Brewer's sick, dying, and innocent prisoners: Letter to the Governor.

My note to the Governor today via her website; posting it here, too, just to make sure it isn't lost:

First Name: * Margaret J
Last Name: * Plews
Phone: 480-580-6807
Email: * arizonaprisonwatch@gmail.com
Street: PO Box 20494
City: Phoenix
County: Maricopa
State: AZ
Zip: * 85036
Subject: legal/law *
Topic: Sick, dying, and innocent prisoners, and the Board of Executive Clemency

My friends and I at Arizona Prison Watch are gravely concerned about the number of state prisoners who are dying inside from medical neglect, from homicide, and from their own hand due to the despair of mental illness and incarceration - as well as those succumbing to terminal illness while awaiting compassionate release petitions which we suspect she has no intention of approving, just as Janet didn't. We find that totally unacceptable.

We are particularly concerned right now about the fates of prisoners William Macumber and Davon Acklin. The Board of Executive Clemency recommended Macumber for immediate release last year because they believed him to be innocent: the governor denied his petition, giving no reason. This is incomprehensible, and we'll be initiating a public campaign for his freedom if the governor doesn't take responsibility for acting on the Board of Clemency's recommendations in his case.

You may already be quite familiar with Davon Acklin's mom Julie, who has been trying to save her son's life - also going through the Board of Executive Clemency now. He's sick from hepatitis C and the ADC is refusing to treat him, we believe largely because of his serious mental illness, which appears to be the standard MO. This despite the stipulations of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which we intend to file a complaint about if appropriate care isn't provided to that child, or if he isn't sent home so his mother can get it for him.

We will also be seeking a new CRIPA investigation into the ADC - and possibly the AZDJC - if the other concerns we've raised aren't promptly addressed, and prisoners continue to die at present rates from neglect, abuse, and despair. The one poor child at Adobe Mountain appears to have been bullied to death; there's no excuse for that. Director Branham has, however, been quite gracious in trying to work with us given the limitations of confidentiality laws, so he may have bought some time. The ADC is out of time, however. As far as we're concerned, all of Chuck Ryan's prisoners are her prisoners too, and she bears a great deal of responsibility for their welfare. Criminalized or not, they are still real human beings with loved ones, hopes, and dreams. The state has a duty to protect them while they are in your care.

I do expect a response on these matters by Friday afternoon - our campaign to address them with the community and media will otherwise begin first thing Monday morning. We hear from these families and prisoners all the time - often we receive copies of letters sent to Governor Brewer pleading for assistance. We'll have them crying on the news every night and we'll be coming to her campaign events until the governor either steps in and steps up, or gets voted out. We can be extremely creative about these kinds of things, as can our friends - thousands of whom are already pretty outraged by SB 1070.

I will be looking forward to a reply from your office.

Thank you.


Margaret J Plews,
Arizona Prison Watch
Arizona Juvenile Prison Watch
Hard Time Alliance (Hep C in AZ Prisons)

Children in prison and broken hearts.

This is a clip from a press release I stumbled across today. CompuMed does tele-cardiology, since the ADC probably doesn't have in-house cardiologists (I'm not all that sure they have regular doctors on site in the prisons, either). It's nothing new and exciting - just a renewal of an existing contract. The ADC is moving increasingly to tele-medicine for other specialist consultations; I believe most jails and prisons are. It'll save them a whole bunch of money in terms of transporting and guarding prisoners when they have to see outside specialists, so look for more things like this in the next couple of weeks as the correctional health care contracts are awarded.

This does leave me wondering if that's the only kind of cardiology consultation prisoners get now, though - an expert reading their ECG reports from afar. The guys in particular are dropping dead of "natural causes" pretty young it seems (though prison is infamous for shortening life spans). In fact, a year ago today a 16-year old boy sentenced as an adult and put in the minors unit at ASPC-Tucson died from heart failure. The whole story of how he got put into prison is pretty tragic, but important for people to know about; I hope they do someday

Edgar's family still doesn't know exactly why he died - I recall speculation at the time that it was his heart. I wouldn't be surprised if the kid had complained of symptoms in the months or weeks or days leading up to his death that a cardiologist - or even a regular physician - would have recognized if he had the chance to see one. Prisoners who have vague complaints like fatigue, nausea, numbness in an arm, etc. are generally regarded as malingerers just trying to duck work duty for the day or something. And who would think that a 16-year old was going to have sudden heart failure? It may well have been an undetectable and untreatable defect even if he had seen a stellar cardiologist.

The thing is that he shouldn't have been in prison in the first place, but I'm not sure I can tell the whole story right now - the link above takes to you a place before I spoke with people from his school. Largely because of situations like his, I have huge problems with charging, sentencing, and treating children as adults. People are still trying to raise the drinking age to 21 because kids just don't have good judgment all the time, and yet we throw them into adult courts and jails and prisons in a heartbeat. Hooray for the prosecution and judge, protecting us from children like him, making the world safer for - well, not for vulnerable children like him, clearly...

A year later and this young boy's life and death still make me weep. I can only imagine how broken the hearts of those who knew and loved him must still be, especially today. It's not your fault what happened to your brother, your son, or your student. We are an exceptionally brutal bunch, Americans - and Arizona is both racist and fascist. Any other kid - white ones, that is - would have been put through juvenile court, as he should have been. It's not your fault. It's ours. His biggest crime was being a young Latino male reaching for the Dream...he's someone we should have been supporting and celebrating, not incarcerating. I'm so sorry we didn't wake up and step up sooner - it may still take years to really change anything, though...

Anyway, at least CompuMed doesn't have a rap sheet yet with my friends who track the private prison contractors. They appear to have only been around a few years, though. In any event, I hope they are enormously successful in delivering quality care and never end up on the PCWG's website.

Keep your eyes and ears open for news of the other health care and prison operation contracts - they're supposed to be deciding on them any day, so give me a heads up if you find something out before I do...(bookmark that rap sheet page - we'll be needing it for the rest of them).

Again this is not a news article, it's a press release. This kind of thing just isn't news to most people:

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CompuMed Contracts Extended with Oklahoma and Arizona Corrections

Telemedicine Provides Low Cost Alternatives to Costly In-House Prison Services

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CompuMed, Inc. (OTCBB: CMPD) (http://www.compumed.net), a medical informatics and telemedicine services company, has secured extended contracts to provide its signature CardioGram™ electrocardiogram (ECG) remote interpretation systems and over-read services for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (OKDOC) and Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) at selected facilities throughout both states. The OKDOC rents 21 CardioGram systems, and the ADC owns 45 CardioGram systems...

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Don't bother reading more of that; it's all PR. I guess I just needed it to ease into what was really on my mind tonight...Edgar and his family, and all the other broken hearts out there because we put children like him in prison.

Prison + Children = Suicide

I'm sorry I didn't get this out when it first happened. I hope this kid's sentencing judge heard about his suicide, and thinks twice about how he sentences children in adult court. We have to think of better ways to work with these kids - and sooner.

As a survivor of sexual assault myself, even I don't believe that prison is the answer, especially for kids. It just traumatizes and twists people more deeply, and either makes them more mean or more self-destructive: in either case, there's a high recidivism rate pointing to the fact that prison fails most prisoners. A few rare souls may emerge "better" people, not because of the prison so much, though, as because of who they already were going in. My bet is that prison destroys more lives than it helps to rebuild...lives like Jerry Kulp's.

Our condolences to Jerry's family and friends.

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Teenage state prison inmate dies in Tucson

Associated Press

Posted on May 12, 2010 at 6:19 PM

Updated Thursday, May 13 at 9:31 AM

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Authorities say a state prison inmate has died at a Tucson hospital less than a week after an apparent suicide attempt.

Arizona Department of Corrections officials say 17-year-old Jerry Kulp died Tuesday at University Medical Center after being taken off life support. They say Kulp's family authorized the withdrawal of care.

Kulp was transported to the hospital on May 5, just two days after he entered the prison system.

DOC officials say Kulp was sentenced out of Maricopa County and was serving 10 years for sexual assault. He was at the minors unit of the state prison complex in Tucson.

May 2010 at Adobe Mountain: PHX New Times

Sorry folks: this is from almost two weeks ago. I've been caught up in my own personal and family crises since the night of the 19th; unless someone was covering this for me, we didn't post this from the New Times - Amy Silverman does pretty good work. 

I'll look for follow-up, and post updated info on the ADJC as soon as I can. I probably won't come in for a landing myself until sometime next week. Once I'm settled, I'll be more on top of things again.

 Folks particularly interested in Juvenile Corrections should check out Juvenile Prison Watch - it's new, can use some more research and development; we'd love to have a few family members work collectively on maintaining it. Contact myself or the International Prison Watch staff listed on their websites for more info.

- Peg

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Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections Death Was Suicide, Inside Sources Say

By Amy Silverman,

Wednesday, May. 26 2010 @ 12:19PM

Staff at Adobe Mountain School in Phoenix are reporting that the death of a youth yesterday was a suicide.


And they wonder if the incident is tied to the "hush, hush" suicide earlier this month of a corrections officer from the same facility.


The boy was found in his cell at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections' Adobe Mountain at 6:30 am May 25, according to Laura Dillingham, spokeswoman for the department.



She would not reveal any other details. Next of kin has not been contacted yet, she said, adding that an investigation is under way by the Department of Public Safety, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office and the Department of Juvenile Corrections.

Dillingham refused to respond to questions regarding whether the incident was possibly a suicide.

Two current employees of Adobe Mountain and one former employee of ADJC have contacted New Times to say the boy likely took his own life.

According to the employees, one of whom works on the unit Crossroads, where the boy was living at the time, the boy was found with a plastic bag tied over his head and a blanket over that. He was reportedly dead for quite some time when the morning shift staff found him.

Dillingham said department policy calls for welfare checks every 15 minutes through the night, and said the checks were, in fact, done in this situation. She said the childrens' faces cannot be kept covered, raising questions about whether the checks were done correctly.

She also said that Adobe Mountain School is fully staffed. Employees strongly disagreed.
Until very recently, the employees said, the boy had been placed at Triumph, the mental-health unit at Adobe Mountain, where he'd been for at least a year. The Crossroads employee said the boy was moved to Crossroads -- Adobe's unit reserved for violent kids -- after he was involved in an assault.

The employee said it was well known that the boy had "suicidal ideations" and added that the boy reportedly told the school superintendent recently that he wanted to be moved from Crossroads and would "do something" if he was not. The employee said that Crossroads staff wasn't informed of that conversation until after the boy had died.

Within the last several days, a youth corrections officer at Adobe Mountain took his own life.

Dillingham confirmed this but refused to release details. She said the staff and kids have been receiving counseling since the officer's suicide, but employees said the event has been kept "hush, hush" and there has been no counseling, though word has gotten out. They also say that ADJC director Michael Branham came to the facility and told them not to fly the flags at half-staff, saying the man did not die honorably.

It is unknown whether that suicide led to the possible suicide yesterday, but experts stress the importance of providing immediate counseling in such situations. ADJC's statements emphasize the counseling they are providing in the wake of yesterday's youth death. The statements do not mention the older man's death.

In 2002 and 2003, there were three suicides at Adobe Mountain School. The suicides, along with an investigative series by Phoenix New Times, led to a federal investigation into conditions at the agency's facilities, including Adobe Mountain. Last year, New Times published a story about continuing problems -- including mental health issues -- at ADJC.

Contact info: AZ Adobe Mountain School

the only real news from another story by fox news:
Adobe Mountain School
2800 W. Pinnacle Peak Road
Phoenix, Arizona 85085
www.juvenile.state.az.us
 
school's hotline: 623-869-9050 with concerns if you have a family member there.