Key Points: 

• Attorneys say seriously mentally ill inmates kept in isolation 

• Plaintiffs allege staff threats, violence discourage recreation time

• Motion seeks more out-of-cell time, training and staff accountability

Inmates with serious mental illnesses in state prisons are stuck in isolation due to limited and illegitimate offers to leave their cells and threats and violence by staff, according to a new filing by attorneys in the long-running health care and conditions lawsuit. 

A court injunction bars the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry from keeping inmates with serious mental illness in isolation for more than 22 hours a day, given an “elevated risk of harm.” 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs claim mental health housing units are effectively functioning somewhere close to solitary confinement, in direct violation of the court’s order. 

“They should be being treated like they’re in mental health units, not like they’re in punitive units,” said Maria Morris, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project. “It harms people intensely, and we’re talking about people who are extremely vulnerable to those harms.”

Though improvement in the department’s health care system may be on the horizon with a court-ordered receivership, problems pertaining to conditions fall outside the scope, leaving plaintiffs counsel to continue to monitor, report and push for compliance. 

A March 2 motion-to-enforce shows the issue of isolation falls primarily to three housing units across two complexes. 

Arizona State Prison Complex Lewis Rast houses 19 inmates and Arizona State Prison Complex Eyman Browning, with two units, has 53. The vast majority of the population across all three units consists of people designated as having a serious mental illness. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs claim at Rast, inmates are allegedly offered less than an hour and a half of out-of-cell time each day on average. 

Reporting from the department corroborates the claim, and shows the average daily out-of-cell time in the unit ranged from 38 minutes to about an hour and 15 minutes, with recreation and showers frequently cancelled due to a lack of staff. 

Morris points out, too, that inmates are not receiving confidential mental health care, with reports showing no offers or instances of inmates attending mental health programming or attending individual counseling. 

“When people commit suicide, it’s usually in isolation, it’s very disproportionately in isolation. One of these housing units is specifically for people who engage in self harm,” Morris said. “You’re putting people who have a mental illness that leads them to engage in self-harm into a setting that is, among all the harms of being in prison, the place that’s most likely to result in people killing themselves.”

In Browning, staff offer more than two hours, but counsel argues the offer is not “legitimate,” as inmates face an “extraordinary threat of violence by staff if they leave their cells, and they are routinely deemed to have refused recreation when, in fact, they have not done so.” 

Declarations from inmates reveal fear of the officers tasked with escorting people to and from recreation. 

After one inmate failed to line up fast enough, he was sent back to his cell, and his foot got caught in the door. In declarations from those housed in Browning, inmates reported staff allegedly slamming people to the ground, banging heads into walls, choking inmates and using pepper spray and slurs. 

The filing also noted staff would find violations to bar an inmate from recreation, dissuade them from going to recreation or offer extra food in exchange for refusing recreation. 

Refusal rates for recreation in the two units averaged 73% and 76%, respectively. 

“People want to get out of those cells, they’re confined in these little, tiny cells all day long, and they want that time out,” Morris said. “The fact that there were these extremely high rates of refusals of recreation indicated that they weren’t real offers of recreation that in some way or another, people were being discouraged from taking these offers if they were being made at all.”

Plaintiffs’ attorneys are now asking the court to order a remedial plan, with a minimum of four hours of “legitimately” offered out-of-cell time every day for those with serious mental illness and two hours of “tier time” in which inmates are allowed out of their cells and into a common area. 

The motion also pushes for specialized training for those working in units housing people designated as seriously mentally ill and the removal of any staff found to commit misconduct. 

As the court and the department consider the motion to enforce the injunction, parties are also preparing additional briefing on the health care receivership, with forthcoming motions on the proposed duties, powers and authorities of the receiver, and lists of potential candidates to take the job. 

The Arizona Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.