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PHOENIX (AP) \u2014 Gov. Katie Hobbs on Wednesday announced the creation of a commission to study problems in Arizona\u2019s prisons, including staffing levels and the health care offered to those behind bars.<\/p>\n
The creation of the commission by Hobbs, Arizona\u2019s first Democratic governor since 2009, came several days after she ordered a separate r\u00a0eview of the state\u2019s death penalty protocols.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot deny there is an urgent need to provide transparency and accountability in Arizona corrections system,\u201d Hobbs said.<\/p>\n
The commission will examine inmate access to food, medicine and sanitary products; whether prison staffing levels are adequate; conditions of the prisons, including security measures and whether they are crowded; rehabilitation and education programs for prisoners; and access to medical and mental health care and drug treatment programs.<\/p>\n
David Fathi, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represents Arizona prisoners who challenged the quality of health care<\/a> behind bars, applauded the establishment of the commission.<\/p>\n READ MORE:<\/strong> From student debt to Bono, here are 6 updates on 2022 NewsHour stories<\/a><\/p>\n He said previous governors took a hands-off approach to prisons. \u201cThey were disengaged and uninvolved,\u201d Fathi said. \u201cGov. Hobbs seems to be charting a very different course.\u201d<\/p>\n Last summer, a federal judge concluded Arizona\u00a0had violated the rights of incarcerated people\u00a0in state-run prisons by providing them with inadequate health care \u2014 and that the state\u2019s failures had led to preventable deaths.<\/p>\n Before the trial in that case, U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver threw out a settlement because the state wasn\u2019t following through on many of the improvements to prisoner care it had promised to make. She concluded that $2.5 million in contempt of court fines against the state didn\u2019t motivate it to comply with the settlement.<\/p>\n In late 2021, then-Corrections Director David Shinn testified that prisoners often have greater access to health services than people who aren\u2019t locked up, leading Silver to later say that the claim was \u201ccompletely detached from reality.\u201d<\/p>\n The commission\u2019s members will include four state lawmakers, two people who previously served time in Arizona prisons, a physician, a mental health professional and a family member of someone who served at least three years in Arizona prisons.<\/p>\n Last week, Hobbs ordered a review of Arizona\u2019s execution protocols<\/a>, leading Kris Mayes, the state\u2019s new Democratic attorney general, to hold off on seeking court orders to execute prisoners until the examination is completed.<\/p>\n The review was announced just days after the governor appointed Ryan Thornell, a prison official in Maine, as Arizona\u2019s new corrections director.<\/p>\n The review will examine, among other things, the state\u2019s procurement process for lethal injection drugs and lethal gas, execution procedures, the access of news organizations to executions and the training of staff to carry out executions.<\/p>\n Arizona currently has 110 prisoners on death row. The state carried out three executions last year after a nearly eight-year hiatus brought on by criticism that a\u00a02014 execution was botched\u00a0and because of difficulties obtaining lethal injection drugs.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n PHOENIX (AP) \u2014 Gov. Katie Hobbs on Wednesday announced the creation of a commission to study problems in Arizona\u2019s prisons, including staffing levels and the health care offered to those behind bars. The creation of the commission by Hobbs, Arizona\u2019s first Democratic governor since 2009, came several days after she ordered a separate r\u00a0eview of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46797,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[161],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46796"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandon.ddtest.info\/multisite-test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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