~~~Caged ~~~
Gorillas Fighting 4 Change
Monday, July 29, 2013
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Collateral Damage in Arizona Prisons
Arizona‘s
prison system is suffering from collateral damage as it continues to fall into
a financial abyss created by poor leadership and wasteful spending since 2009. The
writings have been on the walls for many years but everybody in state government
has either been looking the other way or failing to read the signs. That is
with the exception of Chad Campbell, a leading Democrat lawmaker who recognized
this failing performance by our prison agency leader and director, Charles L.
Ryan and therefore calling for his resignation on Tuesday, July 23, 2013
State
legislators, the governor and the public should not be surprised at this
announcement to remove Director Ryan. It has been long coming and if your look
back to the infamous Kingman prison escape, I have been calling for his
resignation from that moment as he has done nothing to fix our state’s public
safety issues and manage our prisons in a sound and responsible manner while
bolstering the private prison industry inside our state. Today the state
suffers severely from collateral damage and changes must be made immediately.
Collateral
damage is politically harmful in many ways. First and most it implies urgent
and serious ethical implications of not doing your job as you had sworn to do
when you take the oath of office. Second it is harmful to innocents and this is
a most coincidental side effect that can run a course of destruction. It
basically is a statement of not doing your job with due care and commitment.
Collateral
damage consists of at least four categories of failures with a doctrine that
shows negligence, oblivious to the truth, malevolently knowing what wrong and
reckless behavior is as you ignore these warning signs. Since taking office,
the director has created an order of chaos that is not morally permissible under
the rule of law and moral standards.
He has
implemented a personal doctrine that has had a double effect. The first being a
negative and wasteful prison system failing to perform up to legal and moral
expectations as a government service and the second is the increase reliance
and use of private corporate prison contractors to fill in the voids of his
failing prison policies and send unlimited state funding into a hybrid
governance doctrine that is without scrutiny or reviews.
One could
argue that this double doctrine should be permissible but the loss of human
lives, the destruction of internal personnel procedures and performance /
disciplinary structures, the excessive litigation related to medical and other
essential services as well as the higher costs associated with such inefficient
operational methods are not feasible at a time of responsible fiscal
constraints and higher taxes to run government. This is especially true when
other states have demonstrated lesser spending with better prison management
alternatives than Arizona has and this is highly noticeable at the budget
hearings in Phoenix.
The question
is whether this call for his resignation is legitimate or politically
motivated. It is my trust if Governor Brewer would consciously and deliberately
review his record of performance she would agree it is time for change in
leadership.
Good change
can bring Arizona prisons back into the spending commitments of lawmakers and
the return of rule of law back to those relatives that rely on ethical decision
making to keep their incarcerated relatives safe from excessive suffering,
physical and mentally incurred harm and a high risk of accidental or natural
caused deaths that includes suicides that rank as some of the highest in the
country. After all is said and done, our leaders must recognize that collateral
damage is in no way permissible and tolerable in good government practices.
Monday, July 1, 2013
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