Marshall Project, an online news site covering the legal system and immigration. He expressed concern about jails as nexuses of community spread. Most people in jail are only there for a few weeks or months, he noted. “It’s like having a cruise ship in every county with people cycling in and out and lots of community spread. I am frustrated that this is an untold story happening all over the country. There is one county jail in Georgia that had 100 cases this week, 30 involving staff.” These outbreaks are popping up and are often unre- ported in the media, he said. Neff added that prisons have been
slow to test both incarcerated people and staff members. Part of the reason wardens may not want to test staff is that they are so understaffed already. “When prisons did mass testing, they found mass infection. Prison wardens have been slow to test because they don’t want to know what is going on in their facilities,” he said. It makes sense when you consider the crisis of short staffing in prisons. “In North Carolina state prisons are 25 to 30 percent understaffed. In Mississippi, only 50 percent of positions are filled. I believe they don’t want to know how infected the staff is because they don’t want to scare any more employees away. That is a managerial challenge to them.” One way to deal with the situation
would be to send more incarcerated people home early, Neff noted. Many are on work release and are trusted to go out into the community every day but return to the prison to sleep at night. “There is a real resistance to letting people out,” Neff said. He cited the following numbers for the first three months of pandemic — March, April, and May — concerning pris- oners who applied for compassionate relief because they are old and/or sick and don’t have much time left on their sentences. In those three months, 10,940 applied. Of those, wardens approved 156, less than 1.5 percent. The rest were denied or ignored. Of the 156 approved, 84 were submitted to the federal Bureau of Prisons, which denied 73 of the 84. So it approved 11 of 11,000 who applied, Neff said.
‘Atrocious conditions’ Maria Morris, J.D.; senior staff attorney for the National Prison Project at the ACLU, also spoke at the event. She said that one of the things that tends to happen when a natural disaster or any other kind of disaster arises is that prisons and jails are forgotten about. “We began sounding the alarm early on to think through how prisons and jails dealt with the illness, because
facility in Butner prison had a sig- nificant outbreak and several people died. On June 1, they decided to do a round of mass testing. “Unfortunately, they didn’t do anything with the test results until June 10. The case numbers were jumping by 200 per day and had reached 600 in that facility out of 1,100 total inmates. They divided them up into housing units by whether they had tested positive or negative 10 days ear-
“We knew that once in, COVID- 19 would tear through prisons doing terrible harm. As the months wore on, we have been litigating with some, but not great, success for the most part. Appellate courts have not been very receptive to these cases.” -- Maria Morris, J.D.
there are so many factors about the way they function that made it almost a certainty that what has happened would happen,” Morris said. “We knew that once in, COVID-19 would tear through prisons doing terrible harm. As the months wore on, we have been litigating with some, but not great, success for the most part. Appellate courts have not been very receptive to these cases.” “What we have seen have been
atrocious conditions,” Morris added. “Separate from COVID, prisons have problems of being crowded and not having very good medical care, and high populations of people that have the vulnerabilities that are likely to result in serious cases of COVID and death — high levels of diabetes, hyper- tension and lung diseases. In addition, they don’t tend to be the cleanest of places,” she explained, adding that even in places where there is a policy of wearing masks, staff and incarcer- ated people are not wearing masks con- sistently, and they tend to have poor quality masks. “What is being reported is the number of positive tests. They are not doing a good job of quarantining or isolating patients and when they are isolated, it is in solitary confinement, which carries its own risks.” She gave one example from North Carolina in June.
Its low-security
lier, even though they were all in close contact that whole time. People were placed in negative units, even though they now had symptoms. So the testing didn’t have the impact it could have if they had acted upon it in a timely way.” Brinkley-Rubinstein added that lag
times in lab results and an inability to do contact tracing and quarantining — issues that haven’t been mastered in the community at large— are so much worse in these settings. In response to an audience question, she said that how vaccines will be distributed in prisons and jails is another issue that will need to be addressed from an ethical frame- work and with the input of incarcerated people. By midsummer, it becoming clear
that very few judges had an appetite for a broad release of people from pris- ons and even jails, Morris said. “There was some movement with jails trying to bring populations down somewhat by limiting people they were bringing in. As the attention started waning, you would see jail populations tick- ing back up. The focus has been more on trying to improve conditions. But they needed to address the risk and they weren’t doing that. We are still pushing forward with litigation to keep the pressure up. We are trying to keep scrutiny from the public and courts on prisons and jails.” HI
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