the new national hot spot
Coronavirus cases are soaring in prisons across the country
Coronavirus cases in prisons and jails across the United States have soared in recent weeks, even as the overall daily infection rate in the nation has remained relatively flat.
The number of prison inmates known to be infected has doubled during the past month to more than 68,000. Prison deaths tied to the coronavirus also have risen, by 73% since mid-May.
By now, the five largest known clusters of the virus in the United States aren’t at nursing homes or meatpacking plants, but inside lockups, according to data the New York Times has been collecting about confirmed coronavirus cases since the pandemic reached U.S. shores.
And the risk of more cases appears imminent: The swift growth in virus cases behind bars comes as demonstrators arrested as part of large police brutality protests often have been placed in crowded holding cells in local jails.
A muddled, uneven response by corrections officials to testing and care for inmates and workers is complicating the spread of the coronavirus.
In interviews, prison and jail officials acknowledged that their approach has largely been based on trial and error, and that an effective, consistent response for U.S. correctional facilities remains elusive.
“If there was clearly a right strategy, we all would have done it,” said Dr. Owen Murray, a University of Texas Medical Branch physician who oversees correctional health care at dozens of Texas prisons. “There is no clear-cut right strategy here. There are a lot of different choices that one could make that are going to be in-the-moment decisions.”
Public officials have long warned that the nation’s correctional facilities likely would become vectors in the pandemic because they’re often overcrowded, unsanitary places where social distancing is impractical, bathrooms and day rooms are shared by hundreds of inmates, and access to cleaning supplies is tightly controlled.
Many inmates also are 60 or older, and many suffer from respiratory illnesses or heart conditions.
In response, local jails have discharged thousands of inmates since February, many of whom had been awaiting trials to have charges heard or serving time for nonviolent crimes. State prison systems, where people convicted of more serious crimes are housed, have been more reluctant to release inmates.
Testing for the virus within the nation’s penal institutions varies widely and has become a matter of significant debate.
Republican-led states such as Texas, Tennessee and Arkansas — which generally spend less on prisoners than the national average — have found themselves at the forefront of testing inmates.
In Texas, the number of prisoners and staff members known to be infected has more than quadrupled to 7,900 during the past three weeks after the state began to test every inmate.
Yet states that typically spend far more on prisons have carried out significantly less testing.
California, which spends $12 billion annually on its prison system, has tested less than 7% of inmates in several of its largest, most crowded facilities, according to the state’s data.
Other Democratic-led states that also spend heavily on prisons, including New York, Oregon and Colorado, also have conducted limited testing despite large outbreaks in their facilities.
New York has tested about 3% of its 40,000 prison inmates; more than 40% of those tested were infected.
Critics say that the dearth of testing in some facilities has meant that prison and public health officials have only vague notions about the spread of the virus, which has allowed some elected officials to suggest that it’s not present at all.
“We have really no true idea of how bad the problem is because most places are not yet testing the way they should,” said Dr. Homer Venters, who was chief medical officer for the New York City jail system and now works for a group called Community Oriented Correctional Health Services, which works to improve health care services in local jails.
“I think a lot of times some of the operational challenges of either not having adequate quarantine policies or adequate medical isolation policies are so vexing that places simply decide that they can just throw up their hands,” Venters said.