Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office repeatedly asked the ACLU and Prison Law Office for attorney recruits to handle corrections work, groups that spent years suing the state’s prisons.
Fox News Digital obtained internal emails showing Chief Deputy Attorney General Daniel Barr repeatedly sought recruiting help in 2023 from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Berkeley-based Prison Law Office for lawyers to handle Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry work.
Barr asked those groups for candidates to staff ADCRR matters inside the attorney general’s office and later for people who might serve as ADCRR general counsel, even as both organizations had spent years pressing prison-conditions lawsuits and pushing policies to shrink incarceration.
Mayes has cast herself as a “moderate.” The outreach puts that brand next to groups whose records run the other way on prisons, policing, and custody levels.
In February 2023, Barr emailed ACLU and Prison Law Office representatives with a clear request. He wanted ADCRR legal work pulled back in-house and needed lawyers to do it.
Barr wrote:
"I am looking to bring as much ADCRR work back in-house as possible in the Arizona AG’s office. To do that, I need to hire attorneys to represent ADCRR in numerous capacities. If you know of anyone who may be interested in helping to turnaround things around here, please let me know,"
ACLU National Prison Project Director David Fathi asked for a phone conversation. Barr answered two minutes later.
In April 2023, Barr again sought names for the ADCRR general counsel post and forwarded the solicitation to Prison Law Office and ACLU contacts. On May 11, 2023, he followed up once more.
Barr wrote:
"Still no takers for the ADCRR general counsel job. If you have any suggestions, please let me know,"
Fathi answered that same day and promised to “redouble” his efforts. Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project, replied that one possible recommendation was already “enjoying suing ADCRR in civil rights damages cases in her spare time of running her café in Carrizozo.”
By June 2023, longtime Prison Law Office attorney Don Specter reported a “productive meeting” with the head of ADCRR. In a separate message, Fathi said the ADCRR director had reached out to him “to schedule a call about working together on ADCRR issues.”
Fox News Digital obtained the email traffic, not call transcripts or meeting minutes. The record does not show what further help, if any, followed those exchanges.
Barr was not a stranger to either group. While a partner at Perkins Coie, he spent years litigating alongside the ACLU and the Prison Law Office in a federal case that ended with a judge finding Arizona’s prison conditions constitutionally inadequate.
That history helps explain the easy tone in the 2023 messages. It also sharpens the conflict for an attorney general’s office charged with defending the state’s corrections system.
The ACLU has pursued a nationwide goal of cutting jail and prison populations by 50% through policy changes. The Prison Law Office litigates prison conditions, medical care, disability access, and solitary confinement, and it has a long California record aimed at reducing prison populations.
Fathi has been blunt about enforcement tools. On X he wrote, “we will never solve drug problems with police and prisons.”
Those are not the priorities of sheriffs, line officers, or communities dealing with fentanyl and repeat offenders. They are the priorities of groups that treat custody itself as the problem.
Mayes won the attorney general’s race in 2022 by 280 votes, one of the narrowest margins in state history. She is running again and faces Republican state Sen. Warren Petersen, the Senate president, in November’s general election.
During the 2022 campaign she answered “a resounding no” when asked whether she supported defunding the police. Her campaign website says she has been “a partner to law enforcement, delivering millions of dollars in funding and resources so border sheriffs and Arizona police can keep us safe,” and that she has “locked up drug cartel members, seized more than 27 million deadly fentanyl pills off of our streets and gone after criminals trying to take advantage of our kids.”
Campaign manager Delaney Corcoran answered the email story with a defense of that record and a swipe at the coverage.
Corcoran said:
"Maybe FOX News should start with the facts: The ACLU has repeatedly sued Kris Mayes over issues where they disagreed with her,"
Corcoran added that Mayes “has consistently fought for funding for Arizona police and cartel task forces and stands shoulder to shoulder with Arizona sheriffs and police,” and that Mayes and law enforcement “have seized 27 million fentanyl pills off of our streets, more than any other attorney general in state history.”
The office has defended Arizona against some ACLU suits, including challenges to laws on arrests of people illegally entering between ports of entry and on filming police. It later settled the police-filming case and agreed to permanently prohibit the recording law the ACLU called unconstitutional.
Partnership on some dockets does not erase the choice to mine the same networks for corrections counsel. Voters can weigh both facts at once.
ADCRR later hired Ashley Oddo as general counsel. She previously led Arizona State University’s Academy for Justice. Fox reported she has backed several criminal-justice positions associated with the left, including addressing systemic racism in policing and pardoning people convicted of nonviolent federal marijuana offenses.
Oddo had no institutional tie to the ACLU or the Prison Law Office, and neither group named her in the Barr emails. Barr, Fathi, Oddo, Specter, Kendrick, the attorney general’s office, the ACLU, and the Prison Law Office did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
The hiring still closed the loop on the search Barr kept shopping to groups that sue prisons for a living. The state needed a general counsel for its corrections department. The chief deputy kept asking the plaintiffs’ side for names.
Arizona’s attorney general is supposed to defend lawful custody, secure facilities, and the officers who run them. Shopping the ACLU and the Prison Law Office for that talent is not a moderate errand, no matter how the campaign brochure reads.
