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Prison
Wants to Dump No-Arm, One-Legged
Inmate
PHOENIX (APBnews.com) -- Deborah
Lynn Quinn is the envy of 26,000 convicted
criminals doing time in Arizona
prisons.
Quinn was sentenced to a year in the
slammer for violating probation on a
charge of attempting to sell marijuana,
but now the state's top corrections
official wants to kick her out of prison
and send her home.
The reason? Quinn is almost totally
disabled and too expensive to keep
incarcerated.
The divorced mother has no arms, no
right leg and a partial left leg, needing
a battery-powered wheelchair to get
around.
'She cannot take care of
herself'
When Quinn was sentenced to prison by a
Mohave County judge, Corrections Director
Terry L. Stewart went on the warpath,
saying that caring for Quinn will cost
taxpayers $130,000 -- money that could be
better spent.
"I simply cannot understand how a judge
can sentence a disabled woman to prison
who presents absolutely no escape risk, no
physical danger to the public and who will
be an extremely difficult and expensive
person to care for, without exploring any
alternative sentencing measures such as
intensive probation," Stewart said.
"She cannot take care of herself,"
added Camilla Strongin, a spokeswoman for
the Arizona Department of Corrections.
"She has no arms and legs and a small
stump with a toe on it that she uses to
operate a wheelchair. She has to be fed,
bathed and needs help going to the
bathroom. She can't even clothe
herself."
Option of home monitoring
Quinn, 39, hasn't even been booked into
the Arizona State Prison Complex in
Perryville, where women are housed.
Instead, corrections officials said they
took Quinn directly to St. Mary's Hospital
in Tucson, which is contracted to provide
hospital service to inmates.
Strongin said Stewart is now
considering granting Quinn a medical
furlough and sending her home. Court
records indicate that at the time of her
sentencing, there was discussion about
fitting Quinn with an electronic
monitoring device, but questions arose
over whether it would work.
The case of the unwanted felon began
earlier this month when Mohave County
Superior Court Judge Richard Weiss
sentenced Quinn to a year in prison for
violating her probation for selling
marijuana from her home.
The Kingman woman had been placed on
probation by Weiss on Oct. 1 after
pleading guilty to attempted sale of
marijuana to an undercover police
officer.
Conduct 'left us no
alternative'
About three months later, probation
officers conducted a search of her home
and found three or four ounces of
marijuana, scales and other drug
paraphernalia. Quinn told officers that
she smokes marijuana to relax and is not a
dealer. She said that due to her handicap,
she has lots of friends who visit her.
But Jace Zack, chief deputy county
attorney in Mohave, said that prosecutors
and the judge had no choice but to send
Quinn to jail for a year.
"I'm glad Terry Stewart is concerned
about cost of incarceration. However, the
conduct of Mrs. Quinn left us no
alternative," Zack said. "She was dealing
drugs out of her home, put on probation,
and three months later she possessed drugs
for sale in her home.
"If she wasn't punished, she would have
a free rein to deal drugs forever. Home
arrest is ludicrous when she is dealing
drugs out of her home. In short, there was
no other alternative."
No employment history
Court records show that Quinn is
disabled due to a birth defect. She has
been married twice and is separated from
her second husband. She has a 5-year-old
son. Court records say that her estranged
husband was jailed for beating her.
Investigators said that Quinn has no
history of employment, receiving $700 a
month in Social Security and Aid to
Families with Dependent Children. She also
owns a home.
Court documents say that Quinn told
probation officers that she drinks up to
12 beers per week and smokes three
marijuana cigarettes. She indicted that
the marijuana was for her own personal
use, which she uses to relax, and that she
has not exposed her child to the drug.
Quinn has declined all requests for
interviews, corrections officials
said.
Inmate health care
skyrockets
Prison administrators across the United
States say that inmate health care has
strained budgets in recent years. In
Arizona, the average cost of medical care
for prisoners has gone from $2,085 per
inmate in 1993 to more than $2,571 in
1999, corrections officials said.
Prisons now have to spend money on
inmates whose maladies range from AIDS to
severe mental disorders. And a growing
number of inmates who were sentenced to
long prison sentences have become old
behind bars, requiring more medical
care.
"You're caught between a rock and a
hard place," said Mark Fitzgibbons,
president of the American Jail Association
and director of the Beaufort County
Detention Center in South Carolina. "You
do what the judge tells you to do. I had a
guy paralyzed from the waist down and had
to set up a special cell for him. He had
bedsores and everything else. But every
time he got out of jail, he would go back
to selling narcotics."
By Robert A Phillips, an
APBnews.com staff writer
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