Prison official admits mistake
Inmates’ negative tests came long before transfer
State lawmakers skewered prison officials on Wednesday over their handling of a coronavirus crisis that has killed 22 incarcerated people across the state and infected nearly 5,000 others, taking special aim at prison transfers that effectively delivered the virus to multiple institutions.
At a partially virtual Senate oversight hearing, officials for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and its health care system acknowledged the botched prisoner transfers to San Quentin and Corcoran state prisons, confirming the missteps first revealed last month by The Chronicle. Those mistakes included a failure to test incarcerated patients for the coronavirus for up to a month before they were transferred.
Ralph Diaz, secretary of the state’s prison system, told senators that officials have recently faced “setbacks,” and he specifically noted the San Quentin outbreak that has sickened more than 1,100 people in custody and 100 staffers.
But the secretary also defended the prisons’ efforts to thwart infections from incarcerated people, staff and communities, adding that many prisons have seen no cases to date.
“We can do better. And I know we will do better,” Diaz said. “But I need to express we’ve also had successes.”
Wednesday’s hearing — held by the Senate Committee on Public Safety — was initially scheduled for later in the year, but it was to moved up to before the Senate’s summer recess because of deteriorating conditions at San Quentin and Corcoran, committee Chair Nancy Skinner said last week.
J. Clark Kelso, leader of California Correctional Health Care Services, addressed the committee and provided new, disturbing details about the illfated transfer from the California Institution for Men in Chino to Corcoran and San Quentin state prisons.
For the first time, Kelso publicly acknowledged that the men sent away from Chino had not been tested for the coronavirus for up to four weeks prior to the late May transfers, confirming what sources told The Chronicle.
Kelso explained that the decision of whom to transfer was based on a “matrix” assessment for patient movement, with the goal of sparing medically vulnerable prisoners from infection. In order to be transferred, the matrix required that a patient test negative for coronavirus and not be transferred prior to the availability of those test results.
However, Kelso said, the matrix did not specify that the required negative test had to occur within only a short period of time before the transfer.
The weeksold results, he acknowledged, were “far too old to be a reliable indicator for the absence of COVID.”
Two of the 66 patients transferred to Corcoran tested positive immediately upon arrival, Kelso said. At San Quentin, where more than 120 men were sent, 25 tested positive.
Neither San Quentin nor
Corcoran had any known cases in its populations until that point.
Largely because of the fivetiered cell blocks at San Quentin and testing turnaround issues, Kelso said, “San Quentin almost immediately fell behind the virus.”
Skinner, who represents Oakland and neighboring East Bay cities, was visibly emotional even behind her California state flag mask, and she said she still couldn’t understand the rationale behind the transfers.
“How (could there) have been a transfer with people that had not been tested for two or three weeks?” she said. “It’s abhorrent.”
In a later panel discussion,
Skinner said that anyone who watches TV knows that coronavirus test results are only reliable for about 48 hours.
Skinner criticized prison officials’ assertion that they have released about 8,000 people since the pandemic hit the U.S., adding that the figure was about the same number that would have been released in normal times.
The senator asked Kelso whether he had the authority to order the type of widespread releases that advocates and some lawmakers are demanding, which would make room for appropriate physical distancing. Skinner said these housing changes do not have to be releases into the public, but could also go to nonprison settings where incarcerated people could still be monitored.
“I do not believe I have authority myself to order housing changes or releases that would put patients outside the institution,” Kelso said, noting an exception for hospital care. “I don’t believe I have the higher power to do what you’re asking.”
The Wednesday hearing occurred amid mounting pressure on Gov. Gavin Newsom and prison officials to make the types of major population cuts that have been resisted in the past.
Prison officials recently announced that they are setting up a new emergency incident command center at San Quentin, as well as tents, to make room for coronavirus patients.
As of late last week, prison officials were gearing up for yet another transfer, planning to move as many as 150 men out of San Quentin to North Kern State Prison near Bakersfield. But the transfer was called off after two of the men bound for Kern tested positive.
Prison officials are now considering transferring up to 300 people at San Quentin who have recovered from the virus to other facilities.