Prisons chief amends court testimony
Jimmy Jenkins is a senior field correspondent for KJZZ. This story is published as part of a collaboration between KJZZ and The Arizona Republic.
Arizona Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan has filed an affidavit saying he had “mistakenly testified” this week in federal court about incentive payments made to prison health care provider Corizon Health.
Ryan now says all incentive money paid to Corizon “came entirely from funds appropriated for health care.”
Ryan also said in the affidavit that he mistakenly testified about Corizon’s payment of attorney fees in the Parsons
v. Ryan prison health care settlement. Ryan now says “Corizon pays only that percentage of outside counsel’s monthly statements that are attributed to substantial non compliance litigation under the stipulation, and does not pay any percentage of the $250,000 annual attorneys’ fees for plaintiff ’s counsel.”
Hearings regarding potential sanctions against the state for poor health care conditions in Arizona prisons continued in federal court on Monday and Tuesday.
For years, Arizona’s private health care contractor, Corizon Health, has been failing to meet benchmarks agreed to in the Parsons vs. Ryan prison health-care settlement, which is called the “stipulation.”
In October, Magistrate Judge David Duncan wrote in an order: “Because of pervasive and intractable failures to comply with the Stipulation, the Court is considering the exercise of its civil contempt authority.”
But as early as last June, the judge had been warning the state: Fines were on the horizon.
There are more than 100 benchmarks in the stipulation. In his October order, Duncan specified 11 performance measures the state had repeatedly failed to meet. Duncan ordered the state to keep track of each failure of those 11 measures across all 10 state-run prisons for December, saying those failures would each be subject to $5,000 fines.
At the hearings on Monday and Tuesday, lawyers for the inmates and the state called witnesses to provide background for the judge as he weighs the possibility of levying millions of dollars in fines for the failure to meet the settlement agreement
Attorneys for the state called Ryan and Assistant Director Richard Pratt to testify to their efforts at compliance with the stipulation. Both were critical of their provider, Corizon Health.