Sixty-six inmates at the California Men’s Institution, which is full of coronaviruses, were traveling by bus in late May and heading from Chino to Corcoran prison, where Frank Estrada was incarcerated.
What they did not know was that “the ‘beast’ came with them,” Estrada said, referring to the deadly virus that mounted one of the most disastrous prisoner transfers in state history.
Corcoran State Prison was free of coronaviruses before the buses arrived. He now has 10 active COVID-19 cases and one reported the death of one inmate.
San Quentin, the oldest prison in California, received 121 transfers from Chino and has since been devastated by the disease. Last week, it passed the 2,000 mark in infections, and now reports 862 active cases and 13 deaths among its 3,362 inmates.
The transfers deepened a health crisis within the California correctional system that has now affected more than half of the state’s 35 jails. At least 40 inmates across the state have died of COVID-related illnesses, and 1,905 had active infections on Tuesday.
Current and recently released inmates describe the terror behind bars when the virus raged and, one by one, fellow inmates became ill and in some cases died. Several said they felt helpless because they could not easily practice social distancing or take other precautions available to those outside.
“Fear echoed through the cells,” said Estrada, 56, who managed to avoid the virus and was released early from a 16-month sentence for theft. “Many adult men who are not very afraid were very afraid.”
More than 2,000 inmates at the San Quintín State Prison have tested positive for COVID-19, including 13 who died.
(Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
The outbreaks in Corcoran and San Quentin were preventable if officials had not made the transfers from Chino, according to elected officials, corrections experts and a court-appointed recipient who oversees the prison’s medical care.
At the time of the moves, Chino Prison reported more than 600 COVID-19 cases and nine deaths. The 700 inmates selected for the transfer had medical conditions that made them especially vulnerable to the virus.
All were tested before being shipped. But for reasons that corrections officials have not yet explained, some were tested weeks before the move, rendering the results useless.
“The way a transfer happened where someone didn’t verify the dates those people were evaluated is really incompetent and inconceivable,” said State Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), who chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee.
In a statement emailed to The Times, a spokesperson for the court-appointed recipient acknowledged that the transfers were ill-conceived.
“In essence, the transfer process opened too soon, too quickly, and without the necessary precautions,” the statement said.
“Changes have been made to the transfer and testing policies.”
Michael Kirkpatrick, 62, was deemed fit for parole in April and was awaiting final approval and a release date when news of Chino’s moves reached San Quentin, and along with it, a sense of dread.
“We knew it was only a matter of time for us,” he said.
Kirkpatrick said that he and his cellmate, Anthony Waldrip, developed symptoms, including headaches. They were tested last month and got the results about two weeks ago.
“All they really did was say, ‘Here, take some Tylenol,’ and that’s it,” he said. “We were simply in the wishing system: you wish you didn’t have it. You wish you didn’t get sick anymore.
Kirkpatrick, who was released on July 13 after his probation for a robbery conviction was accelerated due to the outbreak, said he and Waldrip were regularly checked by prison nurses but never saw a doctor.
“It was very scary,” he said. “The boys screamed: ‘Man at 246! Fallen man!’ and it would be someone who fell or got so sick that they had to come and send them out of there. I’d listen to him five or six times a day and say, “Am I next?”
Most of the inmates were locked up throughout the day. They lived in food boxes for weeks. Showers were reduced to one every few days.
At the Kirkpatrick level of about 50 cells, only about five had men who were not infected, he said.
“It is really bad,” he said. “Many men who refused to take the test were considered not to be positive, although many of them probably were.”
Kirkpatrick, who said he earned a college degree during his 22 years in prison and has a job waiting for him as a substance abuse counselor, is quarantined at a San Francisco motel, savoring his new freedom and counting his blessings.
Corrections officials say they have taken steps to protect staff, inmates and the surrounding communities. They include reducing the system’s population by nearly 10,000 since March by reducing new admissions and speeding up probation for about 3,500 inmates.
They also noted that some of the state’s prisons do not have or have few infections, and defended their management of the outbreak in San Quintín. In a statement, corrections officials said they established a 220-bed “alternative care site” on the prison grounds, gave N95 respirators to all inmates and staff, and sent hundreds of additional guards and health workers to help reduce movement between housing units.
“We have taken extraordinary measures to remedy this situation,” the statement said.
Anxiety also permeates San Quentin’s death row, a five-tier wing that houses 718 convicted men. At least seven who tested positive for COVID-19 died in the past month.
“I pride myself on not being afraid of anything or anyone on death row, not even death itself,” wrote Kevin Cooper in an online opinion piece in May. “But this virus is more than dying or dying. It is a tortuous death, as is the lethal injection.
Cooper, a high-profile inmate seeking DNA evidence that he says could prove his innocence in the 1983 murder of four people in Chino Hills, wrote that he was doing everything he could to stay healthy.
“I distance myself socially, I wash my hands regularly, I clean this cage where I am forced to live regularly,” he wrote.
“Every prisoner who lives next to me or around me, to my knowledge, is also taking care of himself.”
Norm Hile, one of Cooper’s attorneys, said his client started coughing and suffering from flu-like symptoms last month. He said Cooper seemed to be improving but was still waiting for the test results.
“COVID should not be a death sentence on death row,” said Hile. “COVID did not sentence them to death.”
Critics said the decision to transfer inmates to San Quentin was bad for several reasons, including its old-style barred cells that do not restrict air flow.
“A prison is like a cruise ship without the dance floors and buffets. People cannot walk away from each other, ”said defense attorney Brian Pomerantz, who represents death row inmates.
For many inmates, COVID-19 is more of an imminent threat than the executioner. California has not served a death sentence since 2006.
“There is a real ‘sitting duck’ feeling about this,” Pomerantz said, adding that inmates in other California jails are also concerned about the virus, especially among vulnerable populations at the system’s medical facilities in Vacaville and Stockton.
On July 10, the day Governor Gavin Newsom announced that up to 8,000 California inmates could be released early to help stop the spread of COVID-19, Pomerantz petitioned a federal court for the release of Waldrip, a client who had not he was arrested for death. row.
Suffering from high blood pressure and other ailments, Waldrip, 54, has served a life sentence of 20 years to life in prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
In January 2000, two Los Angeles police officers saw him at an apartment door with a gun and arrested him, according to court records. Waldrip, who was visiting and did not own the gun, had removed it from a play area where an 8-year-old boy was showing it to his sister, according to court records.
The weapons charge was a “third attack” crime for Waldrip.
Pomerantz argued in court documents that Waldrip, who is eligible for parole in less than a year, “can get better medical treatment and has a substantially better chance of surviving COVID-19 outside of prison.”
As COVID-19 spread through California prisons, officials earlier this month replaced the correction system’s chief medical officer, Dr. R. Steven Tharratt, and Newsom criticized the decision to transfer inmates to Chinese.
Although separated from the rest of the prison population in San Quintín, the 121 newcomers used the same showers and ate in the same dining room as other prisoners. After less than a week, San Quentin reported four positive cases among inmates and stopped more transfers.
J. Clark Kelso, the court-appointed recipient who has overseen California prison health care since 2008, said at a July 1 state Senate hearing that a transfer protocol had called for all inmates to be negative before be transferred. But it did not include a time frame for testing.
“Although all patients had negative results, in many cases the tests were two, three, and some cases four weeks old,” he said. “Too old to be a reliable indicator of COVID absence.”
Once the transferred inmates started testing positive for COVID-19, the protocol was changed to require testing within seven days of the transfer.
Prisoner advocates and health care experts said there was no way to defend the lack of evidence.
“It is a basic medicine: a nurse could have told you that those tests were too old,” said Don Specter, executive director of the Bureau of Prison Law, which represents inmates in a long-running demand for medical care.
