1 in 5 inmates in the US has had COVID-19; 1,700 have died – NBC 6 South Florida

One in five state and federal inmates in the United States has tested positive for the coronavirus, a percentage more than four times that of the general population. According to data from The Associated Press and The Marshall Project, more than half of inmates are infected in some states.

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

“That number is a huge under-figure,” said Homer Venters, the former Chief Medical Officer of the Rikers Island prison complex in New York.

Peddlers conducted more than a dozen COVID-19 prison inspections across the country. “I still come across prisons and prisons where people who get sick are not only not tested, but also receive no care. So they get a lot sicker than they need to, ”he said.

Now the rollout of vaccines poses difficult decisions for politicians and policymakers. Because the virus spreads largely uncontrolled behind bars, prisoners are unable to distance themselves socially and are dependent 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 on a marijuana charge. About 5,100 inmates have been infected in Kansas prisons, the third highest COVID-19 rate in the country, behind only South Dakota and Arkansas.

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

Westmoreland lived with more than 100 virus-infected men in an open dormitory, where he woke up regularly to see men lying sick on the floor, unable to get up on their own, he said.

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

Half of Kansas inmates are infected with COVID-19 – eight times the number of cases among the state’s total population. Eleven inmates died, including five in the prison where Westmoreland was being held. Of the three prison workers who died in Kansas, two worked at the Lansing Correctional Facility.

In Arkansas, where more than 9,700 inmates tested positive and 50 died, four out of seven have had the virus, the second highest infection rate in the US.

Among the dead was 29-year-old Derick Coley, who was serving a 20-year sentence in the maximum security prison of the Cummins Unit. Cece Tate, Coley’s girlfriend, said she last spoke to him on April 10 when he said he was sick and was showing symptoms of the virus.

“It took me ages to get information,” she said. The prison finally told her on April 20 that Coley had tested positive for the virus. Less than two weeks later, a prison pastor called on May 2 to tell her 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,’” said Tate. “She was like, ‘Mommy, my Christmas won’t be the same.'”

Almost every prison system in the country has seen significantly higher rates of infection than the communities around them. In facilities operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons, one in five inmates has had the coronavirus. Twenty-four state prison systems have seen even higher rates.

Hospitals and health systems in small towns faced major challenges before COVID-19 engulfed the country. Today they are bursting under the pressure of this brutal pandemic. Hospitals are depleting resources, bleeding money, and still facing a losing battle to cope with the incoming wave of COVID-19 patients. The toll for frontline workers in these hospitals is even higher.

Prison staff have also been disproportionately affected. In North Dakota, four in five prison staff have contracted the corona virus. This is one in five nationally.

Not all states disclose how many inmates they have tested, but state that generally and regularly test inmates seem to have a higher rate of cases than states that don’t.

Infection rates as of Tuesday were calculated by the AP and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization dealing with the criminal justice system, based on data collected weekly in prisons since March. Infection and death rates can be even higher, as nearly every prison system today has significantly fewer inmates than when the pandemic started, so the numbers represent a conservative estimate based on the largest known population.

But as vaccination campaigns get underway, there has been a downturn in some states to keep the people in prisons from shooting early.

With a nationwide rollout of vaccines poised to begin, there is an ongoing debate about who should get priority. Alberto Carvalho, Superintendent of Public Schools in Miami-Dade County, says teachers are vital workers who play a vital role in our communities and need to be at the front of the queue.

“There is no way it will go to the inmates … before it goes to the people who have not committed any crimes,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis told reporters earlier this month after the initial vaccination priority plans of his state prisoners for the general. placed. public.

As in more than a dozen states, the Kansas vaccination plan does not list inmates or correctional personnel, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, an impartial think tank on prison data. Seven states placed inmates at the front of the line, along with others living in crowded environments such as nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Another 19 states have placed inmates in the second phase of their vaccine rollout.

Racial inequalities in the nation’s criminal justice system amplify the disproportionate toll the pandemic has taken on communities of color. Black Americans are five times more likely to be detained than whites. They are also disproportionately likely to be infected and hospitalized with COVID-19, and are more likely than other breeds to have a family member or close friend who has died from the virus.

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

This week, a criminal justice council task force led by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and Loretta Lynch released a report calling for a scaling back of prison populations, improving communications with public health departments and reporting better data.

Prisons are often overcrowded and poorly ventilated. Dorm-style housing, cafeterias, and open-bar cell doors make quarantine nearly impossible. Prison populations are, on average, sicker than the general population and health care behind bars is notoriously sub-par. Nationally, the death rate for COVID-19 among inmates is 45% higher than the overall figure.

From the start of the pandemic, public health experts have called for widespread release of prisons as the best way to stop the spread of viruses behind bars. In October, the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering released a report urging states to clear their prisons of anyone who was medically vulnerable, nearing the end of their sentence, or at low risk to public safety.

But releases are slow and uneven. In the first three months of the pandemic, more than 10,000 federal inmates filed for compassionate release. Security guards denied or responded to almost all of those requests, approving only 156 – less than 2%.

A plan to thin the population of state prisons in New Jersey, first introduced in June, was held up in the legislature due to insufficient funding to help those released. About 2,200 inmates with less than a year to serve were finally released in November, eight months after the pandemic started.

California has used a similar strategy since March to release 11,000 people. But state prisons stopped accepting new inmates from provincial prisons at various times during the pandemic, simply shifting the burden to the prisons. More than 8,000 people now wait in California County prisons, which are also hot spots for the coronavirus, according to the state correction agency.

“We call that ‘fucking county,'” said John Wetzel, Pennsylvania’s secretary of corrections, whose prison system has one of the lower COVID-19 cases in the country, with one in seven infected inmates. But that’s still more than three times the statewide rate.

Prison walls are porous, even during a pandemic, with correction officers and other workers traveling in and out every day.

“The interchange between communities and prisons and prisons 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 is responsible for confinement and health. studies. . “We must stop seeing 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 daily use in public – and requiring staff and prisoners use them correctly and consistently. But inmates and lawyers say the on-site prevention measures are uneven, regardless of Wetzel’s good intentions.

As the country heads into winter with increasing viral infections, experts warn that unless COVID-19 is brought under control behind bars, the country will not get it under control among the general population.

“If we want to end this pandemic – lowering infection rates, lowering mortality rates, lowering ICU occupancy rates – we need to tackle infection rates in correctional facilities,” said Emily Wang, professor at the Yale School of Medicine and co-author. of the recent National Academies report.

Infections and deaths are extraordinarily high. These are divisions of the state and we are dealing with them. “

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This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Marshall Project examining the state of the prison system during the coronavirus pandemic.