Arizona Corrections director claims prisoners have better access to health care than he does

Despite years of failing to live up to court ordered standards, repeated court sanctions totaling millions of dollars, and weeks of testimony from prisoners to the contrary, Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn told a federal court Tuesday he believes the prison health care system provides greater access to care than services that are available to people in the community.

“They often have greater access to care than I do as a private citizen,” he said of the people in Arizona state prisons.

Shinn testified in federal court in downtown Phoenix Tuesday morning in a landmark prison health care trial to defend accusations of unconstitutional conditions in the state facilities he oversees.

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. The class action lawsuit was then named Parsons v. Ryan, after named plaintiff Victor Parsons and then-director Charles Ryan. Arizona agreed to settle the case in 2014 and it was certified in 2015. 

But since that time, the federal courts overseeing the settlement have found the state was not living up to the terms of the settlement agreement. Federal judges have twice held the Department in contempt, fining the agency millions of dollars. The case has outlasted judges, named plaintiffs, and prison administrators. In 2021, it is now known as Jensen v. Shinn.

In July, Judge Roslyn Silver took the drastic measure of rescinding the settlement and ordering a bench trial, which began on November 1st.

Director Shinn testified as a witness for the defendants on the 10th day of the trial, which is expected to continue the rest of the week and then will be continued on December 7th. 

He frequently struggled to provide direct answers on cross examination, prompting Judge Silver’s intervention. “I’m not sure I heard an answer there,” Silver said in response to several of his explanations. “That calls for a yes or no.”

Shinn described corrections as a “challenging business.” He was appointed Director by Governor Doug Ducey in 2019 after the retirement of former director Charles Ryan, who left the job shortly after a corrections officer leaked videos that exposed a failing security system at the Lewis prison.

Shinn testified running the Arizona prison system was “by far one of the most challenging assignments I have ever had” in a professional career that began as a Corrections Officer in 1991. But Shinn said he had a “tremendous willingness to achieve success and make the lives of the men and women in our custody better.”

Shinn: Centurion has done 'an extraordinary job'

When asked what he had done to increase the quality of health care in the prisons, Shinn pointed to the addition of staff to the state’s health care monitoring bureau, which oversees the state’s contract with Centurion of Arizona.

Despite their history of performance failures in Arizona, Shinn spoke glowingly of Centurion, saying they had done “an extraordinary job” in general, and specifically during the pandemic.

Of Centurion, Shinn said “There is virtually nothing we will not do to help them succeed.” But when asked how the Director was holding the company accountable to live up to its contractual obligations, he had no answers.

Under cross examination, Shinn admitted that shortages of corrections officers and health care staff were impacting the delivery of care, but he said he was focused on total systemic improvements, instead of individual facilities. 

“There’s a myth that we need to have x amount of employees at certain locations,” Shinn said of the state prison complexes. “There are desirable and undesirable locations. They are in places you may not want to raise a family. And we are not going to try to force people into locations where it’s totally unnecessary.”

Shinn said the Department was working with Centurion to improve recruitment and utilizing telehealth options to serve prison populations in locations away from the state’s major metropolitan areas. But he acknowledged that wifi connectivity problems in the prisons might be a barrier for the expansion of telehealth services.

“From a technological perspective, we are somewhat behind the curve in a number of areas,” he said.

He pointed to millions of dollars in additional funding the Department has paid to Centurion, on top of the state’s $216 million annual contract, to incentivize more health care staff recruitment.

While Shinn said overall health care staffing was a priority, he acknowledged that Centurion had never achieved full staffing as outlined in its contract.

Shinn admitted that health care costs for the Department had nearly doubled since the privatization of services more than a decade ago, while the prison population has declined. He said the state currently spends approximately $7,700 per prisoner, per year on health care.

The corrections director described the difficulties of providing prison health care as “almost a battlefield health care method — it’s under stress and challenging conditions.”

COVID-19 response in Arizona prisons

Shinn touted the COVID mitigation efforts in the prisons, saying every prisoner had been tested twice, and the overall vaccination rate was 80%.

Incarcerated people have testified that they have been seriously harmed by delays in medical diagnoses and treatment in the prisons. Prisoners with serious mental illness told the court that prison staff encouraged them to commit acts of self-harm, and they said they have been denied much needed programming due to staffing shortages.

Videos shown by the plaintiffs revealed prison staff using pepper spray and pepper ball guns on prisoners who were committing acts of self-harm.

Shinn has rarely made public appearances, and he took steps early in his administration to curtail press access to the prisons and incarcerated people. 

Shinn and Ducey have been criticized for their response to the pandemic. Ducey did not use any executive powers to release people from Arizona prisons during the worst of COVID-19, as the virus ravaged the state’s prison population. And Shinn has come under fire from incarcerated people, their families, and activist groups for the conditions in the prisons during the pandemic.

Prisoners and corrections staff have maintained they have not had access to enough cleaning supplies or PPE to mitigate the spread of the disease.

Director Shinn said Centurion’s management of the pandemic response had produced “exceptional results,” citing a 99% recover rate among infected prisoners.

In April of 2020, Shinn told a state legislator that because there still were no confirmed cases among prisoners at the time, he thought Arizona prisons are some of the safest places to be. 

Since that time more than 12,000 people in state prisons have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 62 have died from the virus. More than 3,000 DOC staff have self-reported positive infections.

Shinn doubled down on that statement in court. When asked again if he believed being incarcerated in an Arizona prison was one of the safest places to be during the pandemic, he said “I believe it’s been proven and evidence based – yes.”

Have a news tip on Arizona prisons? Reach the reporter at jjenkins@arizonarepublic.com or at 812-243-5582. Follow him on Twitter @JimmyJenkins.

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