Parsons v Ryan: Suicide Prevention Day, 2012, AZ DOC.

Remembering the suicide victims of Jan Brewer 

and Charles Ryan at the Arizona Department of Corrections.

 

 "SOS from Arizona's Other Death Row"

Firehouse Gallery and Cafe, Phoenix

June 2012

This is the state of suicide prevention in Arizona's Department of Corrections, under Director Charles Ryan. I hope the DOC responds to this critique with a detailed description of what else they're doing to reduce the rate of despair and violence that's driving Arizona prisoners to kill themselves at twice the rate than the national average for state prisoners. I want to know what the training consists of. So do the families who have already suffered a death in custody - as well as the loved ones of those mentally ill prisoners fighting to be safe and well in custody now. How have the conditions described below changed since Parsons v Ryan was filed?

If you have a loved one in prison with a serious mental illness whose safety or sanity you fear deeply for, please feel free to contact me. I'm just an artist and activist - I'm not a lawyer or professional anything, but I can refer you to resources in your community, and connect you with other families who share your struggle. 

Have your loved ones write me as well. 

Arizona Prison Watch  /  PO Box 20494  / PHOENIX, AZ 85036

thank you again to all the attorneys working on this case...but most of all, to the prisoner-litigants who had the courage to put their names and faces to the abuses and neglect going on behind bars in this state...

Peggy Plews 

480-580-6807

arizonaprisonwatch@gmail.com

Parsons V Ryan (p. 47)

2. Defendants Deprive Suicidal and Self-Harming Prisoners of Basic Mental Health Care

82. Defendants have a policy and practice of housing prisoners with serious mental health needs in unsafe conditions that heighten their risk of suicide. In FY 2011, there were 13 suicides in ADC prisons, out of a population that averaged 34,000 during that time. That is a rate of 38 suicides per 100,000 prisoners per year, more than double the national average suicide rate in state prisons of 16.67 per 100,000. Three prisoners committed suicide in one week in late January 2012, including a 19-year-old woman.

83. One factor responsible for such a high suicide rate is Defendants’ policy and practice of maintaining suicide watch facilities that offer no meaningful treatment. Usually the only people who interact with prisoners on suicide watch are correctional officers who check on them periodically, medication assistants who dispense pills, or psychology assistants who talk to them through the front of their cell. Plaintiff Swartz did not receive psychotherapy for more than two months in the summer of 2011 while on suicide watch at the Lewis facility. After he swallowed glass and was taken to an outside hospital, the hospital psychiatrist recommended that he be taken to an inpatient mental health unit. These units are in the Phoenix complex. Instead, Mr. Swartz remained at Lewis where he continued to harm himself. He finally was moved to the Phoenix inpatient unit almost three months after the hospital psychiatrist had made that recommendation, but after a short period of time he was again returned to Lewis. Plaintiff Thomas did not see a psychiatrist for 11 months despite being placed on suicide watch multiple times.

84. Defendants also have a policy and practice of holding suicidal and mentally ill prisoners in conditions that violate all notions of minimally adequate mental health care and basic human dignity, and are not compatible with civilized standards of humanity and decency. Suicide watch cells are often filthy, with walls and food slots smeared with other prisoners’ blood and feces, reeking of human waste. Mental health staff show a lackof professionalism and little compassion for prisoners enduring these conditions: for example, prisoners in suicide cells are taunted for being in “the feces cells.” When Plaintiff Swartz complained to a LPN about the unhygienic conditions of the suicide cell at Lewis, the LPN described him in the mental health notes from the encounter as “bitching about cleanliness – germs and disease.”

85. Defendants have a policy and practice of keeping suicide watch cells at very cold temperatures. Prisoners are stripped of all clothing and given only a stiff suicide smock and a thin blanket, making the extreme cold even harder to tolerate. Plaintiffs Rodriguez and Verduzco report that the suicide smock used in Perryville barely comes to the top of female prisoners’ thighs, so both their legs and arms are exposed to cold air. Many prisoners are also deprived of mattresses and as a result must sleep on bare steel bed frames, or on the floor made filthy with the bodily fluids of prior inhabitants. Plaintiff Brislan spent several weeks in a frigid suicide cell with no mattress.

86. Defendants have a policy and practice of exposing prisoners on suicide watch to gratuitously harsh, degrading, and damaging conditions of confinement. Prisoners are given only two cold meals a day, and are denied the opportunity to go outside, brush their teeth, or take showers. The only monitoring prisoners receive in suicide watch is when correctional officers force them awake every ten to 30 minutes, around the clock, ostensibly to check on their safety. In some suicide cells, bright lights are left on 24 hours a day. The resulting inability to sleep aggravates the prisoners’ psychological distress.

87. Mentally ill prisoners on suicide watch complain of correctional staff behavior that interferes with any therapeutic effect of being on suicide watch, including harassment, insults and taunts, and the excessive and practically sporting use of pepper spray. Prisoners at the Perryville suicide watch units, including Plaintiff Verduzco, have jerked awake when awoken by staff on the “safety checks,” and are pepper sprayed for allegedly attempting to assault the officers. Guards in the Perryville suicide watch units also frequently pepper spray female prisoners in their eyes and throats when they are delusional or hallucinating. Plaintiffs Rodriguez and Verduzco have asthma and rely upon inhalers, and they have had asthma attacks from the regular use of pepper spray in the women’s suicide watch unit. On multiple occasions after she was pepper sprayed in the eyes, nose, and mouth, Ms. Verduzco was dragged to a shower, stripped naked, and sprayed with extremely cold water to rinse away the pepper spray; she was then left naked to wait for a new vest and blanket. A prisoner in the Florence prison’s suicide watch unit reports that while there he was handed razor blades to swallow by other prisoners, and told “just die right away.” He started to swallow the blades, and security staff pepper sprayed him while he coughed up blood, and did not provide other emergency response.

88. Defendants’ policy and practice of holding suicidal prisoners in excessively harsh conditions does not prevent but rather promotes self-injurious behavior. Plaintiff Brislan has cut himself numerous times with razors and pieces of metal while on suicide watch at multiple prisons, including Tucson, Lewis, and Eyman’s SMU 1 and Browning units. At the Tucson prison, staff put him on suicide watch in a cell with broken glass on the floor which he used to cut himself. During another stay in suicide watch, Mr. Brislan was given a razor blade that he used to deeply lacerate both of his thighs. While on suicide watch in the Lewis prison during the summer of 2011, Plaintiff Swartz, on separate occasions, swallowed multiple foreign objects, including two large staples, plastic wrap, a piece of glass, a lead-head concrete nail, a spork, two pens, sharpened paper clips, a metal spring, a steel bolt, and two copper wires. As with Plaintiff Brislan, Mr. Swartz’s repeated suicidal gestures and ability to access dangerous objects while on suicide watch confirms that he was not being properly monitored and that any mental health treatment he might have been receiving was inadequate.

89. Defendants also have a policy and practice of improperly using the suicide watch cells to punish prisoners for alleged disciplinary infractions. An Eyman prisoner who went on a hunger strike to protest prison policies, but did not display signs of mental illness or distress, was put in a suicide watch cell for several weeks and was told by a mental health provider, “If you weren’t on this hunger strike, you wouldn’t have to live in the feces cell.”

This is my friend, Davon.

This is a recent letter from my friend, Davon Acklin. He doesn't mention the campaign going on for him out here, but I know he's worried about the other guys there who are sicker than him; as Julie said at one point, this is about them, too.

We need to push on the clemency process so people don't have to die in prison who weren't sentenced to do so. We need more transparency and public dialogue about the treatment of hepatitis C in both the community and our human warehouses (prisons, schools, shelters, hospitals...). We need to make sure that health care is adequate in the prisons. And we need to bring home the sick and dying.




Anyway, this is the good soul I know Davon to be, describing the daily challenges of getting by in prison, worrying about how I was doing in the wake of a recent assault, and talking about having to always look tough in there to keep himself safe. He talks about his sister growing up, and what a terror he was at her age, and how he needs to be a good influence on his little sister, who looks up to him.

Here's a picture of Davon looking tough in his prison orange. He does a good job of it when he has to, but he's a real sweetie. That's why I'm posting this letter, which you can barely make out but you should get the gist of - he was worried about how I'd been getting along, and really touched that I brought his dad, Greg, down for a visit. He can't wait to see his sister and Mom, Not a mention of being sick; I think in a way he's a little uncomfortable with all this attention.

Despite his discomfort with being a poster child for prisoners with Hep C, Davon gave us his blessings to use our own discretion in all this organizing and activism around him because he thinks that by advocating for him his mom will end up helping the other guys he sees there. That's precisely what she's hoping to do.

Given the stigma associated with infectious diseases like HIV and Hepatitis (not to mention a psychiatric disability and a record as a violent criminal) I think that's a pretty courageous position for a young prisoner to take. Davon will be forever Googled back to these pages, with his mom and her friends laying out this crisis in his life for the world to see and judge - something he's willing to risk if doing so will help others.

Now, does that sound like a dangerous criminal? We call that 'lifting as we climb'. That's how we make sure we don't leave anyone behind in this revolution...

The ADC can cause Davon all sorts of grief if they want to, of course, but I don't think they'll stoop to that - it isn't necessary or productive, and it'll just set Julie off on them again. She's trying to focus on building membership in his facebook cause and getting his petition signed for the AZ Board of Executive Clemency right now, and if she's successful then she'll be out of the ADC's hair soon enough. It would be in their best interests to make every effort to help her succeed, not get in her way.

So, hit those links up there for us, and join and sign and spread the word. It's important to show that Davon has a community to come home to that will embrace him and help him keep both his liberty and his sanity. That community is global, now - Davon has friends he hasn't met yet as far away as the Netherlands. His community of correspondents are especially important for the Clemency Board to get personal letters from (in addition to signing the petition), no matter where you may be in the world.

Please help us free Davon.

Thanks for your time.

- Peggy Plews

Making the case: Extraordinary and Compelling.

Ethical and legal issues regarding federal compassionate release. Interesting article - worth reading the rest.

-------------------

EXTRAORDINARY AND COMPELLING:
A RE-EXAMINATION OF THE JUSTIFICATIONS FOR
COMPASSIONATE RELEASE
WILLIAM W. BERRY III*
Maryland Law Review
17 June 2009


I. INTRODUCTION
“Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don’t believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.”—Judge Learned Hand1

Conflicting interests lie at the heart of the sentencing process. Not limited to the obvious competing interests of the state and the offender, the state’s broader punishment interests can often conflict.

The state’s interest in giving an offender his just deserts, for instance, competes with its interests in deterring others from committing the same crime, incapacitating the offender to protect society, and rehabilitating the offender.2 The battle for supremacy between such interests often occurs when a judge considers whether certain evidence is grounds for mitigating a sentence.3

Although parole was abolished with the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984,4 the potential for mitigating a federal sentence does not end with the sentencing decision of the federal trial judge. Rule 35(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure authorizes the court, upon motion by the government, to reduce the sentence to reflect substantial assistance provided to the government by the defendant after the sentence became final.5 In addition, where the United States Sentencing Commission has subsequently reduced the guideline range used to sentence the defendant, the court may reduce the sentence upon a motion by the defendant or the Director of the Bureau of Prisons.6

Federal law, unbeknownst to many, includes another stipulation that authorizes the immediate release of federal prisoners. This safety valve provision demands that the Director move on behalf of the prisoner to secure the prisoner’s compassionate release.7 Not a veiled version of parole, this compassionate release provision is only to be used in circumstances deemed “extraordinary and compelling.”8 The Bureau of Prisons has read this language very narrowly for many years, considering only terminally ill inmates as candidates for compassionate release.9 In November 2007, however, the Sentencing Commission modified its Commentary to the Sentencing Guidelines, defining for the first time criteria for determining circumstances that should be deemed “extraordinary and compelling.” Specifically, the Commission’s new Commentary provides that extraordinary and compelling circumstances can include: (1) terminal illness, (2) debilitating physical conditions that prevent inmate self-care, and (3) death or incapacitation of the only family member able to care for a minor child.10

In addition, the Commentary provides that compassionate release may be granted where, “[a]s determined by the Director of the Bureau of Prisons, there exists in the defendant’s case an extraordinary and compelling reason other than, or in combination with, the [three] reasons described [previously].”11

As explained below, the Bureau of Prisons has ignored, in many ways, the broader statutory language as well as its own regulations in its decision to limit the application of “compassionate release” to prisoners who are terminally ill. By limiting the use of the safety valve to cases of “medical parole,” the Bureau eschews the more difficult categories of prisoners who, for one of the reasons discussed below, may be considered for release given the facts of their particular situation. The Bureau of Prisons, in limiting its need to review compassionate release petitions to medical cases, thus abandons the flexibility to consider truly compelling cases, perhaps in part for a lack of method by which to separate the meritorious cases from the many that do not rise to the level of extraordinary and compelling.

This Article will consider the theoretical justifications for compassionate release in an attempt to develop a framework to evaluate what circumstances rise to the level of “extraordinary and compelling.”

First, the Article will argue that the state’s purposes for punishment, whether retributive or utilitarian, do not by themselves justify the compassionate release of inmates. As a result, this Article will propose that the basis for compassionate release should lie in the broader interests of the state. Thus, the Article will argue that the non-penal interests of the state (in light of the “extraordinary and compelling” factual circumstance) must clearly outweigh the state’s penological interest in the inmate serving the entire sentence before compassionate release
may be justified.

Part II of this Article will explain the significance of the compassionate release provision in light of the large number of inmates in federal prison, and will provide a vignette of one prisoner’s alleged “extraordinary and compelling” circumstance that was rejected by the Bureau of Prisons Director.

Part III will outline the statutory and administrative landscape surrounding the compassionate release provision and describe the Sentencing Commission’s adoption of the guideline commentary.

Part IV of the Article will argue that the traditional purposes of punishment—just deserts, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation—cannot alone serve as the basis for awarding compassionate release to prisoners. Part V will argue that the basis for compassionate release should lie in the broader, non-penal interests of the state, and that circumstances should be considered extraordinary and compelling only when such interests greatly outweigh the state’s penological interests as applied to the prisoner at issue…

Finish article at: http://www.law.umaryland.edu/academics/journals/mdlr/print/articles/68_4-404.pdf

Saving Davon Acklin: How to Help

Here's the official campaign strategy, folks. It should take 10-20 minutes of your time, tops.

------------------reprinted from hopeworkscommunity------------------------

On Helping Davon Acklin

Many of you read the original post on Davon Acklin. If you would like to help him there are several things you can do.

1. Let as many people know about his case if possible. If you are from Arizona or know people in Arizona in particular let them know.
2. Contact the governor directly and ask that he be considered for compassionate release. There is no reason or nothing to be gained by him staying in prison. In your contact explain the facts as you know them. Her phone number is 1-(800) 253-0883. It will only take a couple of minutes. Also email the governors office. The website is http://azgovernor.gov/. Just follow directions on the site to make the email. And then and this is so important- do it again next week. And again the week after that. Persistence pays. It will only take a few minutes.
3. Contact at least 5 other people about Davon. Tell them about the case. Tell them what you are doing to help and ask them to do the same thing. Ask each of them to also contact 5 other people and ask each of those 5 to do the same thing. If we do this and carry through soon the Governors office will be receiving thousands of contacts asking for Davon’s release. It makes a difference.
4. If you live in Arizona write a letter to the editor of your paper about Davon. If you are outside the state write one to a paper in one of the major cities like Tuscon.
5. The contact information on Davon is in the previous post (see below). Contact him directly and let him know you care. This might be the most important thing.
6. There is a cause on Facebook called Free Davon Acklin (http://www.causes.com/causes/498647?). If you are on Facebook please join. Be part of a unified and committed effort to help Davon.

Please act now. What you do as an individual makes a difference.