This is the only way to clean up our squalid prisons

Arizona prisons are in crisis — in the last couple of years alone, there have been stories of broken locks, undrinkable water, substandard medical care and now, an unchecked COVID-19 outbreak.

It’s almost unbelievable that there is no existing independent oversight for a state agency that costs $1.3 billion annually to taxpayers, employs thousands of Arizonans, protects public safety and holds the lives of 38,000 incarcerated people in its hands.

Thankfully, the legislature is poised to do something about it this session with Rep. Walt Blackman’s prison oversight bill.

Oversight isn’t sexy, but it creates transparency and accountability — two components of good government that are missing at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry (ADCRR).

The ADCRR is infamous for its murky communication. Families and lawmakers alike get silence, voicemails or endless run-around when they try to get information from the agency, even when the inquiry is about a life-or-death matter.

Last year, the department made it even harder for the media to speak with incarcerated people and prison staff. The agency’s director, David Shinn, virtually never holds press conferences and rarely updates the agency website, even as the COVID-19 pandemic rages, infecting thousands (including Shinn) and killing dozens.

Despite the omerta-like code the corrections department has employed, the truth has gotten out about conditions in Arizona’s prisons – and it’s an ugly truth. It’s truly impossible to encapsulate all of them in a space such as this, but here’s just some of the ways the Department of Corrections is failing at its job:

● Basic prison infrastructure is crumbling, making it difficult to find habitable places to house people in prison. After a water outage and a well switch last year, the water at the Douglas prison facility still smelled like diesel, caused diarrhea and burned people’s skin.

● A so-called “disturbance” at a Yuma facility was, in fact, a riot in which 37 people were injured, one person died and others were left handcuffed in the cold for hours.

● Gov. Doug Ducey is closing the Florence prison facility because it is too old and run-down to be repaired, and transferring its residents to the understaffed Eyman facility nearby. Understaffing is the reason Arizona will consider spending millions for yet another private prison. This perpetual understaffing creates a perfect storm for rape, physical assaults, neglect, riots, abuse – and even more lawsuits against the state.

● Prisoners are regularly served food not fit for human consumption. A new lawsuit over the failure to provide kosher meals to religiously observant Jewish prisoners is revealing that many people go hungry because food is inadequate or inedible. Going hungry in prison is fit for a Dickens novel, not 21stcentury Arizona.

● For years, the Department of Corrections has been mired in an expensive lawsuit, Parsons v. Ryan, over substandard health care in state prisons. The state will pay $1.4 million in fines because the department won’t comply with court orders. The federal government may eventually have to intervene to get medical care up to par in state prisons.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and what the corrections department needs is someone to come in and do a deep clean on a regular basis. Establishing an independent prison ombudsman, as Rep. Blackman envisions, will cost money, but it’s far cheaper than the status quo.

This idea isn’t new — Washington State, Ohio, New York, and New Jersey all have prison oversight bodies with the power to enter, inspect and monitor prisons on demand and investigate reoccurring prisoner complaints. Texas even has a commission just for oversight of its jails. These bodies publicly report their findings and recommend improvements.

Independent oversight requires a budget and some costs, but these states have learned that this prevention saves millions of dollars. The Arizona Department of Corrections has proven that it can’t police itself and keep the state out of court for its costly and preventable wrongs.

Independent prison oversight isn’t just merited in Arizona — it’s long overdue.