After more than 10 years of litigation, five reports of inadequate care and unnecessary death and three reports of an unsuccessfully implemented staffing plan, plaintiffs in the long-running class action lawsuit against the Dept. of Corrections Rehabilitation and Reentry are asking the court for a receiver to take over the carceral health care system. 

Attorneys and corrections reform advocates view receivership as a last resort, but they claim the department has not come any closer to complying with the court’s injunction, making it a necessary next step. 

“It’s really coming from what the judges’ own experts are telling us about the system. It’s been a decade, and people, our clients, are still dying unnecessarily, and there’s really no path in place for that to be fixed,” Rita Lomio, an attorney for the Prison Law Office and author of the motion for receivership, said. “We have tried over a decade basically every other potential remedy, and the judge has tried potential remedies, and we find ourselves in the same place.” 

A formal response from the department is due on March 4, but in a statement, the department refuted the Plaintiffs’ characterization of the current level of care and deemed a receiver a non-starter. 

“While the Plaintiffs may not be interested in drawing attention to the significant progress being made by the department to improve the delivery and expansion of health care services across prisons, the department certainly is,” a statement read. “Instead of recognizing the irrefutable change happening across the ADCRR, the Plaintiffs continue to move the goalpost. They focus on the reputation and circumstances of the past rather than recognizing or even supporting the good work of the present.”

In a motion filed Feb. 12, Lomio claimed that, even after a decade, the department has “not demonstrated the will, knowledge, or capacity” to truly reform the prison health care system. 

“The enormous expenditure of time and resources by the parties and the Court has landed us in the same place: ‘horrible care,’ nurses acting outside their legal scope of practice, and needless suffering and death,” Lomio wrote. “Even with extensive guidance and step-by-step instructions from the Court and its experts, Defendants failed miserably.” 

In asking for a receivership for the department, the motion cites interim reports from the lead court-appointed monitor, Marc Stern. 

In the series of filings from February 2024 to Jan. 7, 2025, Stern found continued inadequacy of care and little-to-no improvement across the board in operations, which continued daily danger to patients incarcerated by the department. 

There is also the issue of inadequate staffing, and a final Staffing Pilot report found the department “lacks the human resources, the space and the administrative and professional project management capacity” to implement a staffing plan at any state prison. 

Lomio points to the case law established in Plata v. Newsom, another class action over health care in California’s corrections system. 

The receiver assigned to oversee the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation maintained authority over staff, contracts, and budgets and was mandated to bring the department’s medical care into compliance with constitutional standards.  

The Plaintiffs’ request for a receiver in Arizona mimics the same responsibilities, but adds a request for the court to waive state laws standing in the way of compliance with the court injunction. 

Lomio specifically points to a statute requiring the privatization of correctional health services and a second state law requiring that compensation for medical specialists working in correctional health care does not exceed the rate mimicked in Medicaid. 

Lomio added the department’s continued work with an outside health care vendor has put a drain on state resources, with little results, and ongoing staffing woes, particularly among specialists, can be traced back to a state-mandated cap on compensation for corrections health care staff.

Lomio, in line with case law, claims a receiver is crucial given a “grave and immediate threat of continuing harm to the Plaintiffs,” the exhaustion of less extreme measures of remediation, and the lack of leadership to “turn the tide within a reasonable period of time,” and a “huge waste of the taxpayer’s resources,” given ongoing costs from litigation. 

She wrote, “With a receiver, resources will be properly invested into making the ‘substantial’ changes to systems needed to finally improve healthcare in the state prison system and, ultimately, end this case.”

Lomio reiterated to the Arizona Capitol Times the need to essentially give a receiver “complete control” over health care, managing budgets, working with the legislature and developing processes to ensure sufficient and correct staffing levels. 

“We just have had this really adversarial scorched earth litigation for a decade without seeing meaningful improvements, and it’s just a waste of money. We need to make sure that that money is directed smartly, so that we make the reforms we need to get care to a constitutional level,” Lomio said.

“Right now, the only way we can see that is to bring in a competent person to oversee that system, give them all of the powers and responsibilities they need to make an efficient system,” Lomio said. “You put the money in and it goes to good care, whereas right now you’re putting a lot of money in and it’s going to bad care.”

The department views the current status of care differently, though, and said definitively that a “receiver is not the answer.” 

In a statement, ADCRR cited “numerous” improvements to expand access to treatment, create new medical housing and in-patient mental health units and greater communication and responsiveness to health care concerns posed by people who are incarcerated. 

The department claimed the Plaintiffs instead “devote what appears to be an endless amount of time, energy and money, unnecessarily driving up the cost to Arizona taxpayer,” and cited $2.2 million in court and plaintiff monitoring costs, and an increase to the FY2025 budget by $2.5 million, on top of the existing $400 million budget for health care. 

“The question Arizona tax payers and lawmakers should ask themselves is, why does the State continue to allow the Plaintiffs to gloss over facts demonstrating the ADCRR system is revitalized, right in front of their watchful eyes, a shadow version of its former self? And, how much are we willing to allow these out-of-state influences to dictate what is good for our state? With a constantly moving goal, and by relying on outdated and biased reports, the Plaintiffs keep the State of Arizona and its hardworking citizens paying, at the expense of other needs; to what end?” 

A response from the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry is due to the court on March 4, with a reply from the Plaintiffs due two weeks later, on March 18.