II: Records reveal allegations of Arizona prisoners suffering rampant mistreatment and neglect during COVID

In emails and letters sent to Arizona Department of Corrections officials via outside advocacy organizations between 2020 and early 2022, inmates and family members reported countless COVID failures and abuses against the state’s prisoners. Local organizations Middle Ground Prison Reform and Valley Interfaith Project passed on alarming complaints and concerns from the inmates and their family members, pleading then-Arizona prisons Director David Shinn with increasing urgency to alleviate these issues. 

In June 2020, Middle Ground Prison Reform emailed a letter to Shinn about the urgent need for masks, requesting that all prisoners be allowed to wear masks and to make at least two per person available, even offering to begin a campaign to secure donated masks to save taxpayer dollars. As of July 2020, it appears in the documents that PPE cost the corrections complex 50 cents per inmate, but the documents make clear that mask availability among the prison population was sparse. By July 15, 2020, at least 569 prisoners at 13 of Arizona’s 16 prison complexes had tested positive for COVID-19.

The following month, Valley Interfaith Project told Shinn to take more “aggressive action” by implementing protocols to protect inmates and their families, including partnering with the Arizona Department of Health Services to provide supportive isolation for prisoners who were being released while positive for COVID, or who were returning to homes with vulnerable family members.

In January 2021, Director of the Middle Ground Prison Reform Donna Hamm forwarded an email to Shinn and other officials detailing how conditions were deteriorating at the Kingman facilities. Inmates were fed spoiled milk and breakfast items with dates of expiry that passed over a year ago. Prisoners with allergies or dietary restrictions were told that special meals were not available, and had to eat the standard meals or forgo meals altogether. The day prior, Hamm sent Shinn and other officials a complaint about the circumstances at the Huachuca GEO Group facility in Kingman, where there was no attempt to cook or follow any menu at the facility, so the inmates often ate uncooked food for breakfast and dinner at their bunks. The inmate called it, “even beyond GEO’s normal low everyday standards.”

Hamm passed on notes from prisoners’ family members as well, including that one COVID-positive inmate was quarantined and not allowed to eat his own food, but was given “filthy rotten bug infested garbage” to eat. Others said that telephones were not disinfected between use, and inmates were still allowed to leave their units and speak to others who were not in quarantine. Another parent described how their son had to use a piece of a t-shirt as a mask, and was denied an actual mask “because he does not go outside the prison.”

One family member sent a complaint that a physician’s assistant in one of the facilities was actively blocking the inmates from seeing the doctor, while another described a particularly egregious situation where an inmate’s medications were not refilled, sending the inmate into a withdrawal and causing him to throw out his back while vomiting. She said that the last time she intervened for the inmate, the facility health administrator retaliated by sending the inmate for a “surprise epidural” knowing that the previous four they subjected him to had worsened his condition.

The records show that the Department of Corrections paid its contracted healthcare provider a “per inmate/per day” rate.

Middle Ground Prison Reform continued to relay complaints to Shinn in January 2022. An email on January 18, 2022 described a special needs unit for prisoners, where the inmates were receiving no service, medications or Covid testing, which the sender described as “intolerable.” The same day, an Arizona lawyer forwarded to Shinn a “disturbing” message, likely from an inmate’s mother, about a situation in which the prison did not have medication of any kind available while a certain inmate was in extreme pain and barred from seeing an oral surgeon for extractions due to the lockdown.

Another inmate wrote that same day about the lack of testing and officers’ dismissive conduct, another glaring theme in the documents: “[The doctor] states on record there’s around 60 positive covid cases here and not recorded due to not being tested[.] it is well over 100. There’s nothing being done about this… there’s no protocol nor safety measures for inmates yet [sic] alone the officers. It is obvious the officers spread covid and continue to do so every minute.” The complaint alleged that officers were using the same handcuffs for COVID-positive and -negative inmates without any disinfectant or sanitization in between, and other officers were still not wearing masks. The masks issued to prisoners were described as “cheap” and easily broken upon washing. Some inmates were said to have no hand soap, disinfectant, cleaning chemicals or “anything to protect [themselves from] the spread of covid.”

If not for organizations like Middle Ground Prison Reform and Valley Interfaith Project facilitating communication and transparency between the prisoners and the prison officials, the inmates may have lived under even worse conditions with fewer instances of open communication and support from those outside the facilities. While some prison workers remained just as frustrated and adamant as these advocacy groups that safety procedures be implemented, the same problems appeared to persist—and worsen—into 2022.

Summer Roberts contributed to this report.

Aerial photo by Prison Insight via a Creative Commons license.