So, I guess then that neither foreign nationals nor felons have basic human rights guaranteed under the US Constitution? I don't know. The Constitution isn't always right. First it accommodated the enslavement of African Americans, then it explicitly made convicts slaves of the state - so, consequently, more blacks ended up being criminalized after the Civil War. We institutionalized the exploitation and oppression of prisoners because of racism and fear, which is fed by someone else's greed. Not a lot of people know that history.

And then we actually pay to incarcerate them. I frankly don't think it's worth $45 a day of taxpayer money to lock up a father of three who's doing an honest days' work just because NAFTA obliterated his community's ability to sustain itself. Apparently not everyone shares my sentiments: private prisons are booming in the immigrant detention business, and the legislature wants to give Joe more money to round people up. Even public entities are renting out their extra jail and prison space because someone is always willing to pay.

I know we live in a society which regularly debases human life and dignity. But I think our jails have enough poor people and people of color in them to begin asking if our societal neglect of basic things like health care isn't symptomatic of our institutionalized racism and classism, which we can't sit back and wait for Obama's administration to solve. We treat the poor on the inside the same way we do on the outside - suspiciously, skeptically, and with a tendency to think they have no "right" to complain - they're lucky we're as generous as we are.

I don't think they're lucky, of course. The poor, free and in chains, are totally vulnerable to violence from law enforcement officers and mobs alike. Sometimes the mob is there to liberate them, but most of the time they're there with a rope. I think we're just about to kill another prisoner through negligence, punitive policies, and poor management; the county Board of Supervisors has been duly advised on how to avoid such tragedies as Marcia Powell's. The recommendations are fairly straightforward. With the 1.6 million dollars Arpaio expects to get to round up more day laborers, some of those issues could be remedied. I'm sure the undocumented persons being detained have enough medical needs that federal dollars can be thrown into the mix - how can you detain them if you can't afford to treat them?

I can't imagine that federal standards for medical care to prisoners are all that high; it disturbs me that we aren't even going to try to meet them any more. Arizona is in the Old Deep South of the New West, digging in our heels and pulling out the shotguns to try to stop millions of people from seeking equality and freedom; people who came for the American Dream that we dangle, then jerk away. Our state has the right to deal with prisoners as it wants - the hell with US laws or standards. No wonder we are regarded as being littered with idiots. Despite our New American University, we're being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

It's okay so long as business needs their labor, whether it's through slavery or perpetual servitude; most people will just look away. But things have changed. Our relationship with immigrants has always been one of capital's convenience. Now that we don't have so many jobs we don't need to exploit their labor to drive down the cost of wages. Even Americans will work for cheap now, the economy's so bad. We've been through this cycle many times before. We treat foreign nationals like our own poor: as disposable.

I'd like to see the accrediting body's report on Correctional Health Services, and listen in on county supervisor meetings where it was addressed. How do you justify decreasing prisoner access to health care services when so many die in custody? How many of those "natural causes" were survivable heart attacks and strokes that maybe didn't get medical care quickly enough? Was mental health care provided to those who ultimately committed suicide in jail? Had anyone even recognized the risk? And what about the staff recommendations that were made - why were they never implemented?

Who is policing Correctional Health Services? The Arizona Republic? Is that all?

Now is the time to get in touch with our county supervisors and tell them we expect better health care in our jails as well as our communities, and that we will hold them accountable for these folks' lives.