Prisoners at San Quentin are dying from COVID, and help isn?t coming

He’s a father living at San Quentin State Prison and one of over 2,200 inmates who’ve tested positive for COVID-19. Since March, experts have been warning that prison outbreaks of COVID-19 would be deadly and calling on federal judges to release inmates and reduce the size of the prison population. Instead, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) moved men away from a prison in Chino, which was battling an outbreak, to San Quentin, which was virus-free. The first inmate in the California prison system tested positive for COVID-19 in March. Just after the case was reported, Scott Kernan, a former secretary of CDCR, called the prisons a “tinderbox.” Then, on March 25th, lawyers and advocates filed a motion asking federal judges to order the state to reduce the prison population and release inmates with health conditions that would put them at risk for severe disease. The state said it had already taken steps to protect people in the prisons from COVID-19: prisons suspended the intake of new inmates, prevented visitors, and planned to transfer people who lived in riskier, dorm-style housing. These types of rumors spread because inmates don’t trust the system charged with keeping them healthy, says Craig Haney, a social psychologist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz who studies incarceration.“Prisoners become accustomed to living in an environment where they feel people don’t have their best interests at heart and treat them as if they are not fully full human beings,” Haney says. “It’s not at all surprising that prisoners might come to believe that the prison system might have done this.”From the outside, San Quentin looks like a castle overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It’s the oldest prison in California, the grounds split up in a horseshoe of buildings that house different groups of inmates. None of us wanted any of them to move.” Erica was unable to continue seeing her patients after the move — the prison was worried about the virus spreading from inmates to staff. “These people make decisions and don’t care who it affects.”As inmates in San Quentin were shuffled between buildings, COVID-19 was already spreading through the California Institution for Men (CIM) in Chino, over 400 miles away. Transfers risked additional outbreaks, the Prison Law Office wrote in May 13th court filings, and should only happen if there’s enough testing to ensure that the inmates transferred don’t pose a risk to the prison to which they’re heading. The California Correctional Health Care Services (CCHCS) agreed, saying that moving inmates risked spreading the virus between prisons. CDCR wasn’t moving inmates.But by the end of May, the state of California was nevertheless making plans to move about 700 medically vulnerable inmates out of CIM and over to other prisons. It’s hard to say for sure how the virus got into San Quentin, since contact tracing wasn’t reported.There’s no evidence to suggest that it happened intentionally, says Brie Williams, a doctor who advised the state on how it should respond to the San Quentin COVID-19 outbreak.