Virus cases spike in prisons after inmate transfers

The coronavirus has killed more than 300,000 people in the U.S., and cases are rising again this winter after leveling off in the late summer months. There have been more than 275,000 cases inside U.S. prisons. Prisons are a particular concern because social distancing is virtually nonexistent behind bars, prisoners sleep in close quarters and share bathrooms, and each prison has varying policies on personal protective equipment and who gets it.

Oklahoma’s prisons reported relatively few cases of COVID19 until state officials closed several units because of budget cuts, transferring more than 4,500 prisoners between facilities from late July to September. Major outbreaks followed, with more than 5,800 prisoners testing positive and at least 33 dying from the virus.

In Amarillo, Texas, officers who worked at the Neal Unit prison were proud the facility remained unscathed by the virus, but that changed in September. That’s when strict protocols were loosened by the warden, including mandatory isolation of transferred prisoners, according to a longtime correction officer at the prison who had direct knowledge of the protocols but was not authorized to discuss them publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The virus soon took over, infecting hundreds of prisoners and killing a chaplain and a food service manager at the prison. Jeremy Desel, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the cases were found mostly among prisoners who were asymptomatic and disputed the officer’s account. “There has been no relaxing of protocols. If anything they’ve been tightened,” Desel said.

Health experts had warned of transfers between facilities, saying “mass movement of highrisk inmates between institutions is ill-advised and potentially dangerous,” and would likely spread the virus between prisons, according to the notice.

Transfers have also been linked to outbreaks in the federal prison system, including a recent outbreak at the facility in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Families and advocates say it was the result of the Bureau of Prisons transferring 150 prisoners there from a facility in Ohio that’s been battling COVID-19 cases for months.

Corrections officers, too, are worried about the safety of transfers, said Byron Osborn, president of the union that represents most of Michigan’s correctional officers. More than 2,500 correctional staff have contracted the virus in Michigan and at least three have died.

“There is obviously not a lot of definitive information from the communicable disease experts on the spread of the COVID-19 virus or on the topic of when infected people are no longer contagious,” Osborn said. “We believe that everyone would agree that this is problematic.”

Families of the prisoners who’ve fallen ill at Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility say they’re angry because the movement of prisoners is the one thing the corrections department controls.

Amy Wallace’s husband is one of the men incarcerated at Kinross who caught the virus and recovered. But she said a state prison spokesman recently gave a statement to local media that “pinched a nerve.”

The spokesman said it was difficult to know how COVID arrived at the prison, she recalled.

“Well, OK. We do,” she said.