PHOENIX β Gov. Katie Hobbs formed a special commission Wednesday to review operations of the state prison system, saying problems there have been ignored for years.
The panel is charged with looking at everything from security and staffing levels to the ability of inmates to speak with family members and access basic necessities like nutrition, medicines and sanitary products. A preliminary report is due Nov. 15.
But the Democratic governor made it clear sheβs not going to wait that long to address one particular issue on the commissionβs agenda: Accessibility and quality of medical care and mental health programs.
That requires more immediate attention, Hobbs said, at least partly because the state is under federal court order to fix the system.
In a ruling last year, U.S. District Court Judge Roslyn Silver declared the care provided by state prisons is βplainly grossly inadequateββ and state officials are acting βwith deliberate indifferenceββ to the substantial risk of harm to inmates.
Silver said top prison officials were aware of conditions that resulted in serious, and unnecessary, physical injury and death to inmates and actively ignored the problems.
Years-long litigation
The lawsuit was filed in 2012 on behalf of inmates. The state agreed to a settlement signed in 2015, Republican Gov. Doug Duceyβs first year in office, promising to do better. And the state was fined $1.4 million in 2018 for failing to live up to the performance measures to which it had agreed, with Silver imposing another $1.1 million penalty in 2021.
David Shinn, who was Duceyβs director of the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, is gone, having been replaced by Hobbs with Ryan Thornell, former deputy corrections director in Maine.
βOur office is actively engaging with this case to make sure that we are addressing the issues that have been brought up, which really have largely been ignored until now,ββ Hobbs said.
βWe intend to focus on what needs to be done and turn this around and provide humane treatment to folks in our care,ββ she said. βWeβre under, now, judgeβs orders. And theyβve been ignored.ββ
Less clear, Hobbs said, is whether there has been a cover-up of the deficiencies in the prison system.
βThatβs part of what we need to find out,ββ she said.
Silver, in her 200-page order last year, definitely had some thoughts on the issue. She said prison officials had purposely ignored unconstitutional conditions in the system that is responsible for nearly 34,000 inmates.
βDespite years of knowledge, driven by this litigation and defendantsβ monitoring of private healthcare contractorsβ performance, defendants have in fact made no significant attempts to substantively change the health care system and compel sufficient staffing,ββ Silver wrote.
βThus, defendants are acting with deliberate indifference to plaintiffsβ serious medical and mental health care needs,ββ she continued. The judge said testimony from Shinn and others during the trial βprovides compelling evidence of knowledge of the failures but a refusal to take meaningful measures to correct systemic flaws.ββ
Silver accused Shinn of being more interested in protecting himself from criticism than protecting inmates.
Hobbs: Urgency has been lacking
Hobbs agreed with Silverβs overall assessment.
βI donβt think there is any disagreement in here that there has been a lack of transparency into these really serious corrections issues, and a lack of, really, any urgency to deal with them and change the way that weβre treating folks that are in our custody in the state,ββ the new governor said. She said thereβs a βmyriad of problems that have continued to exist.ββ
βThatβs why weβre bringing in a director whoβs focused on reform,ββ Hobbs said.
The governor said Thornell is βabsolutely aware of the issues heβs walking into with this department.ββ
For the moment, though, he is simply Hobbsβ nominee. She has to get him confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, though he can serve up to a year without confirmation.
Hobbs said her office is βin the processββ of sending his nomination to the Senate, along with those of others she has tapped to head state agencies. She said she is counting on lawmakers approving her choices.
βWe believe they are focused on their role as public servants,ββ she said. βI am hopeful they will give my nominees a fair hearing.ββ
One question already is being raised is that Thornell has not dealt with anything the size of Arizonaβs system. At last report, Maine had fewer than 2,200 inmates.
βItβs surprising theyβre saying this without the nomination paperwork in front of them,ββ Hobbs said.
But the Governorβs Office hasnβt provided much more in details about his background other than his position in Maine.
In a news release when he was named, Hobbs said Thornell βhas led significant initiatives that re-envision traditional policies and approaches to incarceration, reforming a wide variety of adult corrections areas, challenging the status quo, and implementing 21st century, normalized corrections practices.ββ
The commission Hobbs is forming includes two members of the House and two members of the Senate, from different political parties, and a representative of an βinmate advocacy organizationββ that the governor will select. Others include a physician, a mental health professional, a representative of an organization of corrections officers, as well as previously incarcerated men and women and a close relative of someone who served at least three years behind bars.
Not βisolated occurrences,β judge said
Whether replacing Shinn is enough may be an open question.
After Silver issued her order last year, Walt Blackman, then a Republican state representative from Snowflake, told Capitol Media Services that Shinn was clearly ignoring obvious problems. But he said firings shouldnβt stop with Shinn and that the state needs to βclean houseββ of deputy directors and wardens who have been there for years and are running their facilities as if they are independent operations.
βSo instead of taking their directions from the director ... they are doing their own thing,ββ Blackman said. βAnd thatβs a problem.ββ
In fighting the lawsuit under Ducey, attorneys for the state did not dispute the multiple examples Silver cited of inmates who died or were harmed due to lack of medical care. Instead, they argued these were βsimply isolated occurrencesββ that do not show a pattern or practice of providing deficient health care.
The judge wasnβt buying it.
βThe overwhelming evidence shows these cases indicate the opposite,ββ Silver wrote, pointing out the number of encounters each of these inmates had with the prison medical system, including many different personnel.
βIt is impossible to conclude their treatment represented isolated occurrences,ββ she said. βRather, these outcomes show that if a prisoner develops as serious health condition while in ADCRR custody, he or she is at substantial risk of grievous harm or death due to medical personnelβs inability to accurately assess and diagnose such conditions.ββ
Then and now photos of Tucson (2020)
Garden Plaza, 1953
UpdatedPima County
UpdatedAll Saints Catholic Church, 1963
UpdatedAll Saints Catholic Church, 2020
UpdatedCorbett's Lumber, 1955
UpdatedCorbett's Lumber, 2020
UpdatedCoronado Hotel, 1987
UpdatedCoronado Hotel, 2020
UpdatedHi Corbett Field, 1963
UpdatedHi Corbett Field, 2020
UpdatedPerkins Motors, 1955
UpdatedPerkins Motors, 2020
UpdatedRoskruge Hotel, 1965
UpdatedRoskruge Hotel, 2020
UpdatedSelby Motors Mercury, 1956
UpdatedSelby Motors Mercury, 2020
UpdatedTemple of Music and Art, 1965
UpdatedTemple of Music and Art, 2020
UpdatedStravenue origin story is a trip down memory lane for one Tucson family
UpdatedWe have left turns from Michigan and potholes from the pits of hell, but one local traffic oddity is an Old Pueblo original.
What do you call a road that runs diagonally between an east-west street and a north-south avenue? Here β and nowhere else in America, apparently β thatβs known as a stravenue.
Pima County is home to 40 of them, mostly in mid-century neighborhoods built around Tucsonβs angled arteries β Aviation Parkway, Benson Highway, the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and Interstate 10 east of I-19.
The U.S. Postal Service even has an official abbreviation for the stravenue (that would be STRA), though mail carriers outside of Southern Arizona donβt need to concern themselves with it.
βOur records indicate the name is only found in Tucson, Arizona,β said Roy Betts, national spokesman for the Postal Service.
Tracing the origins of a made-up word
So who is responsible for coining the term?
Wikipedia gives credit for the stravenue to βMr. Tucsonβ himself, Roy P. Drachman, who reportedly dreamed it up in 1948 as part of Del Webbβs Pueblo Gardens development near 22nd Street and present-day Kino Parkway.
But donβt believe everything you read on the internet. The apparent source for that historical nugget is a reader comment posted beneath an Arizona Daily Star story from 2008, which is pretty thin gravy, even for an online encyclopedia.
Recent research by historian and preservationist Demion Clinco points to a more likely candidate: another prominent Tucsonan who played a large role in the cityβs post-war development.
Clinco said the earliest appearance of a stravenue he can find is on the plat map for a subdivision called Country Club Park, a wedge-shaped neighborhood hemmed in by Aviation Road, Country Club and 29th Street.
It features six stravenues that were mapped out in February 1948, three months before the plat for Pueblo Gardens.
The same land surveyor produced both maps: Tony A. Blanton from the Tucson architectural firm of Blanton and Cole.
In December 1948, Blanton submitted another plat map, this time for North Campbell Estates at Campbell and Glenn, and again there were stravenues.
βBased on this, I think it would be fair to say Blanton brought us the stravenue,β Clinco said. βIf he did not actually invent the term, he produced the first one and promoted their popularity in the late 1940s.β
Blanton helped put Tucson on the map
Longtime Tucson land surveyor Don Rockliffe said details like road names are often handled by the planner who is hired to draw up the subdivision map.
βUnless the developer had some pet names in mind, he left it up to the engineering firm to come up with the street names,β he said.
Of course, Rockliffe might be a little biased. Tony Blanton was his grandfather.
Rockliffe said his father, Donald Alan Rockliffe, married Blantonβs eldest daughter, Beverly, and worked as draftsman and design engineer for his father-in-law.
Blanton and Cole was one of Tucsonβs first engineering and architectural companies, Rockliffe said, and it soon became the preeminent firm of its kind in the city.
By 1958, it had 42 employees and a newly built downtown office at Main Avenue and Pennington Street, though that building was lost to urban renewal about a decade later. βNow itβs buried beneath the county courthouse,β Rockliffe said.
Major local clients included the University of Arizona, several public school districts, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and Hughes Aircraft Company. Blanton and Cole also worked on projects across Arizona and in eight other states.
From cowboy roots to the cityβs βin-crowdβ
Rockliffe said his grandfather was βpart of the βin-crowdβ in Tucson, I guess youβd say, but he started out humble.β
He was born George Anthony Blanton in Calgary, Alberta, in 1910. His cowboy father was originally from Southern Arizona, and the family moved back here in 1911 β first to Willcox and then to Tucson in 1914.
After graduating from Tucson High School and studying at the UA, Blanton got his first engineering job with the Southern Pacific Railroad. He later worked for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Pima County and the city of Tucson before launching a private practice with Frederick P. Cole, a former draftsman for the county.
Somewhere along the way, Blanton changed his legal signature to Tony A. Blanton β short (and somewhat redundant) for Tony Anthony Blanton.
Since learning of his familyβs possible connection to Tucson road-naming lore, Rockliffe has done some research of his own that bolsters Clincoβs case.
He said there are 10 Tucson subdivisions that include stravenues, all of them mapped between 1948 and 1960. Blanton and Cole was the surveyor for six of them, including the five oldest.
Surveying streets runs in the family
The city planning and zoning commission added the made-up word to Tucsonβs official street naming and numbering system in November 1948.
In May 1949, the Tucson Daily Citizen ran a piece explaining the new street type, which it described as βgobbledygood (sic) for diagonal.β
βI can remember seeing Cherrybell Stravenue as a child and thinking that was all so strange,β said Rockliffe, who retired in 2019 after 39 years as a land surveyor for Tucson Electric Power.
He never dreamed at the time that he might be related to the man who invented them β the man for whom Blanton Drive near Fort Lowell Road and Tucson Boulevard is now named.
Rockliffe said he used to visit his grandfather on Sundays and holidays. Occasionally, he would join him in his box seats at Hi Corbett Field for Cleveland Indians spring training games.
Blanton died in 1969 at the age of 59.
Rockliffe was about 11 at the time. Not long after, he began to learn the family business from his own father. He used to watch him work at his drafting table, and he later helped him draw a few subdivision plats before enrolling at the UA to become a registered professional land surveyor himself.
βHe taught me surveying,β Rockliffe said of his dad, the likely son of the stravenue. βIt felt like it was kind of in the blood.β