Robert Willett/The News & Observer via AP
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper speaks at a press briefing on the COVID-19 virus, February 18, 2021, at the Emergency Operations Center in Raleigh.
Last June, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety (DPS) signed a contract with a Quality Inn and Suites hotel in Durham to establish an emergency pilot program to quarantine men who may have been exposed to COVID-19 before being released from prison and did not yet have housing.
In August, the first returning citizens arrived. They received rooms with sheets and clothing, meals, daily COVID health screenings, peer counseling, and assistance with developing a plan to leave the hotel in 14 days. The services are free of charge to the men so long as they follow program rules. It’s a re-entry program that sounds promising, but according to one person with experience of the inner workings of the facility, the new arrivals soon find out that people are miserable.
The food is decent, but there’s never enough. Because they are quarantined, the residents must stay in their rooms, but they can go outside together for cigarette breaks. Through these conversations, the newcomers discover how horrible the hotel really is and how badly everyone wants to leave. One resident has been at the hotel for three months, long past the 14-day maximum for the program. A 24/7 security detail monitors the hotel and the men. The diverse group of residents range in age from their early twenties to well into their sixties. (The person who spoke with The American Prospect about these conditions requested anonymity to avoid reprisals.)
“A pandemic is not an excuse to house people in slum conditions, it’s not an excuse for medical neglect.”
The North Carolina DPS has allowed the program to deteriorate into the worst kind of halfway-house experience, one that harms the men it purports to help. And the slum-like living conditions, limited clothing and personal-care supplies, and inadequate staffing all fester well out of public view as the COVID emergency continues and social service organizations monitor the program.
Greg Williams, a member of the Rose of Sharon Catholic Worker, a faith-based organization that works on prison abolition issues, told the Prospect that if one of their members had not been released from prison and sent to quarantine there last year, no one would have ever known about this crisis. On Christmas Day 2020, Williams and other members of the Catholic Workers group teamed up with reporters from INDY Week, a local alternative newspaper, to visit the hotel. What began as a holiday organizing effort coordinating care packages containing food, clothing, and cigarettes for their friend and other residents’ families and loved ones revealed one horror story after another.
Williams says that many residents reported enduring mold-covered walls, leaks in the roof creating electrical hazards. Others had no heat and hot water and infestations of rats, bedbugs, and roaches. According to late-2019 and early-2020 customer reviews on Yelp, Tripadvisor, Orbitz, and Google Reviews, these infrastructure problems existed long before the pandemic began. Previous customers often complained about having to switch rooms due to filth or a lack of hot water, but the new accommodations also had problems. “Our new room was apparently infested with bed bugs seeing as though my body is now covered in bites,” one person wrote. Another reported mold in their new room’s bathtub. (Quality Inn and Suites operates within the Choice Hotels chain. Neither local managers nor Choice Hotels responded to requests for comment.)
The onsite medical treatment is administered by an outside national health care staffing company that checks the residents’ blood pressure and temperature readings twice a day. But Williams says residents suffer from severe medical neglect, including insulin rationing and denial of schizoaffective disorder medication. One man urinated blood and received limited treatment from onsite medical staff. Another suffered from heart palpitations but was eventually released to a homeless shelter.
“A pandemic,” says Williams, “is not an excuse to house people in slum conditions, it’s not an excuse for medical neglect, it’s not an excuse for any of the mistreatment that’s been happening.”
The daily regimen is strict. According to the program guidelines, three violations of the program’s rules in a week would result in a “reprimand from the Post-Release and Parole Commission” and a possible return to prison. New residents get a helpline number to ask questions and request additional supplies. But the line rings to the hotel’s front desk, which redirects the returning citizens to Locked Up To Living Life, a Durham-based organization that assists returning citizens, and the group’s peer counselors rarely answer.
Some of the men said they’d prefer homelessness over staying at the hotel.
Peer counselors are supposed to meet with the residents twice a week, either in person or by phone, to set up a transition plan to leave the hotel for consideration by probation parole staff. And on the 12th day, a probation or parole officer must meet with the returning citizens to coordinate a departure or extend the stay.
The men must come up with their own plans for leaving the facility and have parole and probation officers sign off on those plans. The men are tested for COVID-19, and a negative result means medical staff, the resident’s parole officer, security, and peer counselors have five days to coordinate and approve a resident’s departure plan. If these tasks are not completed within the five-day window, the men have to be retested and the process restarts.
After the Christmas visit, Williams claims the hotel adopted a new policy requiring mail-only deliveries of any care packages. Residents must consent to a visual inspection of the contents. If the resident objects, a staff member puts the package in storage. The resident cannot collect the items until he leaves the facility.
In January, Ian Mance, an attorney with Emancipate NC, a statewide civil rights group, took up the case of a man who spent seven weeks in the program until he was arrested and reincarcerated for allegedly breaking quarantine rules. The man has since been freed. Mance sent a letter to the North Carolina DPS about the living conditions and medical neglect at the hotel and to determine if people were being held against their will beyond the quarantine period and if others were being arrested and reincarcerated for violating hotel rules.
DPS Deputy General Counsel Jodi Harrison denied the most serious accusations about forcibly extending stays, in a letter to Mance that was provided to the Prospect. While DPS admitted that some men had stayed beyond the 14 days, Harrison said that that decision was up to an individual, especially if homelessness would have been the only other option. Harrison says the residents were free to leave after 14 days if they didn’t like the facility or program.
In a statement to the Prospect, the North Carolina DPS described the program as a success. As of March 16, DPS said that 474 individuals participated in the program, and 93 percent had left the hotel. The department says that “offenders transferred to quarantine at the hotel are not placed under conditions that are any more onerous than those experienced by anyone else in society who must quarantine due to exposure.” DPS added that as of March 15, the department had 57 “active warnings” about breaking the program’s rules, adding that most of the infractions are issued for breaking quarantine, not wearing a mask, and leaving the property.
Mance told the Prospect that his primary concerns about program procedures and re-arrests had been resolved, but he has asked public officials to look into improving medical care for the men.
The Catholic Worker members also noted that while DPS clarified some issues, their denials about the physical conditions raise further concerns: Some of the men they spoke to said they’d prefer homelessness over staying at the hotel. The faith-based group plans to ask the city and county officials to negotiate a new agreement with the state. Since the program can only operate with local officials’ consent, the group wants to see improved housing conditions, medical staffing, and peer counseling. Social service organizations should also be able to drop off supplies for the returning citizens.
A re-entry program “needs to be more than just better than prison as the standard; it needs to be what’s actually humane,” says Kristie Puckett-Williams, the manager of the ACLU North Carolina Campaign for Smart Justice. “When we place people in hotels and call them transition homes, but run them just like the prison, how are we empowering them to never return to prison?”
Before COVID-19, poor nutrition and inconsistent medical treatment in prisons compromised the immune systems of the incarcerated. Once a person leaves prison, he should be able to reconnect with loved ones and receive assistance with finding a job. An effective transition program can bridge those gaps, but while the North Carolina DPS aimed to support the most vulnerable men, it did not adequately monitor or deliver the robust supports that a humane re-entry program must during a historic pandemic. The state’s assertions about the COVID-19 pilot program strain credulity. While the state has updated its guidelines, substandard living conditions and instances of medical neglect have not been fully addressed. The North Carolina DPS merely reproduced the carceral experience for men who had earned and deserved new beginnings.
