‘A storm is coming’: Fears of an inmate epidemic as the virus spreads in the jails

It started with a jails investigator in an office three miles from Rikers Island. Then, a correction officer at a security checkpoint near the entrance to the jail complex got it. Hours later, it was an inmate in a crowded housing unit.

Within days, the investigator had died and three more correction officers and two other staff members had tested positive for the coronavirus, confirming fears that the highly contagious disease had arrived in the nation’s second-largest jail system, endangering 5,300 inmates and twice as many guards.

On Thursday, the jail system’s chief physician, Ross MacDonald, took to Twitter with a warning: “A storm is coming.”

He was part of a growing chorus of public defenders and officials in New York City, led by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who have been pushing for the state courts and the city’s district attorneys to release from city jails people who are especially vulnerable to the virus.

The alternative, they have said, may be a public health catastrophe.

Similar scenarios are playing out in jails and prisons throughout the state and across the country as correction staff members and inmates have tested positive for the virus. Two correction officers in upstate New York prisons, one correction officer in Westchester and an inmate in a Nassau County jail have been found to have the disease, as have two inmates in a federal prison in California.

Mayor de Blasio said his administration was working with prosecutors to free elderly and infirm inmates. On Friday, the district attorneys in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx said they had consented to the release of dozens of inmates, though the final decision will be up to the courts.

“These are unprecedented times,” the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said. “We are doing this in a truncated period of time.”

Officials in major cities in California, Florida and Pennsylvania had already taken similar steps to slow the spread of the virus.

But public defenders and New York City officials said the process of setting people free had been hampered by uncertainties over who could authorise their release, concerns over public safety and worries about where to send people once they were out.

“For everyone’s safety, this decision cannot be rushed,” Freddi Goldstein, de Blasio’s spokeswoman, said Thursday. “We need to determine both public health risk and public safety risk.”

City officials would like to release several hundred people sent to Rikers Island for minor parole violations, near the end of their sentences or detained on low bail.

Public defenders and advocates for inmates have called for sending home all inmates with preexisting medical conditions, those over 50 and anyone jailed for a parole violation.

“It is a ticking time bomb,” said Justine Olderman, executive director of the Bronx Defenders. “We’re looking for bold action and leadership.”

Dr. Robert Cohen, a member of the Board of Correction, the city agency that serves as a watchdog over the jails, said, “The most important thing we can do right now is discharge all of the people who are old and have serious medical issues — those people are likely to die from a coronavirus infection.”

Seventeen percent of the city’s jail population is over 50, and a majority of that group has an underlying health condition, according to data provided by the city’s Department of Correction.

City corrections officials said they had begun screening all personnel entering the jail for fevers and doing medical checks of inmates going to and from court. Visiting inmates has been suspended. Arts and education programs have been cut back.

Detainees have been instructed to sleep head-to-toe, to maintain 3 feet of distance between them, and to not sit on one another’s beds.

Even so, said Dr Rachael Bedard, a geriatrician who works at the jail, it has been — and most likely will be — difficult to stem the spread of the virus in a place where people live in cramped and often unsanitary conditions.

“The only meaningful public health intervention here is to depopulate the jails dramatically,” she said.

Rikers has an 88-bed contagious disease unit with air-controlled cells; the infected inmate is housed there now. But the unit does not have ventilators, so inmates who become severely ill will be sent to Bellevue Hospital Centre.

Corrections officials said that they had stepped up cleaning and that inmates and staff members were given sanitation wipes and general disinfectant. Guards have also been supplied with gloves and respiratory masks.

But inmates, union officials and Rikers staff members say conditions in the jail complex remain unsanitary.

Rayshad Jackson, right, is greeted by his wife, Courtney, after he was released from the Rikers Island jail complex in New York, Friday, Mar 20, 2020. The New York Times

Inmates have complained to their lawyers in recent days that they did not have soap or cleaning products. One told his lawyer in a letter that his housing unit had not been cleaned in several days.

He said when he arrived at the jail, he was held in a pen with dozens of others, some of whom were coughing, and described the area as “extremely dirty,” according to the Legal Aid Society, the city’s largest public defender group.

Rayshad Jackson, who was released from Rikers Island on Friday, said jail officials had not informed inmates about the viral outbreak wreaking havoc globally.

He learned about the virus three days ago from news reports. The news caused a small riot in the jail, he said.

“No one knew what this was,” said Jackson, who had been detained on a parole violation and has chronic asthma and sleep apnea.

One staff member, who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution from the city, said that many correction officers did not have access to hand sanitiser, masks or gloves. Many of the facilities, the staff member said, were poorly ventilated and, despite the department’s public statements, some spaces remained uncleaned for days.

Elias Husamudeen, the president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, said his 11,000 officers had been given only 3,000 masks.

Husamudeen said the department needed to segregate new inmates coming into the jail and provide more supplies. If not, he said, “the crisis will grow worse with each passing day.”

State prisons face a similar problem. So far two correction officers, including one at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility and another at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, and a civilian employee in Albany have tested positive for the virus, state prison officials said.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state prison officials have declined to share details about their plans for addressing an outbreak, citing security concerns.

Civilian employees in the prison system were ordered to remain home for two weeks to limit the number of people entering the prisons, and visits by friends and family have been suspended.

Foster Thompson, an inmate serving time for murder at Sing Sing, said in a telephone interview this week that an inmate in a nearby cell was sneezing, hacking and complaining loudly of body aches. The next day, he said, about 40 inmates in his housing unit went to a clinic for medical attention, but were turned away.

Thompson said prison officials had recently cancelled social and educational programs to keep inmates apart. But crowds are everywhere, he said.

With little else to do, hundreds of prisoners have been gathering in the yard. Eighty men at a time pack into the bathhouse showers, and with visits suspended, there are long lines for the phones.

“There’s no way be away from people,” Thompson said. “Everybody’s basically right on top of each other.”

© 2020 New York Times News Service