Outbreak underscores neglect of prisoners
Health professionals and civil rights advocates sounded the alarm back in March: People held in local, state and federal lockups were in a perilous position because detention facilities weren’t prepared to handle the coronavirus, they told me. They were right. As my colleagues Megan Cassidy and Jason Fagone reported, San Quentin State Prison had no coronavirus cases among its prisoners until an illfated transfer from California Institution for Men in Chino at the end of May. Somehow, the nearly 200 men from Chino, home of the deadliest outbreak in the state’s prisons, weren’t tested for weeks before getting on the transfer bus. At San Quentin, where 121 men were sent, 25 tested positive.
Just over a month later, nearly 1,400 incarcerated people and 165 employees have been infected at San Quentin. Across the state’s prison system, there are more than 5,300 cases among incarcerated people, and 25 have died. Prisoners can’t selfquarantine, leaving them defenseless.
I bet I can guess where the All Lives Matter zealots stand on this one.
The spread of the virus is a shameful failure by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. When people are sentenced, the facility where they’re housed is responsible for their health and wellbeing.
“Just like a parent has to do with their child, because a judge has remanded them to your custody and care,” said DeAnna Hoskins, the president and CEO of JustLeadershipUSA, a criminal justice advocacy group that is campaigning to reduce the country’s prison population by half in a decade.
Prisons don’t operate with a safetyfirst mentality.
“The fundamental problem is that prisons are built to punish people in basically the most cruel way possible, and that’s a fundamentally different purpose than keeping people safe,” Keith Wattley, an Oakland attorney and founder of UnCommon Law, a nonprofit that specializes in helping prisoners with a potential life sentence win parole, told me. “We’ve been pretending for these last couple of months that you can make it do the opposite of what it’s built to do.”
In the United States, more than 2 million men, women and children are behind bars, the most in the world. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a research and advocacy nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, the U.S. locks up people at a higher rate than any other country. America First, indeed. Mass incarceration has been a booming business since emancipation. Sure, the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution abolished slavery, but the wealthy landowners and politicians had the vaccination for the freedom bug tearing through the country: They made Blackness something to be feared, policed and incarcerated.
During Reconstruction, poor and hungry former slaves were snatched off the street and forced to work as unpaid labor — slaves — in convict leasing programs. The War on Drugs supplied a whole generation of manpower for prison labor. Today, prisoners often work for less than $1 an hour. It’s slave wages when you consider the billions earned by companies profiting off of the cheap labor.
The killing of George Floyd in police custody energized a movement to defund police departments, but the entire criminal justice system — from arrest to prosecution to sentencing to rehabilitation to reentry — needs to be reimagined.
“We need that change in opinions toward incarcerated individuals,” state Sen. Nancy Skinner, DBerkeley, told me. “Not only are you incarcerated, but it’s a permanent sentence because once you’re released you have so many barriers. You are an outcast.”
Besides, locking people up hasn’t reduced the factors — poverty, poor education and lack of opportunity — that lead some people to turn to crime. In a 2016 report on poverty in the wake of the 200709 recession, the Brookings Institution examined the negative impact of concentrated poverty.
“Residents of poor neighborhoods face higher crime rates and exhibit poorer physical and mental health outcomes,” the report said. “They tend to go to poorperforming neighborhood schools with higher dropout rates. Their jobseeking networks tend to be weaker and they face higher levels of financial insecurity.”
“People who come from marginalized and disenfranchised neighborhoods are more likely, obviously, to be more traumatized because poverty and oppression is traumatizing,” said James King of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and a former San Quentin inmate. “So you have this group of people that we are actively oppressing. There’s trauma associated with that, and then we criminalize the response.”
Nationally, the number of Black prisoners has steadily declined. From 2008 to 2018, the imprisonment rate for Black people dropped 28%, according to an April report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Still, in 2018, the imprisonment rate of Black men was almost six times that of white men.
In California, the imprisonment rate for Black men is 10 times the rate for white men, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Expanding police departments and putting more people into jails and prisons won’t address underlying issues, such as poverty and systemic racism, plaguing society.
“It’s impossible to replace any of the major systems that drive this country in particular without reckoning with the fact that they were built on principles of white supremacy, and that most of the laws, certainly the criminal laws, have been developed in order to protect white people,” Wattley said.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor @sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr