Judge won’t delay receiver’s takeover of Arizona’s unconstitutional prison healthcare system

A federal judge on Wednesday said that she won’t pause her decision to turn over control of the healthcare system in Arizona prisons to an outside supervisor because it’s clear to her that doing so is the fastest — and perhaps only — way to ensure that sick and injured prisoners don’t have their constitutional rights violated.

“It is indisputable that Plaintiffs and other parties interested in the proceeding continue to be harmed by the unconstitutional health care conditions in Arizona state prisons, and the longer the conditions are allowed to persist, the more injury Plaintiffs suffer,” Judge Roslyn Silver wrote in her order denying a request from the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry that she delay the appointment of a receiver who will take over the healthcare system. 

“The Court has found appointment of a receiver will provide a relatively quick remedy to the violations of Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights compared to leaving the matter in Defendants’ hands, and Defendants have presented no argument or evidence that indicates this finding was (an) error,” she added.

The Corrections Department had argued that Silver implemented a “remedy of last resort” without exhausting other avenues for persuading the state to comply with the court’s orders to fix a healthcare system that was so substandard that it was deemed cruel and unusual punishment that violated inmates’ Eighth Amendment rights.

In its pleadings for Silver to issue a stay pausing her appointment of Annette Chambers-Smith to oversee the system, ADCRR said that Silver disregarded the progress the agency had made over the past three years since Ryan Thornell took over the department and throwing the system into receivership would cause “irreparable harm” to the state.

But Silver said those harms pale in comparison to the harm that is being inflicted on prisoners in Arizona.

“Any harm to Defendants…is significantly outweighed by the harm that will occur the longer the unconstitutional provision of healthcare within Arizona’s prisons continues,” she wrote, citing a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling holding that “it is always in the public interest to prevent the violation of a party’s constitutional rights.”

Silver did pause her receivership appointment for seven days to allow the Department of Corrections to appeal. Within a few hours, the state had filed a notice of appeal with her court.

The lawsuit, Jensen v. Thornell, has dragged on for more than 14 years. In February, Silver took the extraordinary step of placing the state prison healthcare system into receivership after concluding that continued tolerance of the state’s “systemically unconstitutional” health care would be nothing short of “judicial indulgence of deeply entrenched unconstitutional conduct.”

The class-action lawsuit stretches back to 2012, when prisoners sued the department and alleged that its shoddy health care violated their Eighth Amendment right against “cruel and unusual punishment.” The 14 years since have been marked by escalating judicial intervention, culminating in Silver ordering the prison health care system into receivership.

In 2014, the prisoners and the state reached a 103-point agreement on health care performance. But when the Corrections Department repeatedly failed to comply with those standards, the court twice held the agency in contempt and levied fines totaling more than $2.5 million. 

Following a 15-day bench trial in 2022, the court issued a 200-page findings-of-fact order declaring the health care system “pervasively and systemically unconstitutional.” The next year, a permanent injunction was issued with 154 specific “quality indicators” to assess how the prison system was complying with the court’s directives.

In 2024 and 2025, Silver wrote, the state repeatedly and flagrantly violated those orders, and a pilot program aimed at testing a new model for prison health care failed disastrously — it was only partially implemented at one of the two test sites, and was only in place for eight days before it was scrapped.