Truth-in-Sentencing, Arizona: one in ten youth will be sexually abused the first year in juvenile prison.

This is profoundly tragic. This kid was in state prison for shoplifting and drug use - that's a real problem, given who the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections touts as their main customers: "the worst of the worst young criminals in the state." I have yet to see any of the real bad guys get abused in prison, but we shrug off reports like this one as if they're freak accidents and only the criminals we love to hate get hurt badly. Thank god the judge let the kid go home after all this.

Judges should be ordered to read aloud at sentencing the risks they expose each child to if they plan to lock them up - beginning with the one in every ten kids who will be sexually abused the first year they're in the system. Then when a child is raped or suicides in custody, the judge should be held civilly liable for the risk they knowingly, explicitly subjected them to as part of their punishment.

The judiciary can't possibly think that juvenile detention centers are really therapeutic rehabilitation facilites to send children to - which is why the AzDJC calls places like Adobe Mountain "Safe Schools", instead of what they are: child prisons. It makes the prospect of committing a child there more palatable to the well-intended. They're really prison prep schools, though, and come complete with gangs, drugs, and sexual abuse - as well as child-size prison uniforms, stark cells, handcuffs and shackles.

We just pack a bunch of naive, emotionally impaired kids in with a few real disturbed thugs to justify keeping those places open at all, then indoctrinate them into a culture that leaves them few options for roles and self-image to choose from outside of the criminal justice paradigm populated by distinctly-defined "criminals", "victims", and cops.

Most children who have been criminalized and institutionalized are also survivors of abuse already, and grow up with unresolved trauma issues that lead to self-medicating with drugs - and then prison again. It is not uncommon for their involvement with the juvenile justice system to be the greater source of trauma than their adolescent participation in crime was, though.

This kid, for one, was hardly safe - and the truth is that when this kind of thing happens it hardly ever hits the press, so the public is lulled into thinking that violence in the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections is not the rule. Prisons RUN on violence and the threat of it to coerce compliance, though, people. They are authoritarian police institutions - do not send children there and expect them to come out healthy. If they do, they are the exception to the rule, not the other way around.

Sentencing practices should be closely monitored for all critical outcomes - not only recidivism, but suicide, homicide, further victimization, sexual exploitation: once we start treating kids like criminals, we seem to stop caring about all other aspects of their lives but whether or not they remain criminals...nurturing little but prison culture, stigmatization, and a negative self-image in the process.

Don't believe them for a minute when they tell you they have to be like that because of the serious pathology of their youth - the worst are still out getting away with it. The kids the AzDJC really have the most of are the ones who got caught and were too poor to swing their own attorneys - a good many of whom were low-level, non-violent drug offenders who just kept relapsing on probation, and everyone knows that a bunch of the kids we throw into juvie should have gone through mental health treatment, not the criminal justice system - and would have but for the lack of funds for public mental health services in this state. Those kids couldn't get into a residential treatment program unless they were first criminalized (that must be a violation of the Olmstead Act) - and then they ended up in prison instead.

So, this article is for those who still believe that "criminals deserve what they get in prison." Folks who really believe that do these kids the greatest harm through their deliberate indifference to their suffering - as do the bureaucrats who do damage control by distorting the gravity of their plight behind the best of bars. When the AzDJC faced the threat of privatization last year, they and the officers' unions chose to appeal not to our collective sense of responsibility to help these kids, but to our fear of them instead, arguing that private companies can't safely handle the highly dangerous young criminals they have in their care. Public safety would be compromised, they argued - never mind how it would affect the welfare of our criminalized youth. I even heard one guy refer to the escape at Kingman (as if the lack of state oversight had no bearing on the outcome) - suggesting that young state prisoners would be busting out and killing everyone if they could.

But the murderers and sociopaths they have in custody aren't the ones getting screwed - it's the kids like this one below and Presley Austin who represent the incoming tide...AzDJC Director Mike Branham should be the one out in front on this telling the public how bad these places are for such youth, that there's no way to make the prison system "work" for most of them, and that we should be directing our resources into other kinds of services for them before they hit the child prisons.

The problem with committing our children so readily to the care of the state, is that it tends to place its own survival over the best interests of the people its machinery was constructed to serve in the first place. Mike could have embraced an abolitionist vision and steered the entire agency towards dissolution, redirecting resources back to their prisoners' home communities to decide how best to teach their youth the nuances of justice, and to cultivate a better sense of social responsibility than our current reliance on these archaic institutions has done thus far.

Thank you, Judge Aragón, for exercising compassion and taking responsibility for correcting your orders. Someone should fire that prosecutor - especially if he's the one who coaxed the judge to send that kid up river in the first place. He was some kind of dangerous, alright...

Why can't these places keep their prisoners safe?

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Release is ordered for boy, 16, after attacks in custody
Kim Smith / Arizona Daily Star
March 5, 2011


A Pima County Juvenile Court judge who sent a 16-year-old boy to the Catalina Mountain School last December ordered his release Friday after learning the boy may have been repeatedly stabbed with a pen one week last month and sodomized the next.

Judge Gus Aragón ordered the boy placed on probation until his 18th birthday in March 2012, said Assistant Pima County Public Defender Terri Pones.

"I am ecstatic," Pones said following the hearing.

According to court documents filed by Pones, Aragón sent the boy to the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections in December after the drug-addicted boy repeatedly violated probation.

The boy had been adjudicated delinquent for stealing candy and soft drinks from a Marana park concession stand, Pones said. He also has drug convictions.

On Feb. 3, a teacher overheard the teenager's roommate tell another roommate the teenager had been stabbed in the throat, arm and rib cage with a pen two days prior, according to the documents. The teenager told his mother and corrections officials he was afraid of retaliation and he'd overheard other teens talking about assaulting him again.

The boy and his mother were assured he would be housed by himself, staff would supervise him on a more individual basis and someone would always be "shadowing him," Pones said in the court documents.

On Feb. 15, the teenager was taken to Northwest Medical Center after being sodomized by a roommate and forced to perform a sexual act, Pones said.

After being discharged from the hospital, the teenager was sent to Adobe Mountain in Phoenix for his safety, making it difficult for his family to visit him, Pones said.

Because of the assault, Pones said the boy's "treatment needs have now far exceeded" those he had in December and he ought to be released so he can receive treatment in the community.

David Berkman, Pima County's chief criminal deputy attorney, said prosecutors asked Aragón to schedule a hearing on the allegations once the corrections department completed its investigation, but he declined to do so.

Truth in Sentencing and Human Rights.

Upcoming Events

December 10: International Human Rights Day.

December 15: 5th Special Legislative Session to screw the poor and working classes even further.
December 17: International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (Tucson Memorial).

December 18: Sex Workers Outreach Project Protest at the AZ DOC in Phoenix.

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(This is a cross-post from AZ Prison Watch, which is the site I'll use for posting further prisoner death notices from the ADC. I just wanted to let folks over here know what was  up.)

I appear to have stopped posting the inmate death notices in August sometime. It wasn't a conscious decison;  think it was just particularly heartbreaking, and I couldn't seem to keep up with them. But people often come back here again and again searching for links about their loved ones, sometimes posting final messages or explanations so that others might understand what happened to them, and know that they weren't a bad person just because they died in prison. 

I think we should be here for them, so even if it makes us all a little uncomfortable, so I'm going to start putting these folks back up on AZ Prison Watch when they die. We need to know what's killing them, and while they don't give us many clues in the press releases, we do get a little closer to the human suffering part of their experience. 

I always wonder how differently a judge might have sentenced someone if he or she knew that it could be the last few years of their life because prison is harder to survive when you're ill or your immune system is compromised...Maybe judges should have to include statistical probabilities with each sentence that they hand out which informs defendants of their likelihood of being raped in prison, contracting a deadly infectious disease, dying of an otherwise treatable cancer for a delay in diagnosis or inadequate medical intervention, or being otherwise terribly compromised or violated. That would be real "truth-in-sentencing".

Those odds could all,be calculated out - they probably already have been by risk management experts who determine whether or not it's cheaper to let someone get injured and try suing (fat chance if you're a prisoner suin for rights), to settle a case or fight it in court, or to fix the potential hazard in the first place (why bother if prisoners can't sue?). Having to speak aloud the atrocities they must know occur in American prisons may at least make judges think twice about the sentences they were handing out, and what they really expect to accomplish by incarcerating addicted survivors of trauma, for example, with those who would be their perpetrators. What kind of lesson does that teach to whom? 

Even if the judges don't learn from such disclosure of what prison really does to people, the public would. Most of us would not condemn a mentally ill teenager to being repeatedly raped or to endure a long slow death by Hepatitis C for pulling a pen knife out when he thought someone was trying to kill him during a manic episode. Most of us would probably wonder why he was in prison instead of  a psychiatric hospital. 

Most everyone in court when he was sentenced wondered that too. 

Some of us just don't have lives that seem worth saving, I think, or we are viewed as being so helpless and pathetic that we need to be protected from ourselves by being put in prison for awhile, which too many Americans actually think is a "safe" place for people like Marcia Powell (and myself, for that matter), someplace where we would get presumably good dental and health care, be fed three times a day, and been seen by mental health staff... I think that's mostly just fantasy in America, though. Many prisoners only get fed twice a day, small portions of empty calories full of sugars and cholesterol  - for which they may even have to pay from their fifteen-cents-an-hour job.

Social Workers who think they are doing their clients a "favor" by conspiring with courts and cops to help them "hit bottom" via the brutal path through jail or prison may just be setting them up to crash through their bottom and die.  If you're going to mess with people's lives like that, then remember  first, to do no harm.

Even those of you with the best intentions impose your own version of order on us as we try to navigate an increasingly insane world with minimal resources for survival, while you ignore our resistance and cause for protest, and blame us for "non-compliance" if we reject the promise your prescribed pharmaceutical solutions offer to make us nauseaus, give us uncontrollable tremors, numb us to our loved one's smile, touch, or words  of comfort, or silence us in a drugged stupor for months or years.  

We really don't need those kinds of favors, no matter how many recovering addicts swear by "tough love" saving their lives - it was the love part, not so much the tough, that saved most of the hardest cases I knew. For every one who was saved by 12-Step ways, many more were lost along the same road to recovery; their families left in the wake of suicides and drunk driving accidents interrogating themselves about whether or not they were tough enough, too tough, or loving enough.

If every social worker, lawyer, judge and cop had to do a stint as a prisoner or involuntary psychiatric patient, there'd be a lot more sensitivity coming from those directions, and probably more effective solutions to engage someone in treatment would be tried - coercion should be the absolute last resort to protect life and limb.

So, we're going to be looking at you, too, my friends on the bench - if you're up for re-election this year, we'll be taking notes in your courtroom and gathering data on your sentencing practices, finding out who among you has accepted the responsibility of weighing multiple and competing views of justice, tuning out political pressures, and come up with creative and meaningful responses to human crises more in the vein of restorative than retributive justice - especially those of you in juvenile justice. 

Prosecutors, be on notice too. And any court-appointed attorneys that give their indigent clients the short shrift - we'll catch you. And you well-meaning social workers. CourtWatch is coming to Phoenix soon. What you do will no longer be visible only by way of your own press releases - we'll have inside accounts of how you treat people, and just how some of these pleas are arrived at that result in so many people - including the innocent - giving up their rights to trial out of fear, just to put another notch in Thomas' belt of "convictions".  From what I hear, he's got an awful lot of innocent people tucked underneath that belt. The new Maricopa County Attorney, if they have any guts, will start opening innocence claims once Thomas is run out on a rail, if he doesn't take the responsibility to deal with them himself first. The latter would seem to be the more responsible and noble course of action.

Anyway, regardless of their crimes, convictions, or time, I think the folks dying in prison deserve to be at least noticed by us - we may be the only people to whom their passing matters - except perhaps their victim, if there was ever one other than themselves to begin with. So, with today being International Human Rights Day, I thought it was time to go back and catch up on the names of those who have died in state custody over the past few months. I'll be working on this one all day, I think.

I may take a lunch break to do something down at the AZ DOC - call me if anyone's interested in joining me - just want to make sure the prisoners know that they're being thought of today.