SAN QUENTIN – California prison officials created a “public health disaster” in San Quentin and Corcoran prisons last year, transferring inmates from other prisons through a poorly planned and hurried process, while COVID-19 rates increased across the state, according to a condemnatory report by a state supervisory agency.
The 69-page report, released on Monday by the Office of the Inspector General, found that the transfers to San Quentin from the California Institution for Men in Chino made in the spring and summer of 2020 “were deeply flawed and put at risk the health and life of thousands of people and imprisoned employees. The report concluded that the team relied on outdated or inadequate testing, that the authorities were pressured to speed up transfers and that the team that raised the concerns was largely ignored.
A health executive in Chino Prison went so far as to “explicitly order that incarcerated people not be tested again the day before transfers begin,” the report concluded. The problems were so obvious that at least two California prisoners exhibited obvious symptoms of coronavirus when they got off the bus from Chino to San Quentin.
Twenty-eight people died of COVID-19 in San Quentin, and more than 2,000 cases – about two-thirds of the prison population at the time – contracted the virus, according to data released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“Our analysis also found that when the team learned of the positive results of the test shortly after the arrival of the prisoners, both prisons did not properly conduct contact tracking investigations,” wrote Inspector General Roy Wesley in the letter introducing the report. “According to San Quentin, there were many positive cases in a short period of time to conduct contact tracking.”
Wesley’s letter notes that, since the transfer disaster, the prison system “has taken several actions to better safeguard incarcerated people who move between prisons, including implementing procedures that require prisons to conduct the COVID-19 test for transferring incarcerated people no more than five days before the transfer, followed by a quick test on the day of the scheduled transfer. ”Wesley noted, however, his office has not yet reviewed these new implementations.
Asked to comment on the findings, a CDCR spokeswoman released a joint statement prepared by her department and California Correctional Health Services.
“We are grateful for this OIG report and note that many factors contributed to the need to remove high-risk medical individuals from CIM who are not reflected in the report,” says the statement. “The transfers were made with the intention of mitigating the potential damage to COVID-19 CIM patients and were based on a careful risk analysis using scientific information available in May 2020 on the transmission of this new disease. We recognize that some mistakes were made in the process of these transfers, and both the CCHCS and the CDCR have made appropriate changes to the patient’s movement since then ”.
The outbreak became the subject of investigation by the State Senate, in addition to several lawsuits. It is also a critical point for detention advocates, who held a demonstration over the weekend – a caravan across the Bay Bridge – asking Governor Gavin Newsom to follow the advice of health officials to authorize thousands of releases from the state prison system. .
The inspector general’s report is Part III of the agency’s long-term review, and the findings so far have not been good. A report released in October found that, although the PPE was widely available in the prison system, inspectors noted that “employees and people incarcerated often did not comply with these basic security protocols”. An August report found that vague screening guidelines “appear to have caused inconsistent implementation across prisons”.
Although San Quentin’s COVID-19 rates have dropped dramatically since mid-2020, there are still more than 2,200 active cases across the state prison system. Nearly 200 people arrested died, according to CDCR data.
Monday’s report suggests that many in the CDCR and CCHCS predicted the disaster to come. An e-mail from a “CCHCS executive nurse” sent on May 27 – the day before transfers begin – notes that prisoners were tested three weeks earlier, “many days ago” for safe prison transfers, even if prisoners were quarantined on arrival at the new prison. Another e-mail from the “California Institution for Men Manager,” said that “it’s hard to get things right in a hurry … I’m surprised that HQ wants to change our interns now.”
Among those transferred, 189 were clinically vulnerable and therefore had a higher risk of death if they contracted the virus, according to the report. Just a day before the first bus left Chino, authorities were still debating important details, such as how many people to put on each bus and where to host them when they arrived in Corcoran and San Quentin. When the prisoners arrived, their properties were so disorganized that it was impossible for officials to find out immediately what belonged to whom.
“Not only did the prison recently fail to test the prisoners they were transferring to make sure they were not infected with COVID-19 at the time of the transfers, but the prison health team conducted verbal and temperature tests very early for several prisoners scheduled to transfer to be able to effectively determine if they had symptoms of COVID-19 when they boarded buses to Corcoran and San Quentin, ”says the report.