COVID-19 in the Golden State’s jails and prisons

By SETH SANDRONSKY

California is a blue state, but how progressive are its incarceration policies? Consider how the COVID-19 pandemic harmed inmates, prisoners and staff in some of the Golden State’s jails and prisons.

At the Lompoc Federal Prison in Santa Barbara County in Central California, 70% of prisoners had contracted the coronavirus. Prison guards also were infected. Some of them left work and spread infections to their families and communities.

One does not need to show symptoms of COVID-19 to spread it. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America, researchers published their findings on the probable spread of the pandemic. “Speech droplets generated by asymptomatic carriers of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are increasingly considered to be a likely mode of disease transmission,” according to Valentyn Stadnytskyi, Christina E. Bax, Adriaan Bax, and Philip Anfinrud. Speech can spread the pandemic.

Meanwhile, in Monterey County, 160 miles north of the Lompoc Federal Prison, MILPA, an activist group, called for officials to act immediately to protect the health of incarcerated adults and juveniles during the pandemic.

On that note, Yolanda Huang is a Berkeley, Calif.-based civil rights lawyer who sought relief from federal courts via an emergency temporary restraining order for inmates housed in the Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a pleading, Huang asked the federal court to “concretely require the defendant Sheriff, his underlings, and relevant personnel from SRJ’s contracted, for-profit medical care provider, defendant Wellpath...to protect the prisoners at SRJ from defendants’ continuing failure to provide reasonable COVID-19 prevention, care, and treatment.”

Why? “The situation is that the virus is spreading in the jail,” Huang told The Progressive Populist in an email. That could hardly be otherwise. Social distancing and sheltering in place as ways to slow the pandemic spread are a cruel joke for the incarcerated. They have no control over the conditions of their confinement. If anything, incarceration is the absence of people’s personal control.

That was not all at the SRJ. “There’s no testing,” according to Huang. Pandemic tests are crucial to determine who has and does not have the coronavirus inside or outside of jails and prisons.

“The only treatment the jail provides is to put the men into solitary confinement,” Huang said. There is a big problem with that policy. Human rights experts with the United Nations have recognized solitary confinement as a form of torture. Solitary is not a treatment for COVID-19.

Another tactic to slow the spread of COVID-19 is releasing healthy inmates who are not a risk to others. That would reduce the number of inmates infected with the pandemic.

Public opinion polling supports releasing inmates, according to Lara Bazelon, law professor, University of San Francisco School of Law, and Kyle C. Barry, senior legal counsel at The Justice Collaborative, authors of a recent report. (See )

The US public health crisis from the pandemic has many tentacles, some easier to see than others. Incarcerated Americans’ COVID-19 infections have no boundaries, with dire consequences for their health and that of the public. We are only as healthy as the least healthy of us.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2020

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