David Zalubowski/AP Photo
A protester outside an ICE detention center in Aurora, Colorado
Reporting from Cleveland, Ohio, the following is a guest version of Unsanitized from Marcia Brown, a writing fellow at The American Prospect who has been covering COVID-19 and its effect on detained people, incarcerated people, and immigrants.
Even in a state like Ohio, which has taken proactive measures to stop the spread of coronavirus, the disease is quickly sweeping through congregant environments such as jails and prisons. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has only announced tentative steps to reduce jail and prison populations. Advocates say it’s not enough. Likewise, in correctional facilities across the country, such as Rikers Island, Cook County jails in Chicago, and the Washington, D.C. jail, the virus is wreaking havoc. NPR’s Ryan Lucas reported that 30 facilities in the Bureau of Prisons system have confirmed cases. But for some states, this spread isn’t truly tracked because they still don’t have enough tests.
Congregant environments are petri dishes for the virus. When I spoke to Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, she told me that these environments “pose a unique risk to people’s health,” and that people in these facilities disproportionately have pre-existing conditions that put them at risk of serious illness and death, as well as straining the healthcare system. The ACLU is suing to get people out of ICE detention, arguing that keeping people detained during this plague constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the eighth amendment. Similarly, Human Rights First is suing to get Adelanto detention center detainees out, the Southern Poverty Law Center has lined up a similar lawsuit, and other groups are suing to get people out of jails and prisons.
We tend to think of these facilities as segregated from daily life. But stopping the spread of COVID-19 behind bars is essential to stopping its spread outside these facilities, when staff go home to their families. At Elkton federal prison in Ohio, facility staff is at 50 percent and Governor DeWine has brought in the National Guard to staff a field hospital. As staff gets infected, the disease spreads throughout communities. In The Appeal, Sandhya Kajeepeta and Seth J. Prins write that “substantial epidemiological research shows that mass incarceration raises contagion rates for infectious disease—both for people in jails, and for the community at large.”
The spread in federal prisons also can lead to consequences for all of us when it overwhelms nearby hospitals. Many federal prisons are located in rural areas, where healthcare capacity is already insufficient—especially in states that declined to expand Medicaid and subsequently closed rural hospitals—and filling these hospitals to capacity with sick prisoners will leave them unable to care for the general population as they fall ill.
Experts say that the only way to stop the spread is to release people, and fast. Ohio’s state prison system—like that of many other states—is 10,000 people over capacity. Overcrowding makes the risk of disease worse. In fiscal year 2019, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) system operated at 12 percent over capacity. Social distancing in prison is a fantasy; inmates simply cannot isolate themselves from people who show symptoms. And in low security facilities, people live in dorm-like setups, making it even more impossible to avoid one another.
Staff in these facilities are terrified—and rightly so. On Thursday, Ohio marked the death of the state’s first corrections officer, John Dawson, who had worked at Marion Correctional Institution since 1996. The facility seems to be overrun with the virus, and family members of incarcerated people there tell me that they are terrified that their loved one will be next. On Wednesday, I learned that men in one dorm were starting a hunger strike in protest.
The CARES Act, signed into law in March, lengthens the maximum amount of time a federal inmate can be in home confinement, should the attorney general find “that emergency conditions will materially affect the functioning” of BOP. Last weekend, Attorney General Barr announced that he was directing federal prisons to release inmates who are at risk of serious illness or death should they contract COVID-19. Factors for consideration of transfer to home confinement include age and pre-existing conditions, the type of crime committed (non-violent offenders are more likely candidates for release), security level of the facility where he or she is held, their conduct inside prison, whether the prisoner has a re-entry plan, and risk to public safety. He noted three prisons that seem to be hotspots: Elkton, Ohio (which I reported on the day before Barr’s announcement), Danbury, Connecticut, and Oakdale, Lousiana.
Meanwhile, ICE detention is a worsening nightmare. That was the headline on a story I did two weeks ago and it continues to be true. ICE detainees are civil detainees, so ICE has full discretion to release them. But immigrant rights groups have been forced to sue to secure these releases. County jails often hold ICE detainees, and my reporting shows that they are often ill-prepared. ICE’s unchanged protocols, the ACLU’s Eunice Cho told me, are actually making the spread worse. Not to mention that ICE is still deporting people and adopting a ‘business as usual’ attitude. Meanwhile, the fight to close immigration courts rages on—spearheaded in part by the National Immigration Judges Association, the judges’ union and immigration activists. Some courts have closed after a staff member tests positive, only to reopen a few days later.
And let’s not forget the thousands of asylum seekers who aren’t in detention, but who have been forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings as part of the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy. Thousands have formed tent camps, like this one in Matamoros. Now that the administration has indefinitely closed the border to all but ‘essential travel’, these asylum seekers are left in purgatory, with little to no access to healthcare or other resources for the duration of the pandemic.
Men and women on the inside feel like the virus is a death sentence. For some, early release is too late, as I wrote about a daughter who lost her beloved father. As one incarcerated man wrote in an appeal his wife sent me, “I know that we are in prison, but do[es] that give the Bureau of Prisons the right to determine that we all may die because there is no social distancing from staff or inmates?”
But Wait There’s More
- On Friday, The Marshall Project ran a story about how the wheels of prison labor keep turning, despite the death threat of coronavirus making its way through the system.
- In Pennsylvania, The Appeal reports, Republicans in the legislature are attempting to block Democratic governor Tom Wolf from taking action to release people and stop the spread behind bars.
- If you have a criminal record and you want to apply for a small business loan under the CARES Act, too bad.
- Piper Kerman, author of the memoir Orange is the New Black, was on MSNBC Thursday night talking about COVID-19 in Ohio jails and prisons.
- I was on the radio show The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen talking about my coverage of this issue.
