Sunbelt Justice

Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment

Mona Lynch

• Publisher: Stanford Law Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit pénal

In the late 20th century, the United States experienced an incarceration explosion. Over the course of twenty years, the imprisonment rate quadrupled, and today more than than 1.5 million people are held in state and federal prisons. Arizona's Department of Corrections came of age just as this shift toward prison warehousing began, and soon led the pack in using punitive incarceration in response to crime. Sunbelt Justice looks at the development of Arizona's punishment politics, policies, and practices, and brings to light just how and why we have become a mass incarceration nation.

1

ARIZONA’S POLITICAL AND PENAL ROOTS

ARIZONA, THE 48TH STATE to enter the union, has developed quite recently and rapidly from a sparsely populated, predominantly rural land to one in which the population is now overwhelmingly urban. From 1950 to 2000 it was the second fastest growing state in the nation, trailing only Nevada (Berman, 1998; U.S. Department of Commerce, 2001). The population growth during that period has largely been concentrated in the major metropolitan areas in and around Phoenix and Tucson. The expansion of Phoenix alone, which is also one of the fastest growing cities in the country (Economist, 1999), has been phenomenal over the past 50 years. In 1940, the city had about 65,000 residents; in 2000, its population was 20 times larger, with more than 1.3 million residents within the city limits and 6 million in the greater metropolitan area. Phoenix has also developed into one of the core conservative political centers of the nation over that time.

Much of the recent growth is due to the influx of high-tech companies, such as Motorola and Intel, and the general pro-business and pro-growth environment of the city and state (Schmandt, 1995). Not surprisingly, the rate at which growth occurred in this state over the past half century created a number of immediate “crises” related to the rapid social change, including increased concerns about crime and the administration of criminal justice. People move in and out of the state fluidly, so the transient nature of the population has also contributed to the sense of crisis about various social conditions.

Yet although Arizona has undergone its most significant growth and change since the 1950s, its early cultural and political roots continue to influence governance in the state. Arizona began its life as a state after a long and bitter battle to shed its territorial status, which it held for almost 50 years. Much of the federal resistance to granting Arizona statehood had to do with a majority congressional view that the leading Arizona political figures were radicals who seemed to distrust government. Furthermore, the state was strongly conservative Democratic in its early political makeup, a reflection of the influx of Southerners into the territory during the 1800s, whereas Congress was predominantly Republican around the turn of the twentieth century when the quest for statehood heated up.

The legislative attempts at drawing up a state constitution that would satisfy the federal government while also reflecting Arizonans’ political values contributed to the problem as well. The territory was wedded to a variety of direct democracy measures—including the availability of the referendum and initiative process and broad electorate recall powers, including of judges—and insisted on structural controls over elected officials, in part through the use of two-year terms for most offices. These provisions in the various drafts of the proposed constitution led some in Washington, D.C., to label Arizonans as anarchists, and President William H. Taft refused to approve statehood until at least the judicial recall provision was removed. By the end of 1911, Arizona voters agreed to that excision in order to obtain statehood, and two months later, in February 1912, President Taft officially proclaimed Arizona the 48th state. Before the year was out, however, in a show of direct democracy aimed at defying the meddling federal government, Arizona voters reinstated the judicial recall provision.

The political culture from the start, then, has been a blend of southern traditionalistic values imported with the territory’s early settlers and a frontier perspective that values individualism, self-reliance, and self-governance. According to political scientist David Berman (1998), the state’s political system into the 1950s looked like a traditional one-party (Democratic) southern state, complemented by a strong resistance to governmental “meddling” in daily life, especially by the federal government. This orientation in part accounts for the state’s second-class treatment of minorities and the poor, in that the traditionalist culture promoted racial and class hierarchies, and the self-sufficient libertarian streak ensured little support for those who might need government assistance.

Latinos, and to a lesser degree Native Americans, have always been significant subpopulations in Arizona, but their ability to benefit politically from the populist government was attenuated, at best, throughout the twentieth century. African Americans have consistently constituted only about 2 percent to 3 percent of the population from statehood to the present, yet they, too, have been subject to widespread discrimination. English literacy tests were used into the 1960s to suppress voter registration and participation among minority populations; racial segregation in public schools was required by law until 1951 and then made optional until it was constitutionally prohibited in 1954; and segregation in restaurants, pools, and other such private/public spaces was common throughout the state well into the 1960s. Furthermore, the “frontier” outlook favoring individual self-reliance contributed to the development of social policies that did little to aid those in the lower strata, so state social services and welfare spending has consistently been well below the national average. The funding structure of elementary and secondary schools ensured that schools in wealthy districts had the most resources and those in the poorest districts had the fewest until the state supreme court imposed changes during the late 1990s. Labor generally has also been disadvantaged, given the state’s 1946 adoption of a “right-to-work” law that outlawed closed union shops and discouraged labor organizing.

The political system began to open up during the 1950s largely because of the postwar inmigration of predominantly Republican Midwesterners who settled in large numbers around Phoenix. Soon after, there was a smaller but significant influx of more liberal Democrats who tended to settle around Tucson. Although the “native,” more conservative rural-based Democrats and Republicans agreed on a number of issues related to curtailing labor rights, limiting federal intervention, and generally opposing civil rights and welfare, the new urban Republicans pushed an agenda of economic development and modernization for the state, a move that helped bring about the establishment of the Department of Corrections in 1968, which many rural Democrats opposed. The new liberal Democrats were at odds with both of the other groups on social justice issues, but along with the new Republicans, they supported infrastructural growth, modernization, and governmental reform.

By the 1960s, even though the state and its political systems were undergoing rapid changes, the political ethos had several enduring features that can be called “Arizonan” in character and that persist in the state to this day. First, there has been a consistent overriding sentiment across Arizona’s populace of distrusting government, state or federal. This distrust includes a moderate disdain for expansive state bureaucratization and agency building. Second, the values of individualism and self-reliance continue to play out in the political culture such that governmental regulation of the social and economic spheres is viewed skeptically, spending on social welfare is done only begrudgingly, and most importantly, fiscal frugality is the guiding principle for all government endeavors. Although many state governments espouse fiscal temperance as an operational principle, here it is an explicit requirement, so successful appropriations requests are generally framed in language that foremost emphasizes the long-term savings that might be gained through a given expenditure, and at the very least, that demonstrates how the budget is as cost-effective as possible.

Coupled with this is a reluctance of the polity to pay for governmental services through traditional income tax, so the state’s budget base disproportionately relies on a regressive sales tax funding scheme that disguises the cost of governing for the taxpayers of the state.¹ Finally, Arizona is a state that, politically speaking, has historically endorsed the concept of less eligibility and stern punishment in dealing with wrongdoers. Thus, criminal offenders have generally garnered no sympathy from legislators or the justice system, and there has been little concern with their welfare.

This political ethos first became widely known at the national level with the rise of Barry Goldwater’s political career. Although he first gained success as a Republican during the Democratic reign in the state when he was elected a U.S. senator in 1952, his political philosophy reflected the Arizona blend of traditionalist values and libertarianism. His political visibility skyrocketed in 1964 when he ran for and won the Republican Party nomination for president after a divisive primary battle with the more liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. At the time, Goldwater was considered an extremist who was out of touch with American values by many, even within the Republican Party. Yet his outlook, which was seen as so radical in many parts of the nation, was quite mainstream for Arizona. More importantly, his rise in political power has been credited with catalyzing the New Right that has since reshaped U.S. political life (McGirr, 2001). Among the core messages in Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential campaign was one that lauded law and order, particularly in response to civil unrest. This message stayed alive even after his defeat and was reshaped by Sunbelt politicians such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan during their presidential campaigns (McGirr, 2001).

ARIZONA-STYLE PUNISHMENT

This political culture has clearly shaped a number of governmental functions into the present, including the state’s response to crime, criminal offenders, and the problem of justice. Not only do state politics, including state and local partisan politics, directly affect the contours of the penal system, but the underlying political cultural values described above run through the state’s penal history.

Up until the creation of the Arizona Department of Corrections in 1968, the few penal functions that existed in the state operated independently of each other and generally with little organizational or bureaucratic oversight. Thus, each institution and organization had considerable autonomy, and internal operations were well insulated from outside scrutiny. Juvenile institutional placements and parole were governed by the Board of Directors of State Institutions for Juveniles, a five-member lay board appointed by the governor; however, each state-run and contracted juvenile institution operated autonomously, creating its own internal rules and determining release dates for its charges. Adult incarceration was the sole purview of the superintendent/warden of the lone state prison in Florence; adult parole release was overseen by a three-person part-time board (the board was increased to five members in the mid-1960s); and parole supervision was a subsidiary operation of that board, inadequately funded to do much supervision of parolees and run by a director who also worked as a parole officer.

Perhaps the most detailed picture of the pre–corrections department, mid-twentieth-century penal “system” in Arizona comes from a 1958 published evaluation titled Correctional Services in Arizona, which was commissioned by the Arizona Legislative Council and conducted by the National Probation and Parole Association, the predecessor to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (National Probation and Parole Association, 1958). The evaluation studied five aspects of Arizona corrections, broadly defined: policing of juveniles at the local level, probation services in the state, the state Industrial School for boys and the largest contracted school for delinquent girls, the adult state prison, and the adult parole system. The evaluation pointed out the disconnection among these services and institutions, rendering the state without a unified system of corrections and without a means for unified planning.

It also determined that several penal options were underutilized, in particular, county-level probation for juveniles and adults and parole release for adult offenders. Many of those in state institutions, the report suggested, should more appropriately be on county-level probation supervision, but the limited number of probation officers, low levels of training and professionalization, and inadequate resources for local supervision needs across the state’s counties pushed offenders into state facilities. Once there, according to the report, disproportionately few (compared with other states) were released on parole before their sentences expired. This created two problems in the view of the evaluators: it increased the chance for failure upon release when offenders were not supervised, and it cost the state considerable money because it is much more expensive to incarcerate rather than provide community supervision. Although judges had broad discretion in sentencing felony offenders—the state’s penal code allowed judges to set any range of minimum and maximum sentences under the indeterminate sentencing statutes that had existed since statehood—prison sentences were often handed out in cases that would otherwise be more suitable for local options because of the limited resources at the county level.

Again the evaluation pointed out the antiquated structure of parole release and supervision in the state; inadequate funding of parole, which required the three parole officers who supervised parolees across the entire state to manage caseloads nearly three times the recommended load; and the lack of professionalization and training of the staff, especially in terms of “modern” correctional techniques. In particular, the evaluators noted the absence of a rehabilitative edge to the state’s community corrections philosophy and practices. Probation, not only underused for nonserious offenders, offered little support to probationers that would aim to reduce the risk of recidivism. Similarly, the parole supervision services in the state were so inadequate that the agents refused to do their one “rehabilitative” duty—to help their parolees find a job—because they felt if they helped one parolee, everyone else on their caseload would clamor for such assistance. This style of parole supervision was institutionalized even further when a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, William Drew, was appointed in 1966 as executive director of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. Perhaps as a consequence of his law enforcement background, Drew made parole revocations a priority for supervision officers and even set quotas for minimum numbers of revocations per parole officer. Consequently, parole supervision functioned more like law enforcement, where agents were encouraged to put their parolees under surveillance, to see whether they could be caught violating parole, rather than helping them adjust to life outside prison.

The sections of the report that dealt with the state’s juvenile and adult institutions similarly emphasized how antiquated, underfunded, and unregulated they were. Furthermore, the report pointedly noted that none of the penal institutions or other correctional agencies effectively engaged in rehabilitation, and little or no psychological or psychiatric services were available throughout the system. Thus, the evaluators’ major recommendation to the legislative council was to form a Board and Department of Corrections to coordinate the state and local correctional activities and to introduce some needed but currently nonexistent services to the state. In the recommenders’ words, “a scientific rather than archaic approach is required” by the state to deal with the growing offender population and its attendant challenges (National Probation and Parole Association, 1958: 154).

In its appendix, the evaluation diagrammed a model structure for this board/department, which would directly oversee juvenile and adult state institutions, state-run penal camps, local jails, and juvenile and adult parole supervision services. It would also be responsible for coordinating with the criminal and juvenile courts and with a reorganized, professionalized Board of Pardons and Paroles, which would oversee only release decisions. It would modernize the system and ideally adopt a rehabilitative philosophy in all of its operations. This model became the blueprint for the new department formed a decade later.

JUVENILE “CORRECTIONS,” 1912–68

The state Industrial School at Fort Grant, which had been in operation since statehood was achieved, was the only state-run facility for juveniles until 1967 when the Arizona Youth Center opened. The institution, originally named the State Industrial School for Wayward Boys and Girls, opened in 1912, replacing a perennially troubled industrial school at Benson that had been in operation since 1901. The new school’s location was established when the federal government turned a shuttered territorial military post, Fort Grant, over to the state in conjunction with granting statehood to Arizona. This site was in a geographically isolated, rural area of eastern Arizona that was nearly a four-hour drive from Phoenix and was accessible only by an unpaved road. Girls were housed in the Fort Grant Industrial School into the 1930s and then briefly moved to another state-run site, but from the late 1930s until 1972, they were sent to private, mainly religious-based contracted facilities such as the Catholic Good Shepherd School for Girls in Phoenix.

Leadership at Fort Grant was, as at the adult prison, the product of political patronage, so the institution underwent numerous superintendent turnovers and a series of scandals during its existence. The institution relied on a generous definition of “reasonable corporal punishment” to maintain order, and it offered very little to the wards in terms of programs and services for rehabilitation. Because of its isolation, and because of the structural limitations of state oversight at the time, internal operations at Fort Grant were functionally unregulated throughout...