State prisons won’t mandate vaccinations

The state will not force Connecticut’s prison population to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, though it is hoping to get as many incarcerated people to voluntarily take the vaccine as possible.

“Once decisions have been made regarding the actual time-frame for vaccinating the incarcerated population, we will begin educating the population about the benefits of taking the vaccine in order to increase the likelihood of favorable compliance rates,” according to Department of

Corrections spokesperson Andrius Banevicius. “The inmate population will not be mandated to be vaccinated.”

At present, the plan is for people who work in prisons and other congregant settings to be part of “Phase 1a”, as Gov. Ned Lamont said earlier this month. That would get them vaccinated as soon as doses are available.

Prisoners will have to wait for “Phase 1b,” some time between January and May.

There won’t be a state mandate, but it is an opportunity to vaccinate an atrisk population, according to Melvin Medina, public policy and advocacy director at the ACLU of Connecticut.

“They are literally trapped, they cannot move,” he said. “They're required to be in prisons and jails. And so it actually, for many reasons, might be the most efficient facility to distribute vaccines voluntarily.”

One issue for Medina is that Connecticut’s prison population and its homeless population often overlap. Citing a study by the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, he said that 50 percent of people in the state without homes “were at some point incarcerated, in our prisons, in jails.”

“For the purposes of public health, it actually makes sense to prioritize that population while you have them in a prison in jail to give them the opportunity to get the facts before they're released,” he said. “And likely, as we know, a portion of that population will be released into homelessness.”

Prisoners are at risk of catching the virus, according to a letter published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, authored by Department of Corrections Medical Director Byron S. Kennedy.

“Both individual factors and facility-level factors such as dormitory housing rather than cell housing were associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and outcomes,” Kennedy wrote.

As of the end of November, 1,749 inmates have tested positive for the coronavirus, CT News Junkie reported. Eight inmates so far have died from COVID-19-related

issues.

Skepticism in homeless shelters

If Connecticut prisoners are released and end up in homeless shelters, it may be much harder to convince them to be vaccinated, according to Margaret Middleton, CEO of New Haven homeless services agency Columbus House.

Her agency recently started mandating COVID-19 tests and there was resistance, even from staff.

The vaccine could be an even more difficult push. Many of the agency's employees — and the country's social services workforce overall — are Black, she said, and often wary of any initiative putting them at the front of the line for new drugs and treatments.

"Historical inequalities in the health system are really going to be strong influencers of people's willingness," Middleton said.

The possibility of mandates

The idea of required vaccinations is not unfamiliar to social services staff — at least one Columbus House program requires staff to be vaccinated for hepatitis C, Middleton said.

“It's not unheard of," she said. "I think, like any team, we'd really not like to find ourselves in a position of mandating it.”

The state will not be mandating vaccinations for Department of Corrections staff or prisoners but, theoretically, it could.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1905 case Jacobson vs. Massachusetts that states could legally require residents to get inoculated against deadly pathogens, as UConn law professor Sachin S. Pandya explained.

“The Supreme Court ruled that this was perfectly constitutional under the 14th amendment,” Pandya explained, though he said there are constitutional questions — would mandating vaccination be constitutional — and statutory questions — whether or not it would be legal under state law.

“Can they do it consistent with the constitution? And the answer to that is, in general, yes. Depends on how they do it,” he said. “Second, can they do it as a matter of statutory law? That is, is there legislation in place that would allow states or localities to do this? And under what conditions? In general, the answer is yes.”

Medina, though, said mandating vaccinations for either people without homes or in prisons raises constitutional questions.

“At the end of the day, an incarcerated person or someone in one of our shelters experiencing homelessness have constitutional rights,” he said. “The denial of government services to anyone who's refused to take a vaccine raises huge constitutional issues, and it would be very alarming.”

Issues of access

Christina Quaranta, incoming executive director for the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, said her worry is that people in state-run facilities won’t get prioritized.

Not just prisons, she said, but people in mental health facilities as well, are at risk.

“Our major concern is that people who are living inside of prisons and jails in Connecticut will not get the same access, and even mental health facilities, psychiatric facilities, all those care facilities, won't get the same access that other folks do that you and Iwould,” she said. “We run the risk of them being passed over or forgotten about.”

Medina used similar language to express the same issue.

“A top concern is that this is often a forgotten community,” he said. “Often, you know, the politics of being tough on crime is this idea of, ‘convict people, throw away the key and forget about them.’”

Between mandating vaccinations and completely ignoring the prison population is a middle ground, he said, arguing that what matters is equity.

“If the goal is to build public confidence to ensure that we're getting to that herd immunity number and people are willingly moving, you know, moving forward and accepting the vaccine, I think forcing people to take it would not be the right direction to head in,” he said. “We believe that in terms of equity and equitable outcomes, they should receive an equal opportunity to voluntarily receive that vaccine.”