The Arizona Department of Corrections headquarters In downtown Phoenix
It was 10 years ago at the Eyman state prison in Florence. John Fabricius, an inmate at the time, had a job working as a clerk for a correctional officer.
He said the Arizona Department of Corrections administrators were nervous, because it was announced a reporter was coming to tour the prison. And that we needed to take a lot of steps to make sure that everything that he saw was exactly what they wanted him to see,” he said.
Fabricius says he was told to instruct fellow inmates not to speak with the journalist and to warn everyone to stay on their best behavior. “You know, literally taking care of every step that he was going to walk on the sidewalk, the buildings he was going to enter, the inmate areas, all of that was scrubbed by inmates for three days in advance of that tour.”
PHOENIX Arizona prison officials started offering COVID-19 vaccinations Friday to corrections officers at the Perryville prison in Goodyear, with other prisons to follow in the future. State corrections officers…
Many of those deaths have been at the Arizona State Prison complex in Tucson. It s very hard, because we were scared. We were praying that he wouldn t get the virus, said Lillian Coppess, whose husband, Wellington, is incarcerated at the Arizona State Prison on South Wilmot Road.
For Coppess, who heads up the Arizona S.T.A.R.T Project, each day is filled with uncertainty about what the future may hold for her husband.
There have been more than 1,300 COVID-19 cases at the Wilmot facility since the start of the pandemic, and ten inmates there have died. Since the beginning, he told me like at the beginning of April, I remember him telling me, I am going to get it because it s impossible to social-distance in prison. It is just impossible, Coppess told the Digging Deeper team.