Ben Margot/AP Photo
A solitary confinement cell in San Jose, California
Jermane Scott started to feel sick in late July. He is imprisoned at Mansfield Correctional Institution in Ohio, which incarcerates more than 2,500 people.
Scott’s health quickly deteriorated, and he alerted the prison’s medical staff that he was struggling to breathe. But instead of helping him, Scott said the staff first mocked him.
They repeated phrases like “He can’t breathe” and “I can’t breathe,” allusions to George Floyd’s killing in May. Scott, who is Black, also said the staff asked him if he was on drugs, and if he was experiencing a narcotics episode, which he denied. Only after this interrogation did staff take his temperature, which was normal. But because he was “profusely sweating,” the staff took him to the infirmary. There, just a few minutes later, they took his temperature again with a different instrument and he showed a fever of 102.1.
Scott remained in the infirmary for two days until his COVID-19 test results came back positive. But instead of referring Scott to medical isolation for care, the prison placed him in its decommissioned death row block. The unit had limited electricity and no ventilation or electrical outlets in the cells. While he was there, Scott said, there were 19 other COVID-19-positive people incarcerated in the block. With Wi-Fi only periodically working and their access to phones limited, their ability to communicate with the outside world was limited. In sum, the conditions were the same as solitary confinement, commonly called the Special Housing Unit (SHU), administrative segregation, or “the hole.”
Scott remained in the death row block for 17 days. At one point, Scott said his oxygen levels dropped precipitously and he needed oxygen therapy before fully recovering. He still has shortness of breath.
But the experience of being on death row during his illness haunts him, especially knowing that for so many, COVID-19 has been fatal.
Organizers outside the prison protested the use of the death row unit for medical isolation, and on September 23, Scott reported that Mansfield Correctional was no longer using the unit. That may have been because the virus had spread so widely. According to the state’s latest reports, Mansfield Correctional has had 1,919 inmates recover from the virus—a massive outbreak that touched nearly everyone in the prison. At least 12 incarcerated people have died at Mansfield.
Yet, as coronavirus cases begin to rise again for the expected third wave, the use of solitary confinement in prisons and jails to stop the spread of coronavirus behind bars is growing again. In June, Unlock the Box, a coalition of organizations, movement leaders, and state and local campaigns working together to end solitary confinement, released a report that estimated an increase in the use of solitary confinement during the pandemic of nearly 500 percent.
David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, said that the swift growth and magnitude of the use of solitary confinement during the pandemic surprised him—but also didn’t surprise him. “The corrections profession is conservative,” he explained. “They are risk-averse, and when confronted with a challenge, their first instinct is to assert control and to lock down.”
During the pandemic, incarcerated people, whether sick or virus-free, have been allowed no visitors, and institutions have also limited their operations, cutting down on educational and work options. According to the latest update from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, “inmate movement in small numbers is authorized” for commissary, laundry, showers three times per week, and the telephone. That also means little to no time outside.
Should someone test positive for COVID-19, the facility will attempt to limit their movement even further, confining them to a one- or, in some cases, a two-person cell. A primary way that prisons and jails have attempted to stop the spread of the virus was by creating quarantine or isolation units. But some facilities lacked the capacity to do this, instead establishing entire infected units where some incarcerated people told the Prospect they were re-exposed to infected individuals, causing them to remain in the unit for longer. Still other facilities were able to isolate infected individuals, but not necessarily with access to adequate care. In too many cases, advocates say, what should have been medical isolation looked instead like punitive solitary confinement.
Prior to the pandemic, the use of solitary confinement was trending downward. An estimated 60,000 people were in segregation in state or federal prisons before the pandemic, but that number has ballooned to nearly 300,000. With the third wave beginning and the possibility that people could be re-infected, the perils of solitary confinement grow.
As coronavirus cases begin to rise again for the expected third wave, the use of solitary confinement in prisons and jails is growing.
“The use of long-term solitary confinement for more than a few days had been abandoned in the U.S. since the 19th century because of its adverse psychological effects,” said Craig Haney, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It didn’t make a comeback until the beginning of the era of mass incarceration in the 1970s and early 1980s, [when] it came back with a vengeance.” Haney, who studies the effects of solitary confinement in prisons, said that the practice has adverse health effects such as weakening the immune system and exacerbating hypertension.
PRISONS ARE NOT BUILT for social distancing; this spring, experts called them “petri dishes” for the virus. A Stanford study in September showed the virus has spread faster in jails and prisons than on the Diamond Princess cruise ship or in Wuhan, China. A Harvard study in August showed that the “short-term cycling of prisoners through local jails” threatens “entire cities and states.”
Ohio first gained notoriety not for putting incarcerated people sick with COVID-19 in the death row block, but for having entire prison populations that were nearly totally positive. Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio saw 80 percent of prisoners test positive for the disease this spring, and soon became a major vector for an outbreak in the rural county. Shortly after, Ohio’s Pickaway Correctional Institution also saw a surge, quickly becoming the number two COVID-19 hot spot in the nation after Marion.
As of October 25, 91 incarcerated people had died of COVID-19 in Ohio’s prison system and another 15 deaths are considered “probably COVID-19 related.” (According to The Marshall Project’s COVID-19 in prisons tracking project, 104 deaths are COVID-related.)
Ohio’s experience is not exceptional. In Texas, the state with the largest prison population in the country, Vanessa Gibson documented the dysfunctions of the prison where she is incarcerated. In a September letter shared with the Prospect, Gibson, a trans woman, recounted that there had been 600 cases of the virus in the Hughes Unit in Gatesville, Texas. When she tested positive for the virus, she was moved to the quarantine pod, and kept there even after recovering. “It is putting my health at risk by keeping me around sick people!” she wrote. The guards, apparently fearful of contracting the virus, had not kept the pod clean. No one was mopping, food and trash were left everywhere, and the showers hadn’t been cleaned in a month, Gibson wrote.
Alvaro Luna Hernandez, who is incarcerated in the Allred Unit in North Iowa Park, Texas, wrote in a letter to the Prospect that the inmate incarcerated across from him had died from COVID-19. Prisoners have brought lawsuits in defense of their rights, Hernandez wrote, protesting the “inhumane ‘heat related’ [and] unsanitary, filthy conditions,” and the “deliberate indifference of prison officials here to our safety, our health, and our lives.” He also alleged racially discriminatory COVID-19 testing policies, and the mixing of incarcerated people showing COVID-19 symptoms with others not showing symptoms in the same cellblock—where ventilation systems are shared. Infected individuals were moved into his cellblock, he added.
With the largest prison population in the country, Texas also has the highest number of cases of any system in the country, including the federal system. But Arkansas has the highest rate of COVID-19 behind bars, with an astonishing 4,502 cases per 10,000 prisoners.
As of this writing, more than 1,900 federal inmates and more than 800 Bureau of Prison staff members have confirmed positive test results for COVID-19.
Across the country, many individual prisons have comparably high rates. In Michigan’s G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility, where the virus spread through the laundry, 46 percent of those incarcerated at Cotton have tested positive. Inmate Joshua Puckett told the Prospect that when one unit became infected, another unit was told to do the infected unit’s laundry and also became infected from the exposure. When Puckett became sick, he was first placed in a cell alone before joining another inmate later on.
The use of solitary confinement deters some prisoners from coming forward about their symptoms, which enables the virus to spread. The threat of a windowless cell, the ACLU’s Fathi said, discourages people from speaking up. “That has profound implications for the ability of prisons to control the spread.”
Incarcerated people “should be medically isolated but they shouldn’t be put in traditional forms of solitary confinement,” Haney added. “But prison systems don’t seem to be able to understand the fundamental distinction between the two.”
The only known way to stop the spread of the virus behind bars is to lower the population of incarcerated people. Haney said that during the pandemic, he has been filing declarations in lawsuits as part of this battle to stop the spread and lower prison populations. In some cases, advocates like Haney have won: At Adelanto Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing center, a private immigration detention facility in California, a federal judge ordered immediate population reduction, calling the government’s response to a COVID-19 outbreak there “inadequate.” Yet, this only came after a protracted legal battle.
The ACLU has sued multiple prisons to attempt to force them to lower their populations by releasing people who have low recidivism risks and are not a danger to the public—and who have significant health risks. But in Ohio this was unsuccessful. At Federal Correctional Institution Elkton, Ohio’s only federal prison, a massive outbreak in April led the ACLU of Ohio to file suit. One in four people at Elkton had tested positive, and it was one of the first sites where incarcerated people were dying from the disease. Elkton was later among three federal prisons, including FCI Oakdale in Louisiana and FCI Danbury in Connecticut, that Attorney General William Barr cited as part of an emergency order to release vulnerable inmates to home confinement. Despite Barr’s pronouncement, however, few were ever released from Elkton.
In May, a federal judge responded to the ACLU’s lawsuit by issuing a scathing rebuke to Elkton and ordered it to release more than 800 high-risk individuals. But the federal government appealed, and appealed. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals handed the ACLU a loss, ending that recourse for Elkton inmates. As of October 27, nine people have died there and more than 900 have contracted and recovered from the virus. At FCI Butner in North Carolina, a federal judge also ruled against the local ACLU chapter’s efforts to release vulnerable inmates there. At Butner Low Security, 17 incarcerated people have died and another 600 have contracted and recovered from the virus. At Butner Medium Security, another nine incarcerated people have died. Nonetheless, on October 27 the ACLU of North Carolina announced a new lawsuit about the North Carolina prison complex, this one calling for adequate medical care and the protection of prisoners’ constitutional rights.
The only known way to stop the spread of the virus behind bars is to lower the population of incarcerated people.
As of this writing, more than 1,900 federal inmates and more than 800 Bureau of Prison staff members have confirmed positive test results for COVID-19. At least 128 incarcerated people and two staff members have died. Of the BOP’s population of more than 120,000 inmates, nearly 15,000 have tested positive and recovered—a number that is likely an undercount given the nation’s early shortages in testing. Of the system’s roughly 36,000 staff, nearly 1,300 have tested positive and recovered.
As numbers begin to climb again, where the next prison and jail outbreaks will be is unclear, but that there will be more outbreaks is a given, and with prison populations hardly reduced, stopping the spread of the virus will remain virtually impossible. In Oregon, inmates have been infected at ten times the rate of Oregonians overall, and of the 16 incarcerated people who have died from the disease, 13 have died in the last two months. In New York, Elmira Correctional Facility just hit 556 cases, the site of a new spread. And in Montana, the state has deployed the Army National Guard to assist with an outbreak in one of its prisons.
Advocates worry that the growing use of solitary confinement will be hard to reverse. “Prisons are just much more reluctant to let people out of solitary,” said Fathi, “than they are to put them in solitary.”
Six months into the pandemic, he added, public-health officials know how to reduce its spread in prisons: reducing their population. “Solitary confinement,” Fathi concluded, “is not a public-health response. It doesn’t slow the spread of the virus and in many cases may actually accelerate it.”
