Class-action status won in suit over prison care
Published: March 6, 2013 at 6:34 pm
A handful of Arizona prison inmates who sued the state over the quality of health care at the state’s prisons won class-action status that lets other prisoners join the case.
The class is defined in an order Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Neil Wake as prisoners who are or will be subjected to untimely access to care, a failure to receive necessary medication, an insufficient health staff, a failure to provide care for chronic diseases and other alleged failures.
The prisoners pushing the lawsuit also won subclass status for all prisoners who are or will be put in isolation in a cell for 22 hour or more each day at five prison units.
Prison officials have denied the lawsuit’s allegations that the medical care for inmates is grossly inadequate.
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2 Responses to “Class-action status won in suit over prison care”
March 8th, 2013 at 12:27 pm
All the lawmakers and elected law enforcement officials should be required to ‘intern” at the state prisons and jails for a minimum of 6 months. Then and only then, would they reform Arizona’s poorly written criminals laws and policies that put ALL at risk for being thrown into the broken criminal justice system that leads to jails and prison facing great risk, harm and possible death.
The legislators and elected officials, the Governor and AZ Dept. of Corrections Director have been ignoring the exploding crisis for years. Anyone else at the top would have been fired. But then Arizona’s officials are TOO BIG to fail, while the clueless taxpayers are forced to pick up the tab.
Arizona does NOT need more new private prison corporation prisons. They need to accept responsibility for what they have and FIX IT or stop criminalizing ordinary activities to “grow” the prison population.
The legislators are responsible for the mass incarceration of Arizona’s people. Former Judge Rudy Gaerber addressed you several years ago (2009/2010) at the House Sentencing Committee hearings and admonished you at the time. You responded by letting all the recommended sentencing bills by Rep. Cecil Ash die. These bills had the input of many concerned people in the industry and citizens. You chose to look the other way. The prosecutors fought like “prosecutor lobbyists” to defeat this much needed reform. Why?
You all have blood on your hands. Don’t know how you sleep nights.
March 8th, 2013 at 12:48 pm
A Brutal Prison Culture » peoplesworld
http://www.peoplesworld.org/a-brutal-prison-culture/
“Some writers have compared the U.S. sexual humiliation of prisoners in Iraq with Maricopa County, Ariz., where Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s made male prisoners parade around in pink female underwear. The person selected by Attorney General John Ashcroft to train prison guards in Iraq, Lane McCotter, was pushed out of his position as head of the Utah prison system in 1997 because of scandalously brutal conditions under his watch, which led to the death of a mentally ill prisoner who had been chained up naked for 16 hours. It is simply not believable that Ashcroft and others in the Bush administration did not know about McCotter’s background. Anyone who is up for an important government position these days is very carefully screened by the FBI. The Bush administration must not have cared, or perhaps they saw the brutality in McCotter’s resume as a “plus.”