U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Oct. 1 denied Arizona's emergency request to stop a federal court from handing control of state prison health care to an outside receiver. The order clears the way for a court-appointed manager to run medical and mental health care for more than 25,000 people in Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry (ADCRR) prisons, according to the ACLU, which represents the incarcerated plaintiffs. The receiver is set to take over on Oct. 19, the Arizona Mirror reported.
The takeover follows years of findings by court-appointed monitors who reviewed deaths and medical records inside the prisons. Their conclusions, and the state's repeated failure to meet court-ordered standards, led a federal judge to decide the state could not fix the system on its own.
