While chain gangs outside the jail garner national publicity for Sheriff Joe, his captive pool of labor is not directed to clean the festering conditions inside the jails. Instead, this cesspool breeds contagious infections that healthcare employees can only hope to contain.
When Arpaio's culture of violence has produced corpses and lawsuits, his staff has destroyed records and faked documents repeatedly.
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Sheriff Joe Arpaio compares unfavorably to L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca when it comes to jail conditions.
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Baca's office dealt with MRSA infections five years ago. Arpaio's office has yet to start.
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In fact, Arpaio's first major legal payout of $8.25 million came as the result of obvious records tampering by the Sheriff's Office. Attorney Mike Manning had smoking-gun proof that jail employees fabricated a fake health intake report for Scott Norberg (who died after being beaten by guards and strapped into a restraint chair). Not only that, but half of Norberg's postmortem X-rays were missing, and his name was deleted from the X-ray logbook.
So conclusive was the proof of records destruction that the county opted to pay Norberg's family to drop the case. In other words, the county's legal experts looked at the evidence of records-tampering and decided they would be better off not letting the case get to court.
A further obvious effort to destroy records was proved in March 2006, when Arpaio lost a wrongful-death suit filed by the family of Charles Agster III.
During the Agster court case, jail nurse Betty Lewis testified that jail authorities commanded her to create a series of false documents after Agster's death. Some of Agster's health records also disappeared from the jail, and his falsified booking number didn't exist until the day after he was transferred out of the jail into the hospital.
The Agster case also documented a second nurse who collaborated with sheriff's detention officers to make up fake entries and notes after Agster's death.
Next month, on January 8, 2008, a trial is scheduled in Maricopa Superior Court in a lawsuit filed by deceased inmate Brian Crenshaw's family. The family can't present jail-records evidence because the Sheriff's Office destroyed it — even after the court ordered it to hand over the evidence.
Crenshaw, 40, was legally blind and serving a short sentence in Tent City for shoplifting. After a documented struggle with Arpaio's detention officers, Crenshaw was transferred to solitary confinement at the Madison Street Jail. Six days later, he was found comatose in his cell with a broken neck, ruptured intestines, broken toes, and severe internal injuries.
Only sheriff's guards had contact with Crenshaw in his cell, but Arpaio still maintains that Crenshaw sustained the life-ending injuries when he fell off his four-foot bed.
On September 26, 2006, the court ordered Arpaio's office to produce the jail's videotaped recordings that lawyers suspected would have shown officers beating Crenshaw. Then, on August 31, 2007, nearly a year later, the sheriff's attorney replied that the records had been destroyed — even after multiple requests and court orders to preserve the videotapes.
In November, New Times requested information about antibiotic-resistant MRSA staph infections and inmate-reported spider bites (which national jail experts say are often actually MRSA or other staph infections) among inmates.
Betty Adams, the jail's interim healthcare director, officially answered that the jail tracks spider bites. "Data indicates zero occurrences for 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 year-to-date," Adams wrote.
Ironically, Arpaio's spokesmen have said exactly the opposite. On April 23, 2006, Arpaio's publicists told the Arizona Republic, "Inmates routinely complain about spider bites at Tent City."
Somehow, jail healthcare officials say they have recorded "zero" spider bites when asked in the context of deadly and contagious MRSA staph infections. Yet inmates "routinely" complain about spider bites when asked in the context of a puff story highlighting animals in the jail.
Whatever the statistics on spider bites actually are, attorney Kathleen Carey, who caught MRSA while visiting her client in jail, says deputies take precautions to protect themselves.
"In court, you'll often see detention officers wearing gloves. That's because they don't want to catch MRSA from the inmates," Carey says.
Jail healthcare directors reported 41 incidents of "lab confirmed" MRSA infections in the 2006-07 fiscal year. They also reported "zero" spider bites from 2004 to 2007. At the same time, multiple caseworkers, attorneys, and inmates have reported rampant skin infections and spider bites in the jails.
Attorney Carey is living proof that infectious diseases aren't confined behind bars. They spread to the general public from the jail through lawyers, guards, caseworkers, hospitals, courtrooms, and released inmates.
Other counties and the Centers for Disease Control have targeted MRSA in jails, but jail healthcare officials refuse to produce a policy on the flesh-eating bacteria — if they have one.
Interim Correctional Health director Adams told New Times, "CHS does not maintain a database that shows the number or frequency of categories of health concerns."
Adams then canceled a previously scheduled interview with New Times to discuss MRSA and other infectious diseases among inmates. She also didn't produce requested records of MRSA-related deaths in the jails.
Even without official statistics, it isn't hard to confirm that MRSA is killing inmates. Dr. Patrick O'Neill is one of the last doctors to see patients dying of MRSA at the Maricopa Medical Center, where Arpaio's office sends dying inmates.
O'Neill says, "The majority of [MRSA] patients I see will come from jail, either the sheriff's or the prison system's. You also have to realize the ones I see are the most severe cases. There could be a whole other class of patients that our ER guys see, whereas I only see the nearly dying."