An inspector general’s report skewered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for its role in creating a coronavirus outbreak at San Quentin State Prison in which more than 2,000 incarcerated people got the virus and in excess of two dozen died, reports the Huffington Post.
The report released Monday said the California corrections department and its health care services “caused a public health disaster when they transferred medically vulnerable incarcerated persons … without proper safeguards.”
In late May, after the California Institution for Men in Chino experienced a COVID-19 outbreak, the state’s corrections department decided to transfer out incarcerated people with health issues that could make them more susceptible to severe coronavirus cases. From May 28-30, California Correctional Health Care Services transferred 189 people to San Quentin prison and Corcoran prison. But in making those transfers, staff at the prison, “pressured” by health care services leadership, “inadequately screened” the transferees for the coronavirus, including not testing 172 out of 189 transferees for the virus for at least two weeks prior, per the report. Then they put them on buses that didn’t allow for safe distancing.
Once at San Quentin, 119 of those transferred were placed in a unit with “open bar cells where air could move and circulate” — without quarantining them from the rest of the prison population. Staff were also circulating throughout the prison, “likely transmitting the virus from location to location,” per the report.
Before the transfer, no one at San Quentin had tested positive for the virus. Within a few weeks, more than a dozen transferees tested positive for COVID-19. By mid-July, more than half of the 3,100 incarcerated at San Quentin were infected and 11 people died. By the end of August, 2,237 incarcerated people and 277 staff had COVID-19, and more than two dozen incarcerated people had died.
The report said it found the corrections department’s actions “were deeply flawed and risked the health and lives of the medically vulnerable incarcerated persons.”
