In late December, federal Magistrate Judge David Duncan waved an iPad in front of his Phoenix courtroom, enraged. He had just read a local news article suggesting that the Arizona Department of Corrections and its for-profit medical provider Corizon Health were gaming a system put in place to ensure adequate health care for the state’s prisoners. “There is no other way to read it,” he said. “It’s just a game to beat the judge and his monitoring program.”

Duncan has been overseeing a court case aimed at improving medical and mental health care in Arizona prisons. Parsons v. Ryan, which began in 2012, is one of several lawsuits across the country in which Corizon is accused of providing care so shoddy that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment: delayed or denied treatment, too few doctors and nurses, referrals and medication refills that fall through the cracks.

Corizon disputes these claims, and in the Arizona case, the state arrived at an agreement with the prisoners that explicitly says that government officials “deny all the allegations.” In that agreement, struck in 2014, the state — and, by extension, Corizon — commits to meeting 103 standards governing everything from how quickly prescriptions are filled to how often those with mental illness see a counselor. Part of the agreement was that the state would measure how well it was meeting the standards and report the results back to the court.

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Image via Flickr  Some rights reserved by DFAT photo library

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