Prisoners watch as illness spreads
Mitchell Pomerance watched on Sunday as city correction officers escorted out another person incarcerated at North Infirmary Command — a Rikers Island facility that houses inmates with serious medical needs.
It was the fifth individual who had been taken out of his small, confined dorm in roughly 24 hours. Pomerance — an inmate who is still recovering from a recent bout of pneumonia and a surgery to drain his lungs — said he was told that all five had tested positive for coronavirus.
“We had 32 people in here and, as of right now, five people have been taken out. But who knows what will happen in 10 minutes?” Pomerance, 54, told the Daily News on Sunday in a phone call from the facility.
Pomerance — who sleeps, eats and showers with other inmates in an area about the size of a basketball court — said he was tested on Thursday for coronavirus. He is still waiting on the results.
“Everyone thinks the next person has got it,” he said of the COVID-19 virus that’s spreading quickly through the city’s sprawling jail complex. “Everybody is scared. Everyone is concerned about who’s next.”
In the last 16 days, Rikers — a labyrinth of old, decrepit buildings ill-equipped to handle modern-day needs, let alone a pandemic — has become a battleground for coronavirus.
Department of Correction officials confirmed on Wednesday that an inmate and a correction officer on the island had tested positive for COVID-19. Four days later, those numbers shot up to 29 inmates and 17 DOC employees.
But over a dozen of correction officers and non-uniformed recreational staffers — all who spoke to The News on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs — say they do not have the equipment they need to fight this war, and question whether the department is doing everything it can to stop the spread.
Last week, 250 out of 262 non-uniformed recreational staffers — including DOC employees hired to provide services that reduce idle time among inmates — continued to report to work, according to internal documents obtained by The News.
The staffers hand-delivered “activity packets” to various housing units that contained puzzles and readings to help them pass the time, several sources said — creating unnecessary foot traffic throughout the facilities.
At the same time, a number of correction officers and non-uniformed staffers did not have masks, gloves, hand sanitizers and other essential cleaning tools, multiple sources told The News. The department held several training sessions on Friday that included a four-minute video of how to put on a mask. Half of the staffers walked out of at least one of those sessions, sources said, fed up with with the fact that their supervisors were working from home.
“(It’s) absolutely criminal how they are handling the entire situation. The island is in chaos,” said one DOC employee.
“It’s a horror show,” a second employee told The News. “It will be a disaster if we keep coming back in. We could infect everyone (if we are carriers). And the inmates will die from it because they don’t have any access to medical care whatsoever … Nobody is safe from this.”
Department of Correction Commissioner Cynthia Brann told The News that the department is doing everything in its power to curb the unprecedented epidemic.
“The health and well-being of every person in our facilities is always our first priority,” she said. “We are taking every precautionary measure to keep our personnel safe, which is why we are not requiring programming staff to go into housing areas to provide regular programming.
“We will continue to update our COVID-19 guidance as necessary, per DOHMH, to keep those in our facilities safe and healthy,” she added.
Mayor de Blasio said at a press conference on Sunday that the city released 23 inmates who are at low risk to reoffend. Officials are gearing up to potentially release another 200 people, he said — but he did not give more details as to when or how that would happen.