Federal judges have twice held the Department in contempt, fining the agency millions of dollars. Arizona agreed to settle the case in 2014 and it was certified in 2015.īut since that time, the federal courts overseeing the settlement have found the state was not living up to the terms of the settlement agreement. Ryan, after named plaintiff Victor Parsons and then-director Charles Ryan. The class action lawsuit was then named Parsons v. In 2012, the federal court recognized a group of people in Arizona prisons who claimed their Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment were being violated. “I think what it shows is that Centurion’s leadership recognized that the current staffing model that the state has dictated to them is not adequate to provide basic health care,” Kendrick said. Instead, what happened over the next year and half is that many, many people died preventable deaths because of the failure to provide basic medical care and mental health care.” Prison officials were told in Jan 2020 that they needed to increase health care staff by 15 percent and nothing happened. “This document is the epitome of deliberate indifference. “The legal analysis for this type of case is something called deliberate indifference,” Kendrick said. The additional staff included administrators, nursing directors, regional directors, records clerks, nurses, physicians, and special “man down” teams dedicated to emergencies.ĪCLU National Prison Project Deputy Director Corene Kendrick, representing the prisoners in the lawsuit, called the staffing proposal a “damning admission.” In an email sent in January of 2020 to an administrator at the Arizona Department of Corrections health services contract monitoring bureau, Dolan outlined what he referred to as a staffing “wish list.”Īccording to an attorney for the Department, Dolan was responding to a request from DOC “to review the staffing matrix and submit a staffing proposal without budget constraints.”ĭolan’s staffing proposal called for 161.5 additional positions than were in the 2019 Centurion contract. We look at the overall facility and then build the staffing on the data.”ĭolan said Centurion used that information to submit a proposal to the Department to amend the staffing matrix. We look at man-down encounters per facility. “We look at provider visits, nurse lines, number of HNRs, med passes, number of meds that patients are on. “We look at all of the statistics that we collect each month,” Dolan said. Shinn lawsuit, which was still under a settlement agreement at the time. He said the company worked with the 10 state-run prison sites to identify what additional positions they needed in order to provide services that lived up to the performance measures agreed to in the Jensen v. But soon after it took over in July of 2019, Dolan said Centurion did its own independent evaluation to determine if that number was sufficient.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |