Backed by Ballard Spahr, The Republic wins legal fight against Department of Corrections
The Arizona Republic has settled a legal action against the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry and its former director after obtaining practically all of its demands.
The Republic filed the action in June 2022 while reporting The Prison Sell, a prize-winning, deep dive investigation into the state’s exploitation of prisoners.
Reporters Joseph Darius Jaafari, Jimmy Jenkins and Justin Price had asked the department for information about prison jobs, injuries and punishment for not showing up for work. But prison officials denied those requests.
They even refused to provide a list of prisoners currently held in custody.
The Republic was able to get around the Department’s denial by designing a computer program to scrape the Department of Corrections’ front-end website, gathering information about every person incarcerated since 1980 based on prisoner ID numbers. The data included crimes committed, sentencing information, demographic data, movement inside and outside prison, parole data, and work history. From that, The Republic constructed the most comprehensive prisoner database ever assembled outside the Arizona Department of Corrections.
The database allowed The Republic to complete its investigation. But the data wasn’t perfect. So the newspaper retained Ballard Spahr to compel the state to release fields of information from its prison management system database, which contains everything from demographic information about prisoners to their work history and wages to their movement within cell blocks.
“The Republic will always fight in the public's interest for transparency," said Greg Burton, The Republic’s executive editor, "especially when public officials seek to hide the truth behind layers of denials and delays."
A year later, The Republic prevailed.
The Department of Corrections not only agreed to provide anonymized data about prisoner work histories, job qualifications and movements between prisons, it also agreed to pay $40,000 in attorneys fees.
“These are precisely the type of records that Arizona law requires to be open to the public, because they show what the government is doing with the authority and funding the people of Arizona provide,” said Matthew E. Kelley, who represented The Republic on behalf of Ballard Spahr. “While it’s disappointing that the department fought to keep these records hidden, this outcome demonstrates that the public’s right to know what their government is doing will prevail.”
The data will permit the Republic to write follow up stories that will show how the prison system chooses prisoners for work details and whether it honors its commitments to train them so they can stay out of prison in the future.
The victory was the second major win for The Republic and its attorneys at Ballard Spahr over an Arizona law enforcement agency this decade. The first was in the summer of 2021 when a Superior Court judge ruled that the Arizona Department of Public Safety repeatedly violated public records law by failing to respond to the newspaper’s requests for information about Governor Doug Ducey’s Border Strike Force.
Back then, investigative reporter Richard Ruelas had to wait 18 months for the Department of Public Safety to respond to one of his requests – one of most egregious delays he had seen in his career, according to Ballard Spahr attorney David Bodney.
The end result in that case was the same.
The Department of Public Safety was forced to pay The Republic $45,000 in attorney fees.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Republic will obtain prisoner database from DOC after legal victory
