Incidents Of Self-Harm Surging In Arizona Prisons
Download mp3 (1.88 MB)Hundreds of people in Arizona prisons are hurting themselves and trying to take their own lives.
New data from the Arizona Department of Corrections show inmates are harming themselves at an alarmingly increasing rate.
Numbers collected by ADC show a dramatic uptick in self-harm among inmates in the past year. Total incidents increased by almost 70 percent.
In fiscal year 2017, there were more than 80 incidents of inmates trying to hang themselves, and 138 incidents of inmates attempting to overdose on illegal drugs.
The number of incidents of inmates using blunt-force trauma — which can include inserting objects in the body and banging the head against a wall — has almost tripled in a single year.
The surge in self-harm reports comes as ADC is attempting to settle a lawsuit over poor health-care conditions in state prisons.
But reports generated for that settlement show ADC and its private contractor Corizon are still understaffing critical health-care positions.
The latest numbers from August show the state prison in Douglas has no medical director and just one psych associate.
The state prison in Phoenix is designated for seriously mentally ill people. The facility has no psychiatric director, no mental health director and less than half of the psych technicians specified by the contract with Corizon.
There is also no state director of mental health.
MORE: Arizona Prison Health Care Contract Leads To 'Severe Understaffing'
David Fathi is an attorney for the inmates in the settlement. He said there may be other factors at play but the staffing shortages cannot be helping. “This is behavior that we often see with mentally ill people in particular whose mental illness is not being effectively treated,” Fathi said.
Incidents of cutting increased by nearly 50 percent. Fathi said that while not all cutting incidents are life-threatening, they should be taken seriously.
“This is potentially lethal behavior. Some incidents of self-harm result in serious injury or even death,” Fathi said. “And that can happen even if the person doesn’t intend to cause death. Any kind of self-harm behavior has to be treated extremely seriously.”
Fathi called the numbers extraordinary and said the increase in self-harm events “cries out for some sort of investigation.”
In a written response to questions about the increase, ADC spokesman Andrew Wilder said “personnel work very hard to identify, intervene and prevent inmates from committing acts of self-harm.” He said ADC will begin a mental-health training program for correctional officers this month.
But Wilder’s statement downplayed the seriousness of the self-harm numbers, saying they should not “be construed as all being suicide attempts, as they certainly are not.” Wilder continued, “More commonly, these self-harm behaviors involve scratching, biting, ingesting/inserting objects, banging one’s head or hitting one’s self, etc., where there is no intention to commit suicide.”
Wilder said the state “has put into place a mental-health transitional watch program aimed at assisting inmates as they come off of a watch and transition back into a general population environment. The goal is to reduce incidents of self-harm behaviors. The department is already in the process of expanding the program.”
According to ADC, there have already been 142 incidents of self-harm in Arizona prisons in fiscal year 2018, putting it on track to be the worst year on record.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to specify that the numbers reported by ADC are incidents of self-harm, not necessarily individual inmates.
