The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

There are many questions to be answered by the Department of Corrections about Powell's final hours. But her death is only the gruesome exclamation point on a long list of institutional failures that got her there.

DOC officials say that Powell had a rap sheet going back decades and included at least 10 sex and six drug convictions. She'd been in and out of Arizona prisons since 1994.

Records indicate that she left home in California at 15 with a ninth-grade education, no marketable skills and a serious mental illness. A presentencing report describes her as bipolar.

Last summer, she was sent to prison for more than two years on a prostitution charge.

"It's awful the way this woman died," said Donna Leone Hamm, executive director of Middle Ground Prison Reform Inc., which for years has advocated for Arizona inmates and their families. "No one cared much about her when she lived. I hope at least that we care about the way she died."

DOC is investigating the incident. Several employees already are on administrative leave.

After Powell collapsed, she was taken to the hospital and placed on life support. A DOC spokesman told me that the department was unable to locate any family members.

So when the time came to decide whether to pull the plug on the machines keeping her alive, it fell to prisons Director Charles Ryan. Powell was taken off life support at 11:15 p.m. Tuesday; she died at 12:42 a.m. Wednesday.

"The death of Marcia Powell is a tragedy and a failure," Ryan said later. "The investigation will determine whether there was negligence and tell us how to remedy our failures."

I'm not so sure.

For one thing, DOC should not be conducting the investigation. It should fall to an outside agency. The governor should demand it.

According to Hamm, she contacted then-prisons Director Dora Schriro in late 2007 about the practice of placing prisoners in outdoor cages.

"Because no one had died or had been permanently injured, I couldn't get anyone - including the press - interested," Hamm said.

Questions like that are only a beginning.

Powell's horrific death and her woeful life should finally get us to ask why Arizona's failed mental-health system transforms county jails and prisons into mental-health institutions.

It should get us to ask why we criminalize people like this but don't adequately treat them, since it's clear that taxpayers end up footing the bill for their care one way or another.

Powell told state officials that she had two children who were given up to foster care, but DOC says the state has no record of that. Police also checked the address of a name she'd listed as a friend on prison records but found no one living in the abandoned house.

In spite of spending years in the system, Powell's life remains a mystery. Her death is a tragedy, although perhaps not on the level of Rik the law-enforcement dog.

There was a public outpouring for him.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/05/23/20090523Montini0524.html

Ariz. inmate dies after hours in outdoor cell
By JONATHAN J. COOPER-5-22-09

PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona inmate who died after spending nearly four hours in the desert heat was left in an outdoor holding cell for twice as long as she should have been, the state prisons director said Wednesday.

Three corrections officers have been put on paid leave while the state investigates Wednesday's heat-related death of Marcia Powell, who was left in her unshaded cell in 103-degree heat at a prison in Goodyear.

"The death of Marcia Powell is a tragedy and a failure," prisons director Charles Ryan said. "The investigation will determine whether there was negligence and will tell us how to remedy our failures."

Powell, who was serving a 27-month sentence for prostitution, was placed alone in the cell while being moved to an onsite detention unit. Ryan said officers placed Powell in the cell after a disturbance at the detention unit, but he would not elaborate on the nature of the disturbance.

Officers gave Powell, 48, bottled water, as required under prison policy, Ryan said. Corrections officers were 20 yards away in a control room while she was in the cell. Investigators will try to determine how much water she was given and whether she drank it.

Officers did not remove her after two hours as they should have done under department policy, Ryan said at a news conference.

"It is intended to be temporary," he said. "It is not intended to be a place where they are held for an inordinate amount of time."

The criminal probe, conducted by the Corrections Department's investigations unit, will seek to determine whether officials were negligent in their treatment of Powell, who collapsed at 2:40 p.m. Tuesday and died later at a hospital.

Ryan said he hopes to release a report into Powell's death by late next week. The Maricopa County Attorney's office will then decide whether to charge the corrections officers involved.

Ryan would not release the names or disciplinary records of the deputy warden, captain and lieutenant placed on paid leave.

He said he told all state prison wardens to monitor the temperatures at outdoor holding cells while they are housing inmates.

Powell is the 79th person to die in state prisons since July 2008, according to Ryan. He said most of the deaths were from natural causes, but there were three suicides and one murder.

Corrections officials were unable to locate family members for Powell.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.