To define the word “cure” one might find words describing “a medicine or therapy that cures or relieves pain.” Another definition would state to “provide a cure or make healthy again.” This letter is an attempt to reach the conscious and professionalism of a prison director who has repeatedly ignored the pleas of others including family members and employees to cure the dismal conditions of the Arizona prison system that has grown into a culture of deliberate indifference to both their prisoners and its employees.
Shamefully, the agency has sunken a new low for not taking care of their moral obligations to provide safe and secure prison environment as data publicized still shows an enormous number of unexplained “natural” deaths and suicides demonstrating a more aggressive and diligent manner of addressing medical and mental health care is in order to reduce such traumatic events while at the same time, provide staff with better training, better management concepts and better staffing patterns that are detrimental to morale and performance issues within the prison setting.
The Arizona Republic, “which interviewed current and former prisoners and reviewed dozens of inmates' letters of complaint, reported inmates saying they have lost sight, had body parts amputated, been severely disfigured and suffered repeated seizures as a result of a lack of proper medical care.” Having personally experienced many “make up” triage sessions to address the excessive backlogs of medical and mental health treatment during my tenure as a unit deputy warden in Florence, has shown the agency’s failure for medical staff and mental health providers to keep up with their caseloads creating gaps or chasm in their program services and violating certain standards of care mandates that are often ignored and then in an attempt to “catch up” they schedule an emergency triage to see as many prisoners they can muster up to fulfill their legal and moral obligation to provide services as mandated by accreditation standards and other standards of care applied to such an environment.
The untimely deaths of the many losses housed within an Arizona prison shows a lack of control of the facilities to manage gangs housed within their general population. Today, inmates are “beat down” by gangs and as many cases will reveal prior efforts to be segregated from them, they are often refused protective custody by a central office official whose job is to sort out the manipulators from the genuine victims regardless how many times they are beat down on a yard somewhere in the state. History shows that they are often sent to an “alternative yard” to do their time instead of protective segregation that has been designated to be a last resort due to those beds being premium in both space and costs for the agency. This classification process, however, is flawed and has put the risk of being severely beaten high as the agency continues to ignore such special needs for its prisoners resulting in a unfortunate practice that consists of more litigation and expensive medical care thus burdening the tax payers to no end.
Whether the state wants to admit it or not, this lack of action to protect prisoners on an open yard creates difficult situations for staff to handle and puts them in harm’s way whenever such an assault takes place and staff has to intervene to provide assistance and stop the beating. It also demonstrates the lack of efforts to control gang activities as their actions are rampant and often undetected creating more problems for employees as they are working within an environment that is saturated with contraband and drugs illustrating a weak drug interdiction program and poor security practices in the areas of searches and shakedowns in areas susceptible to drug introduction and use. They say that the proof is in the pudding when it is all said and done, there are too many employees being assaulted, too many inmates dying in our prisons and too little being done to make Arizona prisons safer for both employee and prisoner.
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Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/12/06/Ariz-prisoners-say-healthcare-delayed/UPI-26751323196952/#ixzz1hknELPTW
