Arizona is appealing a withering federal court ruling that threw out a 6-year-old legal settlement that required the state to improve health care for thousands of prisoners.

A U.S. district court judge has voided a six-year-old prison health care class action settlement and ordered a trial after the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry and its health care contractors consistently failed to hold up their end of the agreement.

Arizona lawmakers are weighing whether they should enshrine in statute rules governing access to feminine hygiene products for female prison inmates and regulating the treatment of pregnant prisoners.

If the Arizona Department of Corrections continues to be reactive instead of proactive in its preparations for COVID-19, there will be a killing field in the prisons. Folks sentenced to just a few years will be handed down a death sentence, not from a jury or a judge but from sheer negligence.

A federal judge who has criticized Arizona's persistent noncompliance with a settlement requiring improvements to health care for prisoners has ordered lawyers for the state and inmates to decide whether they want to throw out the 5-year-old deal and instead bring the case to trial.

The state of Arizona wants a judge to hold off on her threat to order $1.6 million in additional contempt-of-court fines against the state for failing to adequately follow through on its promises to improve health care for its 33,000 prisoners.

A Quaker organization claims to have bipartisan support for a bill that would upend Arizona’s truth-in-sentencing laws, which requires Arizona inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their court-imposed sentences.

A judge presiding in a legal settlement over the quality of health care in Arizona's prisons has raised the possibility of throwing out the four-year agreement and resuming litigation over inmate care because of the state's pervasive noncompliance with the deal.

Lawyers who filed a lawsuit challenging the quality of health care in Arizona's prisons are seeking $1.6 million in additional legal fees and other costs in enforcing a 2014 settlement that they say the state has repeatedly resisted.

A freshman Democrat in the House apologized March 7 to colleagues and staff who said they were offended by pillows made of feminine hygiene products she and activists handed out the previous day.