Prison testing remains limited

Some private facilities’ numbers stay stagnant amid reports of illness

Wendy Posey was already suffering from a kidney condition when, in early April, her symptoms worsened and new ones developed, including the loss of her sense of smell and taste, fevers and vomiting, her mother said.

After nearly two weeks growing sicker in her dorm at Gadsden Correctional Facility near Tallahassee, the 35-year-old was finally admitted to a hospital on April 17. The hospital tested her for COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, according to her mother, Nina Posey. The result came back positive.

“My daughter cannot be the only one,” Nina Posey said. “Their quarters are so tight in there, and they share everything.”

Yet, as of Thursday, only nine

other tests had been done on inmates at the privately run prison where about 1,500 are incarcerated, despite Wendy Posey having been housed in a dorm in close proximity to dozens of other women. All but one of the nine tests at Gadsden were positive, with one test pending, according to numbers released Friday by the Florida Department of Corrections on coronavirus. Fourteen staff have tested positive.

While the state corrections department has recently expanded testing to include some asymptomatic inmates at the three prisons with the largest confirmed outbreaks — the Tomoka, Sumter and Liberty correctional institutions — testing remains limited beyond those facilities.

It’s especially so at some privately run prisons, like Gadsden and Blackwater River Correctional Facility, the Panhandle prison that saw the state’s first large COVID-19 outbreak and then the first inmate deaths. Testing numbers at those prisons have remained relatively stagnant despite reports of continued sickness and staff testing positive.

There are 50 major prisons run by the Florida Department of Corrections, including Tomoka, Sumter and Liberty, and seven privately managed prisons, which are overseen by the Department of Management Services. It’s unclear exactly how many inmates have been tested across the state, as the News Service of Florida reported Friday that figures released by FDC include re-tests of previously tested inmates.

FDC and FDMS did not respond to questions about expanded testing from the Sentinel. FDMS spokeswoman Rose Hebert said that the agency “continues to follow Florida Department of Health (DOH) and Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) protocol for responding to, treating and reporting on COVID-19.”

In recent press releases, FDC officials have said their testing priorities “closely align with recommendations from the CDC” and protocols from the state health department.

The lack of testing is not due to a lack of inmates showing symptoms, said Debra Bennett, who advocates for women in prison.

“These people are scared,” said Bennett, who was formerly incarcerated and now is the Florida lead organizer for the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. “... They are not testing at these prisons unless they absolutely, positively think they have no other choice.”

Across the state, positive inmate cases of COVID-19 have almost doubled in the last week — up from 293 to 575 as of Friday — with about a 23% positive test rate, according to FDC numbers. Nine state inmates have died after testing positive for COVID-19.

And though Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has continued to highlight expanded testing as central to his plan for the state’s recovery from the pandemic — announcing this week a mobile testing site for longterm care facilities, like nursing homes — he has made no mention of bringing such efforts to the state’s prisons.

DeSantis said he considered prison COVID-19 cases separate from others in the community, something advocates and corrections officers have disputed, noting corrections staff live in the community and people are released from prison every day.

“I don’t understand why the governor will recognize the nursing homes,” but not prisons, said Denise Rock, the executive director of Florida Cares, a nonprofit that advocates for the incarcerated. “Why isn’t he rapid testing in the prisons? ... Why don’t those lives matter as much?”

Inmates report symptoms

In some of the messages from Gadsden, which Bennett provided to the Orlando Sentinel, women described symptoms including fever or the inability to taste and smell, both of which the Centers for Disease Control considers common symptoms of COVID-19.

One woman said her friend had symptoms for two weeks before she was taken to a hospital on April 24, a week after Wendy Posey had gone through a similar experience. Posey is serving a five-year sentence for theft, burglary and fraud charges and is back at the prison’s infirmary after a few weeks at the hospital, but feeling much better, her mom said.

“There is at least twenty people in my quad [with] headaches, weak[ness],

shortness of breath[,] some are coughing and sneezing,” one woman wrote, adding that inmates are still undergoing inspections in the dorms, which require everyone to congregate in one area.

“...[I]nstead of allowing sick people to stay in their bed and rest they force them up and crowd them??” she wrote, using the prison’s JPay messaging system. Gadsden is run by Management and Training Corporation, a Utahbased company that manages the prison through a contract with the state’s Department of Management Services.

Alex Wilkes, a spokeswoman for Trade 1 Alliance, which represents private prison contractors, said it’s important to remember that these companies do not “operate in a vacuum.”

“They work closely with their government agency partners, including the state of Florida, and with local health officials to promote best practices with respect to the management and mitigation of COVID-19, including with respect to testing,” Wilkes said in a statement. Trade 1 Alliance represents Management and Training Corporation as well as The Geo Group, which runs other Florida prisons.

Testing at privately run prisons has not greatly expanded, despite clear evidence that the virus has infiltrated them. The three facilities with more than 10 correctional officers testing positive, besides Tomoka and Sumter, are all private prisons: Gadsden, Blackwater River and South Bay Correctional Facility in Palm Beach County, the latter run by the south Florida-based The Geo Group Inc.

As of Thursday, Blackwater had conducted only 64 tests on inmates, despite 48 having tested positive and at least six having died — a 75% positive rate. Hours after this story was published online Friday, FDC reported that 53 more tests had been done on inmates at Blackwater — more in one day than the facility had reported completing in the past month. Those tests are pending. At South Bay, 45 staff have tested positive for COVID-19, the most of any prison in the state — yet fewer than two dozen tests on inmates had been done as of Thursday. On Friday, that number jumped to 314, with 36 positive and 131 tests still pending, roughly a 20% positive rate for the tests completed. Blackwater and South Bay each incarcerate about 2,000 men. Families and advocates say they believe there are many more positive cases at these facilities, and they worry about how the lack of testing perpetuates the virus’ spread.

“You just kind of wonder what’s going on over there,” Rock said of the private prisons. “There’s a bigger need to catch it earlier [in prisons] because the spread happens so much quicker there.”

Andrea Davis, who has a loved one incarcerated at South Bay, said that while he has thankfully not been sick yet, his dorm is next to the designated “sick dorm,” and officers and staff often walk back and forth between them.

She said her loved one, who she asked the Sentinel not to name for fear of retribution, wants to know if he has the virus so he could respond appropriately, like refraining from using communal phones. He was not among those tested in the latest count and told her it was mostly elderly or sick inmates.

“The number of staff infected at South Bay versus the number of incarcerated people listed there, that makes no sense,” Davis said. “They should be testing the entire population because, in essence, they have all been exposed.”

‘The key ... is testing’

FDC announced April 30 it had done more than 155 tests on asymptomatic inmates at Tomoka and Sumter correctional institutions, after previously only testing people with symptoms or at an increased risk for infection.

Bennett said it was disappointing that FDC’s initial attempt at expanded testing only included two facilities, and in numbers she viewed as insufficient.

Each of the prisons incarcerates more than 2,000 people.

“When you have thousands of people inside one prison, that’s just … not enough,” Bennett said. “... Us out here, we should be just as responsible for keeping them safe in there as we are to try and keep ourselves out here.”

In an FDC update Thursday, officials said almost the entire inmate population at Liberty Correctional Institution, west of Tallahassee, had been tested, which more than doubled the number of inmates tested across the state.

Getting widespread testing available to all prisons, for both inmates and officers, is where advocates for the incarcerated and corrections officers agree, said Jimmy Baiardi, the corrections officer representative for the state’s Police Benevolent Association.

“The key to this, and going back to normal, is testing,” said Baiardi, who noted he does not represent officers at privately run prisons, like Gadsden, Blackwater and South Bay. “The officers feel enough testing isn’t being done.”