I: Arizona prisoner: Inmates were given do not resuscitate status against their will during COVID 19

In emailsand letters sent to Arizona Department of Corrections officials via outside advocacy organizations between 2020 and early 2022, inmates and family members reported egregious COVID-19 failures and abuses, including how inmates were given "fake" health checks and do-not-resuscitate status against their will.

On July 18, 2020, Perryville Warden Regina Dorsey received an email from local advocacy organization Valley Interfaith Project with a two-page handwritten letter from an inmate at the Perryville, Arizona prison. In the letter, an inmate described living in an extremely hot facility with no air conditioning while nauseous and in deep pain. The nausea, she wrote, "makes me so week [sic] that I can't stand up when it happens, my taste buds are messed up… feels like death when it happens."

She explained that many of the inmates in the facility had COVID symptoms but were denied testing-and were given do-not-resuscitate status without their consent. "They said that we have no choice in this matter," the inmate wrote. She alleged that the medical team even had a "fake COVID-19 health check in place" where vital signs were not taken. If the inmates said they were sick, they were told to pay the $4 fee to see a nurse-after which they were still denied COVID tests. The inmate wrote that it would "take a miricle [sic] to be able to get testing." According to the records, the Arizona Department of Health Services bought 65,000 COVID tests Arizona's prisons from correctional healthcare company Centurion of Arizona LLC for $4,028,900 two days prior to Valley Interfaith Project's email, on July 16, 2020.

Then-Arizona prisons Director David Shinn was also copied on the email. The Valley Interfaith Project alleged to Dorsey and Shinn that these were concerns that the organization and other groups had brought to the Department of Corrections for months. In the email, they raised another instance in May 2020 where an inmate was refused care three times and was left to recover by themselves. Perryville prison dealt with hygiene shortages even before COVID, when in 2018 the prison was reportedto have had inmates going days without toilet paper and menstrual products.

According to other COVID-related allegations raised to Shinn via local group Middle Ground Prison Reform, COVID-positive inmates were moved away from their mental health treatment programs, were fed spoiled and expired foods, did not have their medication refilled and were allegedly given treatments that worsened their condition on purpose. One email in December 2020 alleged that COVID deaths and sickness were not being reported to be caused by COVID, and deaths were attributed to inmates' underlying health problems "so that the Covid-related deaths will remain relatively low."

According to the documents, the circumstances were evidently exacerbated by prison workers from both ADOC and for-profit prison company staff allegedly refusing to mask or take basic hygiene precautions, despite many workers expressing frustration with the lax protocols in various public correctional and GEO Group facilities.

Summer Roberts contributed to this report.