John Fabricius, executive director of the Praxis Initiative and formerly of Arizonans for Transparency and Accountability in Corrections, first recognized a void in independent prison oversight while he was an inmate himself. Now, as a lead on criminal justice policy, he sees an extra set of eyes and ears as an absolute necessity. 

What brought you to this work? 

I had an older brother … My brother was nine (years older) … He got into trouble early on … He started getting off into drugs and that kind of thing, and coming off that way … He ends up going into the juvenile system here. Then, when he’s 18, he ends up in the adult system here. He gets a five-year sentence, gets out of here, and ends up in Nebraska. He spends three years back there, gets out, and does well again, eventually ending up in Illinois. Ended up doing eight years in the Illinois system. So in all those times, I went through that as a family member, as a kid growing up with that experience. 

You can imagine that it left an indelible mark on me. My brother, when he came home, would have stories of success and failure. There’s always drug-related failure. But the successes that he would have were where he would talk to me a lot about being in prison and helping guys do their legal work, because he always wrote well, because he was really smart. After he got out of the Illinois prison, he ended up going to DePaul (University) and was pre-law. Unfortunately, that fell through. He ended up back here in the system in 2007, and then he overdosed and died in 2008, not long after he got out. 

His stories of success resonate in my head. So when I got in trouble in 2003, when I went to the Department of Corrections, I saw what was going on in there. It was not as advertised. I certainly understood why my brother walked out. I had anger at my brother for all those years. I was just like everybody else in society. I was mad at my brother for being a derelict and drug addict. I feel really guilty about that now. That experience, him being in there, and what he went through and things that were successful for him really resonated. 

What do you remember about your own experience in the Department of Corrections? 

The first time you go in, all you’re thinking about is getting out. That’s all you’re thinking about most of the time anyway, but you’re really focused on your first time in the incarceration experience. You’re scared to death. You don’t know what’s going on. 

I got out, and there was nothing. I made it 10 months, and then I went back in there. And this time I went in with a 16 and a half year sentence. It was a much more profound sentence.

This time, when I went in, I invested in getting an education. I found a good paralegal school. I took that and then went to work in there doing legal work for other people, helping them with their criminal appeals and helping them with their civil rights cases. I really liked civil rights and civil law. I have a real passion for it. I hate criminal law, but unfortunately I had to do a bunch of it. 

It really put it into sharp focus because I was studying the law at the time, including Supreme Court decisions and Ninth Circuit court decisions, as well as the constitutional framework that outlined how operations were supposed to be conducted, establishing the constitutional floor. I was immersed in policy, and it was emerging to me that there was a real disconnect. 

When did you make the connection to oversight? 

I got a job; I was a clerk. When I was doing that, there was a reporter here named Bob Ortega who used to work for The Republic. He was doing a story on a guy, he was like a self help guru, he was doing sweat lodges, like a yuppie retreat, and I guess he was a real hard-ass, and a lady died in his sweat lodge. That guy was going to go to prison, and Ortega was doing a big exposé. He came to tour our prison as part of that news report. 

We were told by the warden to make sure everything was in line. It just dawned on me right then. This is the only eyes and ears the public has coming into our facilities. He’s walking in right now, and I am part of the tools that manage it, (and) obfuscate all of the facts of this place. He won’t see, hear, smell, taste any of the real problems. And I’m part of that. I’m a tool in this campaign. That’s when I started thinking about oversight. I thought about oversight every day. I was sitting there, thinking about how to implement it, what we would need, and what would work and what wouldn’t. 

What problems did you see? What motivated you to continue down the policy path after you left? 

When I came out of the Department of Corrections, I was fired up. When I was there, it also was the time when we had passed the law to go to privatized health care in 2009, so from 2009 to 2011 basically, what we had was a massive attrition of all these state-hired medical people who knew that the end was near and they were going out to get other jobs. So they were leaving the ship. There was nobody around.

I watched a friend of mine go blind from a detached retina. I saw another guy die. I saw a guy lose a leg. I mean, it just was horrific what was going on there all at the same time this was happening. So that’s what animates me. Then you add on another eight years in prison. By the time I got out, I was so pissed off, I was so fired up that I just started charging. I was like a bull in a china shop for the longest time. Hopefully, I’m a little bit better now. 

When did the charge for oversight in the Legislature start for you? 

We wrote this proposal up; all I did was basically argue that there’s 225 commissions and boards out here that monitor everything from nail polish to education. This is a big, massive agency. It’s the only one that we’re taking care of human lives 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Why do we not have any oversight there?

So when I first started talking about oversight, it was very much what I had been thinking about (in prison). I’d never done any research on oversight models. I thought long and hard about what I thought would work and what wouldn’t, and that was this committee idea that I came up with. 

Laetitia Hua, who won Miss Maricopa County, connected me to Diego Rodriguez, a lawmaker at the time, and he took my bill. It shocked me because I had written this thing down, I’m a paralegal. I had some legal experience, but I had never written a law. They didn’t change a comma or a period, nothing, it sailed through. It was super simple, but it was kind of shocking — the immediacy of that. The instant nature of that was really a game changer. It’s this close. Democracy is this close. 

What is your message on oversight now? What is most important to understand? 

There’s a difference between retaliation and accountability. I think that’s what we need to decide as a society. What are we going to use the Department of Corrections for? 95% of the people who are coming out of the Department of Corrections are going to come home. They could be living right next door to you. So do you want someone who’s been tortured for six years by the government? Or do you want someone who’s been nurtured and helped by the government to find a different path? That’s the binary we have in front of us. 

What keeps you going? 

I am a musician. I’m a guitar player, a studio engineer. And I thought about that while I was in there too, a lot. I love playing music. There’s a billion things I’d rather be doing, really, than thinking about our prisons all the time, and then certainly going down here and putting out in public that I’m an ex-prisoner all the time. There’s other stuff in this world that I would do, but there’s not anything else that I get the level of genuine satisfaction from, because I really feel like we’re doing good things here. I couldn’t be doing anything else now at this stage, knowing what I know and seeing what I’ve seen. 

We come out. We come out alive. Most of us come out alive, but we don’t come out undamaged, that’s for sure. And I am definitely better in many ways, because of the experience. I’m able to sit here and have a conversation with you and not be strung out and all that kind of stuff and doing stupid things. There’s a better part of me for being here. But that didn’t come as advertised, as a function of the Department of Corrections. It came in spite of the Department of Corrections. You rehabilitate in there, in spite of the environment, not because of the environment. That’s what we have to change.