The department has indicated it plans to appeal the appointment of an outside receiver to take control of the delivery of prison health care services at Arizona’s nine state prisons.
PHOENIX (CN) – The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry may soon be under the control of an independent court-appointed receiver because of its failure to comply with a 14-year-old order requiring it to provide inmates with constitutionally adequate health care.
US District Judge Roslyn Silver ordered admission in Februaryafter years of inconsistency, and on Friday appointed Annette Chambers-Smith to take control of providing health care services to inmates at Arizona’s nine state prisons.
The department has indicated it intends to appeal the appointment, and Silver wrote in a 14-page order On Friday afternoon, she would file a motion to adjourn the meeting pending an appeal if the department were to file one.
“Throughout this multi-year and interminable litigation, the court has identified systemic entrenched failures in the administration of health care by the defendants to the plaintiff class,” Silver wrote in the order. “Accordingly, the court found that only a receiver with the necessary powers and authority to address each of the systemic failures would adequately remedy the health care failure.”
Silver points to chronic understaffing, the department’s reliance on complex care by nurses rather than physicians, a failed referral process, data collection and reporting errors, and inadequate resources, funding, and equipment, resulting in unnecessary and avoidable pain, injury, and death.
To correct these failures, Chambers-Smith will take over the delivery and management of health care, with the authority given by Silver to hire, fire, suspend, discipline and control compensation for all corrections department employees and contract personnel who perform health care services. The department’s director, Ryan Thornell, will retain authority over law enforcement and corrections personnel unless the receiver makes a convincing case to the court that certain employees are essential to providing proper health care.
Chambers-Smith will be authorized to develop policies, procedures and protocols that she deems necessary to carry out the proper health care functions and may “adopt rules to implement the purposes of the department and the duties and powers of the recipient.”
She will also be given authority over the department’s annual budget and all contracts with third-party healthcare vendors.
Chambers-Smith led the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction beginning in 2019 and resigned in March amid a wrongful-death lawsuit over the killing of a corrections officer in Christmas 2024. She has since worked in the Ohio governor’s office.
The department will be responsible for paying Chambers-Smith $500,000 a year for five years with an annual cost-of-living increase.
“The Court sincerely welcomes the eventual return to the State of Arizona of operational control of health care with respect to class members, upon a finding that the unconstitutional violations have been remedied and the unconstitutional health care existing in the Arizona state prison system has ceased,” wrote Silver, a Bill Clinton appointee.
The trial began in 2012 when a class of inmates sued the state, alleging that inadequate health care in prisons led to “unnecessary pain and suffering, preventable injury, amputation, disfigurement and death.”
After vacating a class-action settlement in 2021 because the Department of Corrections failed to enforce its terms, Silver revealed in court that the department failed to provide adequate medical and mental health care to its inmates. In addition to calling for better staffing, Silver’s 2023 order called for improvements in several areas, including better documentation of medical records, protection of patient confidentiality and regular and timely dispensing of medications.
In 2024, Silver found the department still hadn’t cleaned up her act AND ordered a six-month pilot program in which it had to fill medical staff vacancies in only two of its nine prisons. She later ordered full compliance with a larger staffing plan by June 2025.
“In the intervening three years, the defendants have not fully complied with the requirements of the permanent injunction and have aggressively contested its enforcement,” Silver wrote in a four-page order filed Thursday afternoon.
That order responded to a request by the corrections department to modify the standing order, which required, among other things, that all staff physicians and medical directors be board-certified or board-certified in internal medicine or family practice. The department asked that the threshold be lowered to 50% to attract more “otherwise qualified” applicants.
“Historically, it appears that defendants have repeatedly advertised positions without merit,” Silver wrote. “But more than three years have passed since the effective date of the permanent injunction and the defendants have not complied with, nor have they ever demonstrated an effort to substantially comply with, the court’s entrenched order and the monitors’ case opinion that they must aggressively raise wages to attract qualified healthcare staff.”
Silver denied the motion.
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