Covid 19 coronavirus: 1 in 5 US prisoners test positive, 1,700 have died

One in five state and federal prisoners in the United States has tested positive for the coronavirus, a rate more than four times higher than the general population. In some states, more than half of the prisoners have been infected, according to data compiled by The Associated Press and The Marshall Project.

As the pandemic enters its 10th month, and as the first Americans begin receiving a long-awaited Covid-19 vaccine, at least 275,000 prisoners have been infected, more than 1,700 have died, and the spread of the virus behind bars shows no evidence. signs of slowing down. New cases in prisons this week hit their highest level since testing began in the spring, far surpassing previous peaks in April and August.

“That number is a very low count,” said Homer Venters, a former medical director at the Rikers Island prison complex in New York.

Venters has conducted more than a dozen court-ordered Covid-19 prison inspections across the country. “I still find myself in prisons and jails where, when people get sick, they not only don’t get tested, they don’t get care. So they get sick much more than they need to,” he said.

Now, the launch of vaccines poses difficult decisions for politicians and legislators. As the virus spreads largely unchecked behind bars, prisoners are unable to socially distance themselves and rely on the state for their safety and well-being.

Donte Westmoreland, 26, was recently released from the Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas, where he contracted the virus while serving time for marijuana. Some 5,100 prisoners have been infected in Kansas prisons, the third highest rate of Covid-19 in the country, behind only South Dakota and Arkansas.

“It was as if I had been sentenced to death,” Westmoreland said.

Westmoreland lived with more than 100 men infected with the virus in an open bedroom, where she regularly woke up to find sick men on the floor, unable to get up on their own, she said.

“People are dying in front of me from this virus,” he said. “It’s the most terrifying sight.” Westmoreland said he was sweating and shivering in his bunk until, six weeks later, he finally recovered.

Half of the prisoners in Kansas have been infected with Covid-19, eight times the case rate among the general population of the state. Eleven inmates have died, including five at the Westmoreland prison. Of the three prison employees who died in Kansas, two worked at the Lansing correctional facility.

In Arkansas, where more than 9,700 prisoners tested positive and 50 died, four in seven have had the virus, the second highest rate of prison infection in the United States.

Among those killed was 29-year-old Derick Coley, who was serving a 20-year sentence at the Cummins Unit Maximum Security Prison. Cece Tate, Coley’s girlfriend, said she last spoke to him on April 10 when he said he was ill and showing symptoms of the virus.

“It took me forever to get information,” he said. The prison finally told him on April 20 that Coley had tested positive for the virus. Less than two weeks later, a prison chaplain called on May 2 to tell him that Coley had died.

The couple had a daughter who turned 9 in July. “She cried and said, ‘My dad can’t send me a birthday card,'” Tate said. “She was like, ‘Mom, my Christmas is not going to be the same.’

Almost every prison system in the country has experienced significantly higher infection rates than the surrounding communities. In facilities run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, one in five inmates has had coronavirus. Twenty-four state prison systems have had even higher rates.

Prison workers have also been disproportionately affected. In North Dakota, four out of every five prison employees have contracted coronavirus. Nationally, it is one in five.

Not all states publish how many prisoners they have examined, but states that examine prisoners extensively and regularly may appear to have higher case rates than states that do not.

Infection rates through Tuesday were calculated by the AP and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the criminal justice system, based on data collected weekly in prisons since March. Infection and mortality rates can be even higher, as almost all prison systems have significantly fewer prisoners today than when the pandemic began, so the rates represent a conservative estimate based on the largest known population.

However, as vaccination campaigns are launched, in some states there has been a rejection of the early application of vaccines to people in prisons.

“There is no way it will reach the prisoners … before the people who have not committed any crime,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis told reporters earlier this month after initial plans to priority vaccines in their state put prisoners before the general public.

As in more than a dozen states, Kansas’ vaccination plan does not mention prisoners or prison staff, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan prison data think tank. Seven states place prisoners near the front of the line, along with others who live in crowded settings such as nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Another 19 states have placed prisoners in the second phase of their vaccine launches.

Racial disparities in the nation’s criminal justice system compound the disproportionate cost the pandemic has taken on communities of color. Black Americans are incarcerated five times more than whites. They also have a disproportionate chance of being infected and hospitalized with Covid-19, and are more likely than other races to have a close family member or friend who has died from the virus.

The pandemic “increases the risk for those already at risk,” said David J. Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.

This week, a working group of the Council of Criminal Justice headed by former attorneys general Alberto González and Loretta Lynch published a report calling for reducing the prison population, improving communication with public health departments and reporting better data.

Prison facilities are often overcrowded and poorly ventilated. Dormitory-style housing, cafeterias, and open bar cell doors make quarantine almost impossible. The prison population is sicker, on average, than the general population, and medical care behind bars is notoriously poor. Nationally, the Covid-19 death rate among prisoners is 45% higher than the overall rate.

From the early days of the pandemic, public health experts called for widespread prison releases as the best way to curb the spread of the virus behind bars. In October, the National Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering released a report urging states to empty their prisons of anyone who was medically vulnerable, nearing the end of their sentence, or who had a low risk to public safety.

But the launches have been slow and uneven. In the first three months of the pandemic, more than 10,000 federal prisoners requested compassionate release. Guards denied or did not respond to nearly all of those requests, approving only 156, less than 2 percent.

A plan to reduce the state prison population in New Jersey, first introduced in June, was delayed in the Legislature due to insufficient funds to help those who were released. Roughly 2,200 prisoners with less than a year to serve were finally released in November, eight months after the pandemic began.

California used a similar strategy to release 11,000 people since March. But state prisons stopped accepting new prisoners from county jails at various points during the pandemic, which simply shifted the burden to jails. According to the state corrections agency, more than 8,000 people are now waiting in California county jails, which are also coronavirus hot spots.

“We call that ‘shitty county,'” said John Wetzel, Pennsylvania’s secretary of corrections, whose prison system has one of the lowest Covid-19 case rates in the country, with one in seven prisoners infected. But that’s still more than three times the state rate.

Prison walls are porous even during a pandemic, and prison officials and other employees are in and out every day.

“The interchange between communities and prisons and jails has always been there, but in the context of Covid-19 it has never been clearer,” said Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, a professor of social medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill who studies incarceration and Health. . “We have to stop thinking of them as a separate place.”

Wetzel said Pennsylvania prisons have kept virus rates relatively low by widely distributing masks in mid-March, weeks before even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending them for everyday use in public, and require staff and inmates to use them properly and consistently. But prisoners and defenders say prevention measures on the ground are uneven, regardless of Wetzel’s good intentions.

As the country heads into winter with a surge in virus infections, experts warn that unless Covid-19 is controlled behind bars, the country will not control it in the general population.

“If we are going to end this pandemic, reduce infection rates, reduce death rates, reduce ICU occupancy rates, we have to address infection rates in correctional facilities,” said Emily Wang, professor of Yale School of Medicine and co-author of the recent National Academies report.

“Infections and deaths are extraordinarily high. These are areas of the state and we have to deal with them.”

This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Marshall Project that explores the state of the prison system in the coronavirus pandemic. – AP