44 of 47 inmates infected in Cummins prison barracks

An outbreak of coronavirus has swept through a barracks at the state’s largest prison, rapidly infecting 44 prisoners, officials announced Monday.

The Arkansas Department of Corrections announced the first confirmed infection of a state inmate Sunday, a man at the Cummins Unit who tested positive after being hospitalized with symptoms.

The prisoner was housed in an open “military-style” barracks along with 46 other inmates who were immediately placed on restricted access and tested, officials said. When the results came back, all but three of them were shown to be infected with the virus.

“You can understand how efficiently covid-19 can be spread in that setting,” Dr. Nate Smith, director of the Department of Health, said at a news conference Monday.

Despite the sudden surge in cases at Cummins, Gov. Asa Hutchinson and prison officials Monday resisted calls to conduct widespread testing among the state’s more than 16,000 inmates and to take steps to reduce the population of crowded prisons.

At his daily coronavirus briefing Monday, Hutchinson said he was hopeful that the outbreak was “contained,” averting the need to consider releasing inmates from other barracks and prisons.

Meanwhile, Smith announced that 27 staff members and five inmates at a facility for parole and probation offenders in Little Rock had tested positive for the virus. Smith said the remaining offenders at that facility would be tested.

Department of Corrections spokeswoman Dina Tyler said that beyond the barracks at Cummins that is the center of the outbreak, the department has tested two prison inmates and 15 inmates at the Little Rock Community Corrections Center.

“We’ll test when there is a need to test, if someone is symptomatic,” Tyler said.

The department took several early steps aimed at blocking the virus’s spread into prisons, by suspending visitations to inmates starting March 16 and quarantining arrivals from county jails for two weeks before releasing them into the general population.

Staff members also underwent temperature checks before entering prison units. Last week, the sewing shop at the Cummins Unit began producing masks to be distributed to employees and inmates throughout the system.

Despite those precautions, the number of confirmed cases among workers associated with the prison, probation and parole systems continued to rise along with the statewide caseload. Prior to the first inmate testing positive, the Department of Corrections reported that 17 staff members were among the confirmed cases. An employee of the Division of Community Corrections was the first state employee to die of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

How the first cases hit the Cummins Unit is unclear.

The chairman of the Legislature’s subcommittee on state prisons, state Sen. Gary Stubblefield, R-Branch, said he was told by Corrections Secretary Wendy Kelley on

Monday that an inmate at the barracks where the outbreak occurred had recently visited an outside hospital and was returned to the unit before the first case occurred. Tyler, the department spokeswoman, confirmed that Monday.

The department said in news releases Sunday and Monday that it was also testing staff members who had access to the barracks, but that none of those tests have come back positive.

“They’re going to have to do something about testing those guards when they leave the facility and come back,” Stubblefield said Monday, expressing concern about the spread despite the increased isolation of the facilities.

Other lawmakers also raised concerns about the effectiveness of precautions being taken to protect inmates and prison staff.

Two Democrats — state Reps. Jamie Scott of Little Rock and Vivian Flowers of Pine Bluff — joined groups including the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas in calling for Hutchinson and the state Parole Board to take steps to release inmates who are low-level offenders, near the end of their sentences or at risk of becoming very sick from the virus.

Flowers, who herself contracted the virus and has since recovered, called on the Department of Corrections to conduct sample tests from at least one inmate in every barracks, and to increase the testing of staff.

“If you don’t thin this population while also testing, what you saw in this barracks today is what you’re going to see across the entire system,” Flowers said. “How do you avoid that?”

Earlier in the state’s outbreak, on March 26, the state Board of Corrections voted to

“They’re going to have to do something about testing those guards when they leave the facility and come back.” — Sen. Gary Stubblefield, R-Branch

expedite parole consideration by a year for 114 state inmates. As of Monday, however, the Parole Board had yet to act on 38 names it was considering from that list.

“We’ve been predicting this, we’ve been asking that this be prevented. We’ve been begging,” said Holly Dickson, executive director of ACLU Arkansas.

On April 8, the group sent Hutchinson a letter requesting that his administration take further action to release elderly inmates, those with chronic health conditions and those nearing their release dates. On Monday however, Hutchinson told reporters he was not considering using his pardon power in response to the outbreak.

“There’s a reason these inmates are in a maximumsecurity unit,” Hutchinson said. “I don’t see that happening. If it spreads more broadly, there are potential plans we could look at.”

The barracks at the Cummins Unit where the outbreak occurred houses medium-security inmates, Tyler said. The 1,876-bed prison farm in Lincoln County houses male inmates of all security levels and is the largest facility in the state.

Steps being taken to control the spread at the unit include placing the infected barracks under quarantine, Tyler said, while having other inmates transported to lunch and pill call one barracks at a time. Inmates outside the infected barracks are still going to work and attending programs. The testing of inmates was conducted by the state Health Department and Wellpath, the prison system’s contracted health care provider. Information for this article was contributed by Michael R. Wickline of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.