How Bad is Prison Health Care? Depends on Who’s Watching
In late December, federal Magistrate Judge David Duncan waved an iPad in front of his Phoenix courtroom, enraged. He had just read a local news article suggesting that the Arizona Department of Corrections and its for-profit medical provider Corizon Health were gaming a system put in place to ensure adequate health care for the state’s prisoners. “There is no other way to read it,” he said. “It’s just a game to beat the judge and his monitoring program.”
Duncan has been overseeing a court case aimed at improving medical and mental health care in Arizona prisons. Parsons v. Ryan, which began in 2012, is one of several lawsuits across the country in which Corizon is accused of providing care so shoddy that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment: delayed
