Inhumanity Has a Price

Every sheriff gets sued over jail conditions. The problem is that Joe Arpaio gets sued thousands of times more than any of the others.

Before Arpaio's reign, Maricopa County didn't bother to pay for liability insurance. And with good reason — the county wasn't losing multimillion-dollar lawsuits or paying families millions to settle their claims.

Peter Crowley, Maricopa County's risk manager, says the county's insurance rates have skyrocketed during Arpaio's tenure. "I wasn't here back when [the Scott Norberg case] happened," Crowley says of Arpaio's first major loss, a suit the county settled for $8.25 million. "But I can tell you this: Our deductible was only $1 million a few years back. Now it's $5 million."

Early into Arpaio's reign, county officials realized they needed insurance. They were able to get a relatively cheap policy, and from 1995 to 1998, the county paid $328,894 a year for an insurance policy with a $1 million deductible.

But now, after Arpaio's lawsuits have cost the county $30 million in legal fees and cost insurance companies millions more, it pays four times as much for a policy. That policy doesn't even cover lawsuits under $5 million.

Today, Maricopa County pays a yearly premium of $1.2 million for outside insurance with a $5 million deductible. For any lawsuit that costs $5 million or less, the county foots the entire bill. It's the best policy the county can get given Arpaio's dismal track record.

Since 1995, that yearly insurance premium alone has cost taxpayers $11,345,609, according to the county's Risk Management Office. More staggering is the official grand total of Arpaio's attorney's bills, lawsuit settlements and payments: $30,039,928.

Both figures were listed in a report produced by county officials after a recent New Times public-records request. Combined, they show the cost to insure for and defend against Arpaio lawsuits totals $41.4 million.

In Joe Arpaio's jails, even the paperwork is deadly.

For $6 million, the jails could have built a computer database of inmate health problems. Such a database, advised jail auditor Moore and Associates in 2000, would improve healthcare for inmates and improve efficiency for jail employees.

Three years after that finding, a 2003 audit concluded, "Personnel report that medication errors occur on a regular basis" and "there is a significant backlog in health-record filing that has been estimated to be between eight months to one year . . . the health records are not current and continuity of care cannot be maintained."

Five years after that first warning, the jail still hadn't built an electronic database for inmate health problems.

Deborah Braillard died as a result.

She had been arrested for riding in a stolen car.

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.

A shoestring budget-records system of paper folders (with misspelled and misfiled names) costs healthcare employees hours of time spent inefficiently, warned the 2000 Moore and Associates audit. It also probably cost Braillard her life.

An electronic database (as was standard in most jails of Maricopa County's size by 2005) would surely have shown Braillard was diabetic and saved her life.