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PHOENIX (CN) — The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry may soon be under control of a court-appointed independent receiver due to its failure to comply with a 14-year-old order demanding it deliver constitutionally adequate healthcare to prisoners.
U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver ordered receivership in February, after years of noncompliance, and on Friday appointed Annette Chambers-Smith to assume control of the delivery of healthcare services to prisoners at Arizona’s nine state-run prisons.
The department has indicated it intends to appeal the appointment, and Silver wrote in a 14-page order Friday afternoon she would grant a motion to stay the appointment pending appeal if the department filed one.
“During this multi-year, interminable litigation, the court has identified entrenched systemic failures in defendants’ administration of healthcare to the plaintiff class,” Silver wrote in the order. “Accordingly, the court found that only a receiver with the powers and authority necessary to address each of the systemic failures would adequately remedy the failure of healthcare.”
Silver highlights chronic understaffing, the department relying on complex care from nurses rather than physicians, a failed referral process, data collection and reporting errors, and inadequate resources, funding and facilities, resulting in unnecessary and avoidable pain, injury and death.
In order to remedy those failures, Chambers-Smith will take over healthcare delivery and management, with the authority granted by Silver to hire, fire, suspend, discipline and control compensation for all corrections department employees and contract staff who perform healthcare services. The department director, Ryan Thornell, will retain authority over law enforcement and corrections staff unless the receiver makes a compelling argument to the court that certain employees are essential to the provision of adequate health care.
Chambers-Smith will be authorized to develop policies, procedures and protocols she finds necessary to carry out proper healthcare functions and may “adopt rules to implement the purposes of the department and the duties and powers of the receiver.”
She will also be given authority over the department’s annual budget and all contracts with third-party healthcare vendors.
Chambers-Smith directed the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction beginning in 2019 and resigned in March amid a wrongful death lawsuit over the Christmas 2024 killing of a corrections officer. She has worked in the Ohio governor’s office since then.
The department will be responsible for paying Chambers-Smith $500,000 a year for five years with an annual cost of living raise.
“The court genuinely welcomes the eventual return to the state of Arizona of the operational control of the healthcare relating to the class members, upon a finding that the unconstitutional violations have been remedied and the unconstitutional health care existing in the state of Arizona prison system has ceased,” Silver, a Bill Clinton appointee, wrote.
Litigation began in 2012 when a class of prisoners sued the state, claiming inadequate healthcare in the prisons led to “unnecessary pain and suffering, preventable injury, amputation, disfigurement, and death.”
After vacating the settlement of a class action in 2021 because the Department of Corrections failed to follow its terms, Silver found at trial the department failed to provide adequate medical and mental healthcare to its prisoners. In addition to requiring better staffing, Silver’s injunction in 2023 required improvements in several areas, including better medical record documentation, patient confidentiality protections and regular and timely delivery of medications.
In 2024, Silver found the department still hadn’t cleaned up its act and ordered a six-month pilot program in which it needed to fill medical staff vacancies at just two of its nine prisons. She later ordered full compliance with a larger staffing plan in June 2025.
“In the three intervening years, defendants have utterly failed to comply with the permanent injunction’s requirements and have aggressively opposed its enforcement,” Silver wrote in a four-page order filed Thursday afternoon.
That order responded to a request from the corrections department to modify the permanent injunction, which required among other things that all staff physicians and medical directors be board certified or board eligible in internal medicine or family practice. The department asked the threshold be lowered to 50% to attract more “otherwise qualified” applicants.
“Historically, it appears defendants have consistently advertised positions to no avail,” Silver wrote. “But over three years have passed since the effective date of the permanent injunction and defendants have not complied, nor have they ever demonstrated attempts to substantially comply with the entrenched order of the court and the opinion of the monitors case that they must aggressively increase salaries to attract qualified healthcare staff.”
Silver denied the motion.
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