Arizona prisoner alleges warden ordered 'inmate-on-inmate discipline,' hundreds of beatings

Shocking claims made in a federal courtroom in downtown Phoenix on Monday call into question the very fundamentals of incarceration in Arizona.

According to testimony from a civil trial in U.S. District Court that pits a prisoner against his captors, there is an accepted way to run a state correctional facility, and then there is "The Lewis Way."

One would normally expect corrections officers to be in charge of security at a prison, where incarcerated people are locked in cells.

But Phoenix attorney Andrea Driggs this week described a starkly contrasting picture to a federal jury. Depicting operations at the Lewis Prison in Buckeye, she turned that notion completely on its head in dramatic fashion.

Driggs, an attorney with the firm Perkins Coie, presented the case of Earl Fenton Crago, Jr., a 50-year-old incarcerated man who says he was retaliated against after blowing the whistle on dangerous security conditions he said threaten the lives of prisoners.

At Lewis, the prisoners run the security, and incarcerated people are able to leave their cells as often as they please, Driggs told jurors.

Subsequent courtroom testimony from both prisoners and corrections officers on Tuesday reinforced this view.

Crago alleges in his civil rights lawsuit that the conditions at Lewis were so bad in 2019 that they amounted to deliberate indifference, and as a result, veteran corrections administrators should be held liable for a pattern of abuse.

“How could it be possible that the men and women charged with maintaining safety in a prison could end up in court?” Driggs asked. “We need to go back to 2018, but the problems started at least a decade earlier.”

Crago is alleging that while he served some of his 25-year murder sentence at Lewis, the deputy warden sanctioned a program of “inmate-on-inmate discipline.” Crago claims wardens promised him and other prisoners additional privileges, beneficial treatment and immunity from disciplinary infractions if they helped maintain security at the prison.

In her opening statement of the five-day trial on Monday, Driggs presented the jury with memos from prison administrators that showed they were concerned with “very serious issues” regarding the prison doors at Lewis in 2018.

Those issues would later become public in 2019, when Corrections Officer Gabriela Contreras leaked footage to the media showing prisoners could open their cell doors at Lewis and attack each other and prison employees.

But before the media reports exposed the problem, Driggs said administrators at Lewis were taking highly unorthodox steps to address the safety issues.

Crago alleges that after prison officials found out the locks at Lewis could be tampered with, Deputy Warden Joseph Pitz met with prisoners, including Crago, and asked them for help keeping other prisoners in their cells. Crago alleges Pitz explicitly gave them permission to use force against other prisoners, which led to “hundreds of beatings.”

In exchange, Crago alleges Pitz promised perks like good prison jobs, extended recreation and restoration of lost privileges. He even committed to bringing a prisoner back onto the yard who was a known source of drugs and contraband, Crago claimed in court.

Crago declined the offer, and instead began filing complaints and grievances about the safety conditions at Lewis, which, he alleged, caused Pitz to retaliate against him. According to Crago’s civil complaint, he was then attacked several times by other prisoners who said Pitz sent them to silence him.

Crago's attorneys claim the attacks happened in early 2019, alleging Pitz directed prisoners to assault, strangle and stab Crago on three separate occasions. They claim Pitz specifically told Crago's attackers to jump him in areas of the prison where they would not be seen on camera.

Crago also alleges that Pitz threatened him and other prisoners to not seek medical treatment after they were attacked, so as to not alert anyone else at the prison of the assaults. Crago said he complied.

In the lawsuit, Crago alleges prison officials violated his Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment by failing to keep him safe, and his First Amendment rights when Pitz retaliated against him for speaking out.

Crago alleges understaffing at Lewis made conditions even more dangerous.

Separately, prison whistleblowers told The Arizona Republic that conditions at the prison are leading to an unsafe working environment that is causing their colleagues to quit and contributing to the deaths of prisoners.

Crago is seeking monetary compensation and a court order to improve prison security.

The trial is being overseen by U.S. District Court Judge Roslyn Silver, who presided over a class action lawsuit that went to trial last fall, in which prisoners alleged unconstitutional health care and custody conditions.

In July, Silver ruled in favor of the prisoners, calling the Arizona prison health care system "plainly grossly inadequate." Silver has since appointed several experts who she said will assist her with "crafting an injunction that remedies the constitutional violations" in that previous case.

Defense: 'His story doesn't add up'

Defense Attorney Laura Van Buren told the jury in openings statements on Monday that Crago’s claims were false. She portrayed him as unreliable and called attention to his disciplinary tickets received for promoting prison contraband.

"The evidence will show his story doesn't add up," argued the lawyer from the Wieneke Law Group.

Contrary to the way Crago's attorneys depicted the Department of Corrections, Van Buren argued that Arizona prison administrators "took proactive and practical steps" to deal with faulty locks as they discovered problems.

“We will present evidence of corrections officials showing up to work focused on their mission — safety and security,” Van Buren said. “They were actively working toward a solution.”

In addition to Pitz, who is now retired, the other named defendants in the lawsuit are former Director Charles Ryan, current Director David Shinn, retired Northern Region Operations Director Ernest Trujillo, retired Warden Berry Larson, and Warden Gerald Thompson.

All of the defendants except Shinn were present in court on Monday, where they listened to the testimony against them, and watched videos played by the plaintiff's attorneys of corrections officers being beaten by prisoners at the Lewis prison.

Ryan is facing separate criminal charges stemming from an hourslong armed standoff with police at his Tempe home in January.

Attorneys for Pitz say he denies making any instruction for prisoners to use force on other prisoners, and maintained that all of the defendants deny that their conduct violated Crago’s constitutional rights.

Pitz is expected to defend his actions on the stand later this week.

Former chief justice takes the stand

After the Lewis lock issue was made public, Gov. Doug Ducey ordered an independent investigation that was conducted by former state Supreme Court Justices Rebecca White Berch and Ruth V. McGregor.

Plaintiff's attorneys called White Berch as the first witness of the trial on Monday, highlighting parts of the report that confirmed several of Crago’s allegations.

White Berch testified the two justices found mentions of malfunctioning doors at Lewis in records from as early as 2003, and that those problems escalated in recent years. She said her investigation found prisoners could put foreign objects like plastic pen caps in the paths of prison doors that could make them appear secure when they were not actually locked.

“It became more severe,” White Berch said. “It came to a point where they were able to much more freely UA their doors — which means unauthorized access. It means the inmates can get out of their cells without permission.”

White Berch told the court that records provided to her and McGregor by the Corrections Department about the Lewis prison were “difficult to decipher” and “often incomplete.”

She said several of the reports from prison leadership showed improper reporting practices.

“We determined that the reports were quite inaccurate so we weren’t able to determine the magnitude of the problem with any certainty,” White Berch said.

White Berch said she was dismayed to learn about the reports filed by Crago, because they were not supplied to her during the investigation as they should have been.

Critical to Crago’s allegations, White Berch testified that interviews she conducted, as well as videos and reports she reviewed, appeared to show an inmate-on-inmate disciplinary system.

“There were at least four corrections officers who reported that there was a program that involved using inmates to control other inmates,” she said. “We concluded that the ability to get out of one’s cell did contribute to assaults.”

White Berch said they also concluded that assaults at Lewis had been underreported.

“A lot of them were not reported because COs (corrections officers) didn’t want to take the time to do reports,” White Berch said. “Sometimes they didn’t feel there would be discipline if they did file a report.”

Incarcerated people testify from prison

Another prisoner, Kelvin Barnett, appeared in Judge Silver's courtroom Tuesday morning on a large monitor that was flickering from red to green to orange, the color of his prison issued shirt. Testifying remotely from the Lewis Prison, Barnett told the jury that short staffing and flawed prison locks had created a terrible security situation where prisoners have the ability to leave their cells at will.

“It’s a daily thing," Barnett said. "If you wanna get out of your cell — you jimmy the lock.”

Barnett said things have been bad at Lewis for several years, but when Pitz became a deputy warden, his new administration began to lean on prisoners more and more to enforce security among themselves.

Barnett recalled a town hall meeting in 2018 where he and a dozen other prisoners met with prison administrators to discuss how to improve conditions.

"The prison doors were not secure and inmates were running rampant in the pods," Barnett testified.

Barnett then imitated Pitz's instructions to the prisoners gathered at the town hall.

"He put his fingers up like this (demonstrating air quotes) and said he couldn't ask us to 'regulate' the situation, but he told us we had to take care of it and keep things in line."

Barnett says he and the other prisoner enforcers knew what this meant. They were allowed to use physical force to keep unruly prisoners who left their cell too often in check, but only within certain limits.

"He didn't want any ambulances or helicopter flights," Barnett said. "In other words, he didn't want anybody getting beaten so bad that they had to be airlifted out to a hospital. But we knew if we kept the beatings to a minimum, he was OK with it."

Barnett said that while almost every cell in his unit at the time could be opened by the prisoner at any time they wanted, doing so in front of a higher level prison supervisor would look bad, and could not be tolerated.

"If you disregarded them and came out of your cell when they were around, then you probably got jumped on," he said. "You got beat. You got hands put on you, in other words."

Barnett told the jury he saw that happen to prisoners at least 40 times.

In exchange for the vigilante justice, Barnett said Pitz offered the prisoner enforcers more freedoms.

"We would get more recreation, more outdoor time," Barnett said. "They offered to put in video games, give us a PlayStation. They offered to give us movie nights where they would bring movies in from the streets and let us watch them."

Barnett said the agreement gave him the ability to roam the prison grounds freely and live without interference from the actual security staff.

"Our cells are not searched. We weren’t harassed by staff at all," he said. "If I wanted to come out of my cell and go hang out in another inmate's cell, I could do that. I could go from one building to the next building if I needed to, and I did that frequently."

He testified that prison staff knew not to give him and the other prisoner enforcers disciplinary tickets, and even if they did, Pitz would make them disappear.

Despite the agreement, Barnett said prisoners would still leave their cells in large numbers. He estimated that in certain units at Lewis, at least 10 of the 25 cell doors do not lock properly.

On one evening, Barnett recalled 23 of the 25 cell doors in his pod were unlocked with prisoners roaming freely.

When asked specifically if Barnett assaulted Crago, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But he later admitted that he told Crago "he needed to watch his back because the DW (deputy warden) wanted him silenced."

Testifying next from a different unit at Lewis, Arturo Flores was more forthcoming. When asked if Pitz asked him to beat up Crago, Flores testified "yes."

Flores said he saw Crago as a snitch for writing complaints about Pitz, which he believed made things worse on the unit for everyone.

When asked directly if he assaulted Crago at Pitz's direction, Flores freely admitted it.

"Yeah," he said. "If you’re making my time harder, of course I'll come kick your ass."

"I don’t agree with snitching on officers," Flores said. He said he believed because Crago had written grievances about Pitz, he was justified in beating him up.

"At the end of the day, I did wrong, and it is what it is," Flores said.

Addressing the jury, Driggs said: “You are going to determine what kind of prison system are we going to have in Arizona by determining if the defendants are responsible for the violence Mr. Crago suffered."

More prisoners, corrections officers, the current and former directors of the Department of Corrections, and other high level administrators are expected to take the stand this week.

Day three of the trial on Wednesday picks up with Shaun Holland, a former Lewis corrections officer, resuming his testimony.

Have a news tip on Arizona prisons? Reach the reporter at jjenkins@arizonarepublic.com or at 812-243-5582. Follow him on Twitter @JimmyJenkins.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona prisoner: Lewis warden ordered 'inmate-on-inmate discipline'