South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Virus hobbles correctional facilities
Health of staffers and inmates results in drastic measures
Battered by a wave of coronavirus infections and deaths, local jails and state prison systems around the United States have resorted to a drastic strategy to keep the virus at bay: shutting down completely and transferring their inmates elsewhere.
From California to Missouri to Pennsylvania, state and local officials say that so many guards have fallen ill with the virus and are unable to work that abruptly closing some correctional facilities is the only way to maintain community security and prisoner safety.
Experts say the fallout is easy to predict: The jails and prisons that stay open will probably become even more crowded, unsanitary and disease-ridden, and the transfers are likely to help the virus proliferate both inside and outside the walls.
“Movement of people is dangerous,” said Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who has been tracking coronavirus cases in correctional settings. “We’ve got really good examples of overcrowding equals more infection and greater risk of outbreak. We’ve got lots of evidence that even transferring people from one facility to the next is very dangerous.”
There have been more than 480,000 confirmed coronavirus infections and at least 2,100 deaths among inmates and guards in prisons, jails and detention centers across the nation, according to a New York Times database.
Among those grim statistics are the nearly 100,000 correctional officers who have tested positive and 170 who have died.
Early in the pandemic, some states tried to ward off virus outbreaks by releasing some offenders early and detaining fewer people awaiting trial in order to reduce their populations, but those efforts often met with resistance from politicians and the public.
More recently, as arrests in many areas have increased, jail populations have returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to data collected by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy group based in New York.
That fact, combined with widespread infections among correctional officers, staffing shortages stretching back many years and strains on prison medical facilities, have pushed states as the pandemic progresses toward more concentration and crowding, rather than less, in part through closure of strained facilities.
In late November and early December, North Carolina prison officials closed Randolph Correctional Center in Asheboro along with three minimum security facilities and have not ruled out more closures.
“It feels like we’re holding this together with bubble gum and packaging tape,” Todd Ishee, the state commissioner of prisons, said in a recent interview.
“Really, we’re all in the same boat,” Ishee said. “It’s challenging our community. It’s challenging prison systems north, south, east and west.”
Wisconsin has closed a cell block at its prison in Waupun and started moving its 220 inmates to other prisons, despite warnings that similar prison transfers elsewhere have sown deadly outbreaks, including at San Quentin State Prison in California.
Infections and deaths in the prison system have more than doubled since the beginning of November, according to a New York Times analysis of state data.
More than one-third of Waupun’s guards have been infected since the start of the pandemic, according to state data.
Elsewhere, authorities have so far rejected prison closures but have taken sweeping measures to try to keep pace with a virus that has moved through prisons with lightning speed.
Ohio and New Hampshire have each called in the National Guard to bolster thinned correctional staff. Michigan has transferred hundreds of inmates around its prison system as staff counts have dipped, despite infection rates in the prison system doubling during the past month, according to the Times’ data.
Correctional officers also point to low pay, dangerous conditions and a lack of institutional support as drawbacks to attracting qualified candidates — and ultimately bringing staffing numbers to adequate levels.
In some states, correctional officers earn less than $12.50 an hour — not much more than fast-food workers — and many lack broad job protections or benefits.
Ardis Watkins, executive director of the North Carolina State Employees Association, the union that represents the state’s correctional officers, said the virus had overwhelmed the community of prison guards — bringing not only sickness and death but also foreboding.
The prison closures and subsequent inmate transfers, she said, were like “pouring gasoline on a fire.”
“They’re terrified. They realize that when they go to work, they may not come home at the end of the day,” Watkins said. “The nature of the job is, ‘anything could happen, including getting killed.’
“But what they’re not used to is knowing that going to work might mean their family can get a disease that they could die from.”