SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) – California prison officials wanted to protect coronavirus inmates at one facility by transferring them to another, but unleashed a “public health disaster” that left thousands of inmates infected and 28 dead, together. correctional officer, the state inspector general said Monday.
The report contains new details about last year’s disastrous decision to move inmates from the California Institution for Men east of Los Angeles to the San Quentin Jail north of San Francisco. The prisoners were put in buses for more than 680 kilometers, and the tight quarters increased the risk of spreading infections.
The inspector general found that pressure to meet self-imposed deadlines led authorities to ignore warnings from health officials, and that outdated tests could not detect that some of the prisoners already transferred were infected.
Numerous officials at the Department of Corrections and the office of the federal court-appointed recipient who oversees medical care in the prison knew, according to the report, that the tests were too old to be valid. Yet e-mails show that a health care manager in the Southern California prison “explicitly ordered that the inmates not be retested the day before the transfers began.”
The preparations for the relocation at headquarters level ‘were deeply deficient and endangered the health and lives of thousands of prisoners and staff’, reads the report of Insp. General Roy Wesley.
Democratic congressman Marc Levine, who represents San Quentin, said the report was “crazy in scope and scope” of “fundamental failures” of officials. He again demanded that federal receiver J. Clark Kelso be fired, saying his office “knows it poses a disaster to public health.”
Correctional officials and the recipient’s office have issued a joint statement saying the transfers are well-intentioned and based on risk analysis consistent with what was known about the virus in May.
“We have acknowledged that some mistakes were made in the process of these transfers,” they said. But “there were many factors that contributed to the need to relocate medically high-risk individuals … which are not reflected in the report.”
The decision to remove inmates from the Southern California prison came as an outbreak swept through the facility, killing more than 650 inmates and 55 people. The report reads in their concern about the vulnerable prisoners.
E-mails show that the resulting pressure has led Southern California prison officials to ignore health care concerns that 172 of the 189 inmates have not been tested for the virus in at least two weeks. Most went to San Quentin and the rest to the California prison, Corcoran, in the Central Valley.
An unnamed head office manager of the department said in an email that the old tests were being recognized.
Officials exacerbated the error with more erroneous errors.
The health care staff in the prison did oral and temperature examinations, but did so too early to determine if the inmates had symptoms by the time they got on the bus.
And the danger ‘was exacerbated by another unexplained decision’, approved by the Federal Recipient’s Office, to increase the number of prisoners in the buses because the protection of masks’ benefits from a faster move … to exceed the risks, ‘according to an email included in the report.
By the time the prisoners reached San Quentin, which at the time did not confirm any virus cases, nurses immediately noticed that they had two symptoms of the coronavirus. But almost all the prisoners transferred were placed in a housing unit without solid doors, which allowed the virus to circulate freely. The report contains a time-lapse video of how the outbreak was captured by the two prisons.
San Quentin’s staff worked in different areas on different days and probably helped with the distribution.
A total of 91 of the 122 prisoners sent to San Quentin became infected and two died. By the end of August, 2,237 inmates and 277 employees in the facility were infected, and 28 inmates and one correctional officer were killed.
Corcoran had a much smaller outbreak, with a peak of 153 cases, after two of the 67 prisoners transferred there tested positive. According to the report, it is likely to be better curtailed because most inmates are housed behind solid doors.
None of the prisons did properly locate infected prisoners.
Since then, officials have increased tests, quarantines and the use of personal protective equipment, pointing out that there have been no recent outbreaks attributed to transfers between prisons.
The inspector general acknowledged that officials had taken several steps to improve safety during transfers, including tests no more than five days before the move and a quick test on the day of the transfer. Such measures “should help prevent future disasters”, the report said, although it noted that overall cases had more than 8,500 infected prisoners and more than 4,300 infected workers by the end of the year.
As of Monday, there were more than 2,200 active prison cases and nearly 1,200 worker cases in the state prison system. Since the pandemic began, 192 prisoners and 22 people have died, showing that the ‘difficult task of containing the virus in its prisons is still incomplete’, Insp. General Roy Wesley wrote.
Originally published