While visiting one of her clients at the Maricopa County Jail, Kathleen Carey, an Attorney, was infected with the MRSA Staph Infection. It cost her $180,000 in medical bills, which kills more Americans each year than HIV / AIDS. She also passed the infection on to her 17 year old son, and HE nearly lost his arm.

The following excerpts are reprinted from the Article, Inhumanity Has a Price, printed in the Phoenix New Times, published, 18 Dec 2007:

…The Sheriff has captured the imagination of voters with his almost cartoonish contempt for the prisoners in his charge. He’s subjected inmates to pink underwear, chain gangs, and rancid bologna sandwiches, and he’s garnered big wins at the polls. But Arpaio’s jail policies have generated a tsunami of lawsuits from prisoners and their families…

…There simply isn’t another jail system in America with this history of taxpayer-financed litigation.

New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, for example, collectively housed more than 61,000 inmates per day last year. From 2004 through November of this year, these same county jails had a combined 43 prison-conditions lawsuits filed against them in federal courts.

In the very same three-year time frame, despite housing a mere 9,200 prisoners per day, Sheriff Arpaio was the target of a staggering 2,150 lawsuits in U.S. District Court and hundreds more in Maricopa County courts.
With a fraction of the inmate population, Arpaio has had 50 times as many lawsuits as the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston jail systems combined…

…Arpaio has an 11-year history of ignoring expert warnings that his jails violate basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution and threaten life and limb. At least 11 inmate deaths have directly resulted from Arpaio’s refusal to heed such warnings.

In that time, the deductible for the county’s insurance policy to cover lawsuits against the sheriff has jumped from $1 million to $5 million. The annual premium has quadrupled in recent years. These dollars come out of the county’s coffers, not from Arpaio’s annual budget of $288 million, which he’s already overrunning this year.

And which is $60 million more than the sheriff budget in a county jail of similar size in Houston.

While the sheriff has long argued that his crude jails prevent crime, a study that his office commissioned, and that cost $19,900, found that Arpaio’s jails have no effect on inmate recidivism…

…Despite the cost, the primary victims of Arpaio’s mismanagement are not taxpayers, or even attorneys like Kathleen Carey, but indigent inmates like Michelle McCollum.

McCollum, who was arrested for drug possession, could not make bail and, therefore, waited for trial in Arpaio’s lockup. She eventually was sentenced to nothing more than probation.

A medical test administered when McCollum was admitted to jail confirmed that she was pregnant.

On August 22, 2005, McCollum sat on the concrete floor of the Fourth Avenue Jail…

…Suddenly, two inmates attacked her, pummeling her face, back, and abdomen.

McCollum and another cellmate reported the beating to detention officers, pleaded for medical help, and reminded deputies that McCollum was pregnant and had been hit in the stomach. McCollum also put in a medical request to the infirmary.

No doctor or nurse looked in upon the injured McCollum.

Two days later, McCollum sat in the courthouse, chained to a row of inmates, when she started to bleed. She bled for five hours, looking frighteningly like Stephen King’s infamous Carrie. The inmates chained to McCollum to await their arraignments began to complain. Detention officers ignored the prisoners.

When she arrived at the E-Pod in Sheriff Arpaio’s Estrella Jail, a bloodstained McCollum again told guards about her beating and her need for medical care. An officer put in a priority request for medical attention, but nobody came. Alarmed at McCollum’s loss of blood, a guard finally ushered her to see a doctor.

Infirmary workers called an ambulance and rushed McCollum to Maricopa Medical Center. Doctors there found her baby with an ultrasound, but they couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat. The baby was dead.

Doctors told the jail guards that McCollum must return to the hospital in two days — on August 26 — to see if the fetus would pass on its own.

Ten days later, the jail had yet to deliver McCollum to her hospital appointment. On September 5, while McCollum stood holding her tray in the food line, the bleeding started again.

Still, nothing was done.

Three weeks after the ignored doctor’s appointment, McCollum was finally rushed to the county hospital for the second time. She had lost so much blood that doctors gave her a massive blood transfusion. Then they removed the dead fetus.

It’s important to note that McCollum hadn’t been convicted of a crime. Like inmates whose deaths are recounted later in this story, McCollum was awaiting trial — innocent under the law.

Ignored cries for medical attention and resulting agony are not uncommon in Arpaio’s jails.

“Only 40 percent of inmate sick-call requests are responded to in a timely manner . . . Because sick-call requests are not responded to in a timely manner and health appraisals are not completed within the required time frames, an inmate’s health status is likely to deteriorate while in the custody of Maricopa County,” concludes an audit of jail conditions done for the county two years before McCollum lost her baby.

Deborah Braillard (also) died as a result (of Maricopa County Jails POOR quality of Health care.)…

When Braillard, 46, an insulin-dependent diabetic, started shaking, vomiting, and fading into a diabetic coma, Arpaio’s detention officers decided against taking her to the infirmary.

She had been in perfect health when she entered Arpaio’s jail, but after two days without insulin, she was on the verge of a coma.

Numerous inmates, including Braillard’s cellmates, who rattled cell bars and hollered for guards, say asking for medical treatment in Arpaio’s jails often merits a reply from guards that you’re faking it.

Braillard wasn’t faking it.

Tamera Harper was one of three Estrella Jail cellmates of Braillard’s who told an identical story of what happened next.

“I woke up to hear Deborah Braillard moaning and crying for help. The detention officers moved her to a television room to keep her from disturbing other inmates,” Harper wrote in a court declaration.

The detention officers didn’t take Braillard to the jail infirmary.

The cellmates all say that when officers flopped Braillard back into her bunk the next morning, January 23, 2005, she was unconscious. The inmates attempted to feed Braillard sugar, but she began convulsing.

Jail employees eventually arrived, lifted Braillard into a wheelchair, and opted for non-emergency transport to the Maricopa County Medical Center, where she was quickly transferred to the intensive care unit. Hospital doctors reversed the diabetic coma with basic insulin and fluids. But the damage was done.

Eighteen days later, Braillard’s daughter Jennifer watched as a county physician, Dr. Scott Van Poppel, declared her mother dead — ultimately from going 70 hours without insulin in Arpaio’s jail.

When Sheriff’s Detective J. Bryant arrived to check out Braillard’s body, he pulled back the blue hospital blanket to note that Braillard’s limbs were swollen, her toes were already black, and her calves were spotted with sores. Hospital tubes and IVs were still in her body.

The problem isn’t just that the jail denied Braillard insulin and refused to treat her. It’s that the jail knew Braillard was diabetic before she was even arrested.

Like many inmates, Braillard had passed through the jail months earlier. On that visit, she had marked the jail’s intake sheet, declaring her diabetes. The jail’s health records documented Braillard’s need for insulin.

Yet, on her second incarceration, jail employees denied her insulin, ignored her cries for help, and failed to get her insulin when she became unconscious…

Is then kind of person who would allow these atrocites to occur on their watch REALLY the kind of person we want in such a position of AUTHORITY?