SACRAMENTO, California (AP) – California prison officials wanted to protect coronavirus prisoners in one facility by transferring them to another, but instead triggered a “public health disaster” that led to thousands of prisoners being infected and 28 dying, along with a correctional officer, the state inspector general said Monday.
The report provided new details about last spring’s catastrophic decision to move prisoners from the California Institution for Men, east of Los Angeles, to San Quentin State Prison, north of San Francisco. The prisoners were put on buses for the journey of more than 400 miles (680 kilometers) and the tight quarters increased the risk of spreading infections.
The inspector general found that pressure to meet self-imposed deadlines has prompted authorities to ignore warnings from health officials, and outdated tests have failed to detect that some of the transferred inmates were already infected.
Several officials in the state penitentiary department and the office of the federal judicial administrator who oversees penitentiary medical care knew that the tests were too old to be valid, according to the report. However, emails show a health executive in a Southern California prison “explicitly ordered that incarcerated people not be tested again the day before transfers begin”
Preparations for changes at headquarters level “were deeply problematic and put the health and lives of thousands of people and prisoners at risk,” said Inspector General Roy Wesley’s report.
Democratic MP Marc Levine, who represents San Quentin, said the report “is maddening in scope and scale” for officials “fundamental failures”. He again called for the resignation of federal receiver J. Clark Kelso, saying his office “knew it was at risk of a public health disaster”.
Prison officials and the recipient’s office issued a joint statement saying the transfers were well-intentioned and based on risk analyzes consistent with what was known about the virus in May.
“We recognize that some mistakes were made in the process of these transfers,” they said. But “there were many factors that contributed to the need to move individuals at high medical risk … that are not reflected in the report.”
The decision to move prisoners from the Southern California prison came while an outbreak was sweeping through the facilities, leaving more than 650 prisoners and 55 employees sick. In their concern for vulnerable prisoners, executives “closed on a tight deadline” for transfers, the report said.
E-mails show that the resulting pressure has prompted Southern California prison officials to “ignore the health team’s concerns” that 172 of the 189 inmates had not been tested for the virus for at least two weeks. Most went to San Quentin and the rest to California State Prison, Corcoran, in the Central Valley.
The recipient’s office “said MOVE THEM NOW and we’re trying to comply,” said an unidentified department head manager in an email acknowledging the old tests.
The authorities compounded the error with more missteps.
Prison health staff conducted verbal and temperature tests, but they did it too early to detect whether inmates were showing symptoms when they actually boarded the transfer buses.
And the danger “was exacerbated by another inexplicable decision”, approved by the Federal Revenue Service, of increasing the number of prisoners on buses under the argument that, because they are wearing protective masks “, the benefit of a faster change. appears to offset the risks, “according to an email included in the report.
By the time the inmates arrived in San Quentin, which at the time had no confirmed virus, the nurses immediately noticed that two had symptoms of coronavirus. But almost all of the transferred inmates were placed in a housing unit without solid doors, allowing the virus to circulate freely. The report includes a time lapse video of how the outbreak went through the two receiving prisons.
The San Quentin team worked in different areas on different days, probably helping with dissemination.
In all, 91 of the 122 inmates sent to San Quentin were infected and two died. At the end of August, 2,237 inmates and 277 unit staff were infected, and 28 inmates and a correctional officer died.
Corcoran had a much smaller outbreak, peaking at 153 cases, after two of the 67 inmates transferred there tested positive. The report said it was probably better contained because most of the prisoners there are housed behind solid doors.
None of the prisons adequately tracked infected detainees.
Since then, authorities have increased testing, quarantine and the use of personal protective equipment, noting that there has been no recent outbreak related to transfers between prisons.
The inspector general acknowledged that employees took several measures to improve security during transfers, including testing no more than five days before a move and a quick test on the day of the transfer. These measures “should help prevent future disasters,” says the report, although it notes that the overall cases reached more than 8,500 infected detainees and more than 4,300 infected employees by the end of the year.
As of Monday, there were more than 2,200 cases of active inmates and nearly 1,200 cases of employees in the state prison system. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 192 prisoners and 22 employees have died, showing that the “arduous task of containing the virus inside prisons remains unfinished,” wrote Inspector General Roy Wesley.
Originally published