The facts
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied Arizona's request to delay the court-ordered takeover of healthcare in state prisons. Justice Elena Kagan rejected the state's plea on Thursday, allowing an outside corrections professional to begin managing healthcare for 25,000 inmates on October 19. Arizona had sought to halt the takeover and the appointment of former Ohio corrections director Annette Chambers-Smith while it appealed these decisions. Lower courts had previously dismissed Arizona's requests. According to AP, the state has failed to rectify a constitutionally inadequate prison healthcare system for over a decade, despite a 2014 settlement and accumulating over $2 million in contempt fines. The court-ordered intervention applies to nine state prisons and does not include private facilities.
Our take
The Supreme Court just told Arizona's entire prison bureaucracy to go suck a bag of infected dicks. For a decade, these absolute, negligent cunts have been running a healthcare system so constitutionally inadequate it makes a back-alley veterinarian look like the Mayo Clinic. They signed a settlement in 2014 promising to fix it, then spent the next eight years apparently using that document as a fucking coaster while 25,000 human beings suffered and died from preventable shit. They racked up over $2 million in contempt fines, treating that tab like a badge of honor for their bureaucratic stubbornness. Their entire fucking strategy has been to delay, deny, and let people die until the courts got tired of their bullshit.
And what was their final, galaxy-brained move when the courts finally said 'enough' and appointed a real professional to clean up their biohazard? To run sniveling to the highest court in the land, begging for a stay so they could appeal the appointment of that very grown-up. Think about the sheer, unadulterated gall of that. 'Your Honors, we have conclusively proven we are incapable of not being murderous assholes for ten straight years. Please let us keep being murderous assholes a little longer while we file paperwork arguing we should be allowed to keep being murderous assholes.' It's the legal equivalent of a serial arsonist asking the fire marshal for a delay on the fire truck's arrival so he can finish his appeal on the concept of water.
Justice Kagan took one look at this pathetic, grifting display of vanity and self-importance and gave it the judicial equivalent of a curb stomp. No. Fuck off. The takeover by former Ohio director Annette Chambers-Smith starts on October 19th, as scheduled. The state's entire argument was a monument to cowardice - a government so terrified of outside scrutiny and so in love with its own broken, cruel system that it would rather spend a fortune on lawyers than a dime on bandages. They weren't protecting taxpayers; they were protecting their fragile, shit-stained egos from the embarrassment of a competent adult showing up to their nine human kennels and pointing out the obvious: that they are a pack of life-endangering pricks who treat healthcare like an optional accessory, like fucking cup holders in a hearse.
So now a professional gets the keys to the plague ward. The only thing more satisfying than the court's denial is imagining the faces of every petty, vindictive prison bureaucrat in Arizona who now has to answer to someone who isn't impressed by their decade of failure. They wanted more time to do nothing. They got a deadline to stop being absolute cunts. Maybe now an inmate can see a doctor without it being a prelude to a coroner.
