https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kid-ZyIhsBU
Friday, August 21, 2020
INSIDE THE PRISON WHERE CALIFORNIA’S CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK EXPLODED
For Donald O’Brien, life at the California Institution for Men seemed a step closer to freedom. Then came the coronavirus.
John Thomason
August 15 2020, 7:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/california-institution-men-coronavirus-prison-outbreak/
DONALD O’BRIEN WAS EXCITED when he got the news that his transfer had been cleared — as excited as any incarcerated person can be about staying in prison, he might clarify. Late last year he learned that he’d be moving from a maximum security facility near the U.S.-Mexico border to the California Institution for Men, a primarily minimum security prison about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. He hoped it would be his last stop before freedom.
O’Brien, 56, had just been denied parole, and he hoped the transfer to less secure housing would look good when he goes before the board again. But more than that, he just needed to pass the time. Having spent all but a couple years of his adult life imprisoned, he knew that a change of scenery would make a difference. And while Chino looks nothing like coastal Santa Monica, where he grew up, something in the air made it feel more like home.
O’Brien and I began writing letters to each other five years ago and have kept in touch ever since. I didn’t contact him as a journalist; we were both just looking for pen pals. At that time, O’Brien was 12 years into a sentence he’d received under California’s controversial “three strikes” law, following a burglary conviction. Had he been sentenced for that offense alone, he’d have been on his way home by then. But because it was his third felony, California law dictated that he spend at least 25 years behind bars, and possibly the rest of his life. So even then, he was looking to pass the time.
Last year, California’s piecemeal criminal justice reform measures started to give nonviolent offenders like O’Brien a much earlier shot at parole. I wrote him a letter of support for his hearing. While we were both disappointed by the denial, the move to CIM felt like a good omen.
“This place is like a park,” he wrote to me after arriving in March, “a lot of trees and over 30 cats running around.” For the first time in decades, O’Brien could see the outside world in motion when he gazed through the prison fence, watching traffic roll by on Chino’s Central Avenue. He marveled at makes and models that didn’t even exist the last time he’d seen cars on the road. What had happened, he wondered, to all the Camaros?
There was only one downside to CIM: sleeping in a large open hall with over 100 other men. “Really no privacy at all,” he wrote to me. “That is the only downfall.”
The sense of wonder and freedom was soon eclipsed by dread. Two days before O’Brien dated his letter to me, two CIM staff members had tested positive for Covid-19. There were few precautionary measures being taken inside the facility at the time, and nobody bothered to tell the inmates that the novel coronavirus had already breached the prison’s walls, according to O’Brien. But, as an avid reader of the news, he already knew what was coming. “It won’t be long before we are quarantined,” he wrote to me.
By the time O’Brien’s dorm was put under a quarantine in late April, CIM was undergoing a full-blown outbreak. One incarcerated person had died, and more than two-thirds of the 87 people held there who had received tests so far had tested positive. Now, according to a New York Times database, more than 1,200 cases have been connected to the facility, which had a population of about 3,500 at the beginning of the outbreak. Nineteen people incarcerated there have died. That death toll is higher than that of any other California facility besides San Quentin State Prison — and San Quentin’s outbreak was imported from CIM.
CIM was patient zero for the pandemic in California’s prisons. The facility was at 120 percent of its official capacity when its outbreak began, and about 200 particularly vulnerable inmates were transferred to other institutions in late May. But because they were only tested weeks before the transfer, they brought the virus with them. As a result, San Quentin went from being virtually virus-free to having more than a third of its population test positive. Twenty-five people incarcerated there have since died.
CIM’s response to its own ballooning Covid-19 count has primarily entailed limiting inmate movement, ending outside visitation, placing infected dorms under quarantine, and isolating some of the sickest people, as well as those who test positive. But these measures have failed to contain the virus. This failure is due largely to the institution’s fundamental design: Most of the facility’s inmates live in large, open dormitories that typically hold 140-200 people in bunk beds separated by only a few feet. Just a handful of centralized sinks, showers, and toilets are shared between them. By the prison’s own accounting, CIM was overcrowded for much of the pandemic. It wasn’t until June, after the ill-fated transfers to San Quentin, that the facility’s official capacity dipped below 100 percent. Even now, consistently maintaining 6 feet between the dorms’ occupied bunks is impossible.
Internal policy has played a role too. Though inmates are forbidden from leaving quarantined dorms, CIM has elected to transfer coronavirus-positive people who have recovered from their symptoms into both quarantined and “clean” dorms. Because inmates are not typically retested after once testing positive, these frequent transfers have the potential to introduce or reintroduce the virus into new dorms. Furthermore, the non-profit Prison Law Office discovered that in one dorm elderly inmates with disabilities and severe preexisting medical conditions have been housed alongside people with active Covid-19 infections, ostensibly because there was no other accessible housing available. Incarcerated people who spoke with me and other news outlets have also faulted the facility’s failure to implement universal mask-wearing until at least the end of April, as well as its reliance on twice-daily temperature checks to identify new positive cases, in lieu of comprehensive testing.
In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, insisted that the department has been “strongly committed to responding to this public health emergency and to protecting both staff and the incarcerated population.” Among other measures, the response cited CIM’s construction of temporary housing to relieve overcrowding and increase treatment space for positive cases, its use of town hall meetings and posters to “educate” CIM’s population about Covid-19, its provision of personal sanitation supplies, and the regular screening of each housing unit by nursing staff.
But CDCR’s confidence in the thoroughness of CIM’s response does not appear to be shared by prisoners who still have to spend every day and night in a single open hall with 100 other people. When they hear announcements reminding them to engage in social distancing, while sitting on bunks 3 or 4 feet apart from each other, they can’t help but question the commitment of prison officials.
“I think they’re trying to ride this out,” O’Brien told me in July. “Whoever doesn’t make it doesn’t make it.”
AS AN OLDER man with preexisting medical conditions that make him acutely vulnerable to the virus, O’Brien is typical of CIM’s population — half of the people held there at the onset of the outbreak were 50 or older, and the same portion were considered medically high-risk. It could be argued that O’Brien’s vulnerability was actually caused by his tenure in California prisons: Within one month of arriving at Pleasant Valley State Prison in November 2005, O’Brien was diagnosed with valley fever, an airborne infection caused by fungal spores found in soil. While valley fever is not unusual in the inland part of central California where Pleasant Valley is located, infection rates within the prison at this time were 400 times higher than they were in the community next door, according to a 2015 investigation by Mother Jones. O’Brien says he and others were exposed due to a major state construction project adjacent to the prison, a claim echoed by prison officials at the time. Regardless of its cause, O’Brien survived his infection and the bout of pneumonia that accompanied it, but it left him with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and permanent scarring on his left lung.
Nearly 15 years later, O’Brien stared down another pandemic at CIM. Though the first two cases at the facility were staffers, the virus soon spread. The first positive inmate was identified on April 4, along with 11 more staff. By the end of the month, the virus had arrived in O’Brien’s dorm. One man, gasping for breath, was isolated, and the entire dorm was placed under quarantine. Guards told the inmates that “one of their visitors” had infected the dorm, according to O’Brien, even though outside visitation hadn’t been permitted in well over a month and the first positive cases at the facility were staff members.
As a result of quarantine, the dorm’s residents lost much of the relative freedom that their reduced custody status entailed. With no visitors allowed, they are reliant on exorbitantly expensive phone calls for contact with friends and family. They can no longer access their jobs, religious services, self-help groups, the dining hall, and recreation in the large yard with its basketball courts, baseball field, and track. Instead, if they want to get outside, dozens of men now share three tables, two benches, a handful of pull-up bars, and not much else in the dorm’s enclosed 1,650-square-foot yard. O’Brien walks as much as he can in the limited space, and alternates sitting between sun and shade. Given the 100-degree heat that’s come with summer, he feels lucky that his yard actually has a few trees.
The irony of being asked to engage in social distancing while being trapped in such close quarters was not lost on O’Brien or any of the nearly 100 other men who sleep in the same large hall. When meals are delivered, they have no choice but to eat them on their beds. The food now is often uncooked, or cold by the time it reaches the dorm, O’Brien said. (After first hearing this, I bought him a package of food items he can prepare himself while quarantined.)
“We’re still sleeping 3 feet apart from each other, but they’re encouraging social distancing,” James Menefield, who was housed in O’Brien’s dorm until this month, told me by phone. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Though CDCR claims that all CIM staff and inmates were provided with masks on April 7, Menefield and O’Brien don’t recall receiving theirs until weeks later. For at least the first two weeks in April, according to Menefield, inmates who donned DIY masks for their own safety were sometimes threatened with discipline by guards — despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially recommended universal mask-wearing at the beginning of the month.
Darrell Harris, a trained respiratory therapist incarcerated at CIM, had been telling other inmates to wear masks even before it became government policy. But, according to an account he gave the health news website Stat, a corrections officer confiscated his mask on April 1. (Face coverings are usually prohibited in prisons.) Harris appealed the disciplinary action, ultimately requesting that a judge order the facility to return his mask, require CIM corrections officers to wear masks and gloves, and provide cleaning supplies to inmates.
According to Stat, CIM adopted most of Harris’s requests as its best practices by the end of the month. However, while the CDCR spokesperson told me that CIM provides “ongoing distributions” of personal cleaning supplies (including “hospital-grade disinfectant”), Menefield and O’Brien said that they have received no such supplies, except for 8-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer and bars of soap.
The three masks provided to each incarcerated person at CIM are made from the pants legs of the orange jumpsuits inmates wear during transfers, according to O’Brien. The CDCR spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny this, noting only that the masks are “made of two layers of 100 percent cotton twill.”
While the prison dithered over the measures it would take to contain the virus in April, cases continued to rise sharply. The first person incarcerated at CIM to die of the virus passed away on April 19. Still, prison staff did not regularly wear masks through early May, despite the new guidelines, according to inmates interviewed by Stat. Menefield corroborated this account.
“For a month and a half, staff were wearing masks in a discretionary manner,” he said, adding that only about a quarter of staff he observed at any given time during this period were following the guidance. (In response to questions about staff compliance, the CDCR spokesperson pointed to an April 15 memo “requiring the use of face coverings with notification that non-compliance would result in progressive discipline.”)
O’Brien, on the other hand, wore his mask religiously from the moment he received it. “I am not taking any chances,” he wrote to me the day after CIM’s first Covid-19 death. “I sleep wearing one.”
O’Brien estimates that 98 percent of inmates wear their masks regularly, and he says compliance among staff is now widespread as well (though he added that it sometimes takes the presence of their superiors to motivate some staff to comply.) Still, he pointed out, inmates can’t really wear their masks while they shower — which they do eight men at a time, with 2 feet between stalls. The reality of 100 men all eating meals on their beds poses additional challenges for containing the airborne virus.
In late April, 25 elderly and high-risk inmates were transferred out of O’Brien’s dorm and into individual single-bed cells in another building. The move was, in part, meant to finally enable social distancing in the dorm. But though the move got the dorm’s population to just under 100, it wasn’t nearly enough to create 6 feet of space between each occupied bunk.
“For every four bunks, there’s an empty bunk,” Menefield told me, “but in between those four bunks that are occupied, there’s only 3 feet of living space.”
THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE testing of people incarcerated at CIM was conducted on May 6, more than a month after the first positive case. Of the eight dorms clustered together on O’Brien’s yard, six came back with at least one positive. One of the two that did not was O’Brien’s.
The relief was short-lived. Within two weeks of the test, people who had been living in dorms with positive cases were being transferred into the two dorms that were considered clean — including people who had tested positive and subsequently been isolated for two weeks. Because people who tested positive once were not retested, residents of the “clean” dorms worried that the transfers could be introducing the virus into new areas of the prison.
Whether the virus was introduced through these transfers or from some other source — like staff, who were not tested by their employer until late May, and were instead asked to seek their own tests and self-report — every dorm at CIM had been infected by the end of May, and new positive cases popped up again in O’Brien’s dorm shortly after the transfers. One of these was his bunkmate. The dorm has never gone two weeks without a positive case. It’s entering its fourth month of quarantine.
The prison administers twice-daily temperature checks, to isolate potential vectors of the virus, but Menefield said that his own experience calls into question their effectiveness. On the evening of June 7, his body temperature clocked in at 101 F. He says he was instructed to return to his bunk, take Tylenol, and return for another check in an hour. By then, his temperature had normalized and he was again cleared to return to his bunk.
That night, however, prison staff shook him awake and told him to report for another temperature check. This time the reading was 103 F. A doctor ordered that Menefield be given a Covid-19 test and transferred to an isolated unit. Four days later, his results came back positive. Menefield thinks the gap between his first reading and his isolation could have put many other residents in danger.
“For seven hours after presenting with a fever, I was allowed to be around other inmates,” he told me. “Every inmate in that immediate area — within 10 bunks of me — has [since] tested positive.”
O’Brien, for his part, has not broken a fever or had any unusual respiratory difficulty since the outbreak began. He did, however, experience extreme fatigue and mild body aches in late June and spent the better part of the week doing little besides sleeping. His temperature checks came back normal, so, in the fog of sickness, he wrote it off as a depressive episode. (O’Brien has a history of bipolar disorder and depression.) He recovered after about five days. Later, when I asked him if he might have had an undetected case of Covid-19, he thought for a second and said, “It could be, I don’t know.” He added that he’d never had an illness that felt the same way. Whatever the experience was, O’Brien endured it in close proximity to dozens of other inmates.
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With only three widespread Covid-19 tests administered since the facility’s first cases appeared in March — the most recent occurred on August 6 — it’s entirely unclear the extent to which asymptomatic or partially symptomatic transmission has gone unchecked at CIM. Another potential blind spot is CIM’s decision not to retest people who have tested positive in the past. Since July, even the temperature checks have largely been limited to inmates who have only ever tested negative, according to O’Brien.
A round of testing in July revealed 13 additional positive cases in his dorm, including his new bunkmate, who had arrived in June to replace the first bunkmate who left after catching the virus. O’Brien says this new bunkmate was exhibiting symptoms for weeks prior to being tested — constantly coughing and sweating profusely — but he was not isolated until his results came back positive. Once the 13 positive cases were moved out, 15 formerly positive people were moved into the dorm to replace them. Another test in early August, too, resulted in seven new positive cases being shuffled out of O’Brien’s dorm.
The result of the facility’s piecemeal and largely unexplained mitigation measures has been the festering of low-level paranoia in the dorms. O’Brien avoids the many inmates who cough and sneeze regularly, and he eyes the formerly positive cases that get moved into his dorm with suspicion. “They’re not completely healed,” he told me. “I don’t know if you’re ever completely healed.”
Suspicion of prison authorities is even more acute. More than once, O’Brien has told me that he thinks the corrections department’s goal is to expose everyone to the virus. Menefield was slightly more circumspect. “Given all of these facts, either staff were grossly incompetent in handling this crisis, or they did this intentionally,” he told me.
CIM’s internal coronavirus policies have received relatively little publicity, but CDCR’s transfer of hundreds of inmates from CIM to other facilities without timely testing in late May was widely condemned after it caused the outbreak at San Quentin. One California legislator called it “the worst prison health screw-up in state history.” As a result, CDCR’s chief medical director was demoted to an advisory role in early July.
O’Brien points to this ousting as acknowledgment that the system is not taking appropriate measures to keep him and thousands of others incarcerated at CIM safe. But it has changed little about the day-to-day operation of the facility. The paranoia caused by the ongoing outbreak has been blunted by the continuing banality of a regimented daily life spent between the crowded dormitory and the spartan yard. The summer heat makes the air in the dorm even more stifling than usual: It’s cooled only by fans, not air conditioning, and the exhaust vent on O’Brien’s side of the building is broken. So when things start to get unbearable just after noon, he puts his head under a faucet and goes out into the yard to sit in the shade of one of the trees. He’s not as hopeful as he was when he first arrived at CIM, but he can still see the cars zooming by on Central Avenue, reminding him of what it might be like to be free — and to be able to finally prioritize his own safety the way he sees fit. He’s learned in prison that nobody else will.
August 15 2020, 7:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/california-institution-men-coronavirus-prison-outbreak/
DONALD O’BRIEN WAS EXCITED when he got the news that his transfer had been cleared — as excited as any incarcerated person can be about staying in prison, he might clarify. Late last year he learned that he’d be moving from a maximum security facility near the U.S.-Mexico border to the California Institution for Men, a primarily minimum security prison about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. He hoped it would be his last stop before freedom.
O’Brien, 56, had just been denied parole, and he hoped the transfer to less secure housing would look good when he goes before the board again. But more than that, he just needed to pass the time. Having spent all but a couple years of his adult life imprisoned, he knew that a change of scenery would make a difference. And while Chino looks nothing like coastal Santa Monica, where he grew up, something in the air made it feel more like home.
O’Brien and I began writing letters to each other five years ago and have kept in touch ever since. I didn’t contact him as a journalist; we were both just looking for pen pals. At that time, O’Brien was 12 years into a sentence he’d received under California’s controversial “three strikes” law, following a burglary conviction. Had he been sentenced for that offense alone, he’d have been on his way home by then. But because it was his third felony, California law dictated that he spend at least 25 years behind bars, and possibly the rest of his life. So even then, he was looking to pass the time.
Last year, California’s piecemeal criminal justice reform measures started to give nonviolent offenders like O’Brien a much earlier shot at parole. I wrote him a letter of support for his hearing. While we were both disappointed by the denial, the move to CIM felt like a good omen.
“This place is like a park,” he wrote to me after arriving in March, “a lot of trees and over 30 cats running around.” For the first time in decades, O’Brien could see the outside world in motion when he gazed through the prison fence, watching traffic roll by on Chino’s Central Avenue. He marveled at makes and models that didn’t even exist the last time he’d seen cars on the road. What had happened, he wondered, to all the Camaros?
There was only one downside to CIM: sleeping in a large open hall with over 100 other men. “Really no privacy at all,” he wrote to me. “That is the only downfall.”
The sense of wonder and freedom was soon eclipsed by dread. Two days before O’Brien dated his letter to me, two CIM staff members had tested positive for Covid-19. There were few precautionary measures being taken inside the facility at the time, and nobody bothered to tell the inmates that the novel coronavirus had already breached the prison’s walls, according to O’Brien. But, as an avid reader of the news, he already knew what was coming. “It won’t be long before we are quarantined,” he wrote to me.
By the time O’Brien’s dorm was put under a quarantine in late April, CIM was undergoing a full-blown outbreak. One incarcerated person had died, and more than two-thirds of the 87 people held there who had received tests so far had tested positive. Now, according to a New York Times database, more than 1,200 cases have been connected to the facility, which had a population of about 3,500 at the beginning of the outbreak. Nineteen people incarcerated there have died. That death toll is higher than that of any other California facility besides San Quentin State Prison — and San Quentin’s outbreak was imported from CIM.
CIM was patient zero for the pandemic in California’s prisons. The facility was at 120 percent of its official capacity when its outbreak began, and about 200 particularly vulnerable inmates were transferred to other institutions in late May. But because they were only tested weeks before the transfer, they brought the virus with them. As a result, San Quentin went from being virtually virus-free to having more than a third of its population test positive. Twenty-five people incarcerated there have since died.
CIM’s response to its own ballooning Covid-19 count has primarily entailed limiting inmate movement, ending outside visitation, placing infected dorms under quarantine, and isolating some of the sickest people, as well as those who test positive. But these measures have failed to contain the virus. This failure is due largely to the institution’s fundamental design: Most of the facility’s inmates live in large, open dormitories that typically hold 140-200 people in bunk beds separated by only a few feet. Just a handful of centralized sinks, showers, and toilets are shared between them. By the prison’s own accounting, CIM was overcrowded for much of the pandemic. It wasn’t until June, after the ill-fated transfers to San Quentin, that the facility’s official capacity dipped below 100 percent. Even now, consistently maintaining 6 feet between the dorms’ occupied bunks is impossible.
Internal policy has played a role too. Though inmates are forbidden from leaving quarantined dorms, CIM has elected to transfer coronavirus-positive people who have recovered from their symptoms into both quarantined and “clean” dorms. Because inmates are not typically retested after once testing positive, these frequent transfers have the potential to introduce or reintroduce the virus into new dorms. Furthermore, the non-profit Prison Law Office discovered that in one dorm elderly inmates with disabilities and severe preexisting medical conditions have been housed alongside people with active Covid-19 infections, ostensibly because there was no other accessible housing available. Incarcerated people who spoke with me and other news outlets have also faulted the facility’s failure to implement universal mask-wearing until at least the end of April, as well as its reliance on twice-daily temperature checks to identify new positive cases, in lieu of comprehensive testing.
In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, insisted that the department has been “strongly committed to responding to this public health emergency and to protecting both staff and the incarcerated population.” Among other measures, the response cited CIM’s construction of temporary housing to relieve overcrowding and increase treatment space for positive cases, its use of town hall meetings and posters to “educate” CIM’s population about Covid-19, its provision of personal sanitation supplies, and the regular screening of each housing unit by nursing staff.
But CDCR’s confidence in the thoroughness of CIM’s response does not appear to be shared by prisoners who still have to spend every day and night in a single open hall with 100 other people. When they hear announcements reminding them to engage in social distancing, while sitting on bunks 3 or 4 feet apart from each other, they can’t help but question the commitment of prison officials.
“I think they’re trying to ride this out,” O’Brien told me in July. “Whoever doesn’t make it doesn’t make it.”
AS AN OLDER man with preexisting medical conditions that make him acutely vulnerable to the virus, O’Brien is typical of CIM’s population — half of the people held there at the onset of the outbreak were 50 or older, and the same portion were considered medically high-risk. It could be argued that O’Brien’s vulnerability was actually caused by his tenure in California prisons: Within one month of arriving at Pleasant Valley State Prison in November 2005, O’Brien was diagnosed with valley fever, an airborne infection caused by fungal spores found in soil. While valley fever is not unusual in the inland part of central California where Pleasant Valley is located, infection rates within the prison at this time were 400 times higher than they were in the community next door, according to a 2015 investigation by Mother Jones. O’Brien says he and others were exposed due to a major state construction project adjacent to the prison, a claim echoed by prison officials at the time. Regardless of its cause, O’Brien survived his infection and the bout of pneumonia that accompanied it, but it left him with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and permanent scarring on his left lung.
Nearly 15 years later, O’Brien stared down another pandemic at CIM. Though the first two cases at the facility were staffers, the virus soon spread. The first positive inmate was identified on April 4, along with 11 more staff. By the end of the month, the virus had arrived in O’Brien’s dorm. One man, gasping for breath, was isolated, and the entire dorm was placed under quarantine. Guards told the inmates that “one of their visitors” had infected the dorm, according to O’Brien, even though outside visitation hadn’t been permitted in well over a month and the first positive cases at the facility were staff members.
As a result of quarantine, the dorm’s residents lost much of the relative freedom that their reduced custody status entailed. With no visitors allowed, they are reliant on exorbitantly expensive phone calls for contact with friends and family. They can no longer access their jobs, religious services, self-help groups, the dining hall, and recreation in the large yard with its basketball courts, baseball field, and track. Instead, if they want to get outside, dozens of men now share three tables, two benches, a handful of pull-up bars, and not much else in the dorm’s enclosed 1,650-square-foot yard. O’Brien walks as much as he can in the limited space, and alternates sitting between sun and shade. Given the 100-degree heat that’s come with summer, he feels lucky that his yard actually has a few trees.
The irony of being asked to engage in social distancing while being trapped in such close quarters was not lost on O’Brien or any of the nearly 100 other men who sleep in the same large hall. When meals are delivered, they have no choice but to eat them on their beds. The food now is often uncooked, or cold by the time it reaches the dorm, O’Brien said. (After first hearing this, I bought him a package of food items he can prepare himself while quarantined.)
“We’re still sleeping 3 feet apart from each other, but they’re encouraging social distancing,” James Menefield, who was housed in O’Brien’s dorm until this month, told me by phone. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Though CDCR claims that all CIM staff and inmates were provided with masks on April 7, Menefield and O’Brien don’t recall receiving theirs until weeks later. For at least the first two weeks in April, according to Menefield, inmates who donned DIY masks for their own safety were sometimes threatened with discipline by guards — despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially recommended universal mask-wearing at the beginning of the month.
Darrell Harris, a trained respiratory therapist incarcerated at CIM, had been telling other inmates to wear masks even before it became government policy. But, according to an account he gave the health news website Stat, a corrections officer confiscated his mask on April 1. (Face coverings are usually prohibited in prisons.) Harris appealed the disciplinary action, ultimately requesting that a judge order the facility to return his mask, require CIM corrections officers to wear masks and gloves, and provide cleaning supplies to inmates.
According to Stat, CIM adopted most of Harris’s requests as its best practices by the end of the month. However, while the CDCR spokesperson told me that CIM provides “ongoing distributions” of personal cleaning supplies (including “hospital-grade disinfectant”), Menefield and O’Brien said that they have received no such supplies, except for 8-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer and bars of soap.
The three masks provided to each incarcerated person at CIM are made from the pants legs of the orange jumpsuits inmates wear during transfers, according to O’Brien. The CDCR spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny this, noting only that the masks are “made of two layers of 100 percent cotton twill.”
While the prison dithered over the measures it would take to contain the virus in April, cases continued to rise sharply. The first person incarcerated at CIM to die of the virus passed away on April 19. Still, prison staff did not regularly wear masks through early May, despite the new guidelines, according to inmates interviewed by Stat. Menefield corroborated this account.
“For a month and a half, staff were wearing masks in a discretionary manner,” he said, adding that only about a quarter of staff he observed at any given time during this period were following the guidance. (In response to questions about staff compliance, the CDCR spokesperson pointed to an April 15 memo “requiring the use of face coverings with notification that non-compliance would result in progressive discipline.”)
O’Brien, on the other hand, wore his mask religiously from the moment he received it. “I am not taking any chances,” he wrote to me the day after CIM’s first Covid-19 death. “I sleep wearing one.”
O’Brien estimates that 98 percent of inmates wear their masks regularly, and he says compliance among staff is now widespread as well (though he added that it sometimes takes the presence of their superiors to motivate some staff to comply.) Still, he pointed out, inmates can’t really wear their masks while they shower — which they do eight men at a time, with 2 feet between stalls. The reality of 100 men all eating meals on their beds poses additional challenges for containing the airborne virus.
In late April, 25 elderly and high-risk inmates were transferred out of O’Brien’s dorm and into individual single-bed cells in another building. The move was, in part, meant to finally enable social distancing in the dorm. But though the move got the dorm’s population to just under 100, it wasn’t nearly enough to create 6 feet of space between each occupied bunk.
“For every four bunks, there’s an empty bunk,” Menefield told me, “but in between those four bunks that are occupied, there’s only 3 feet of living space.”
THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE testing of people incarcerated at CIM was conducted on May 6, more than a month after the first positive case. Of the eight dorms clustered together on O’Brien’s yard, six came back with at least one positive. One of the two that did not was O’Brien’s.
The relief was short-lived. Within two weeks of the test, people who had been living in dorms with positive cases were being transferred into the two dorms that were considered clean — including people who had tested positive and subsequently been isolated for two weeks. Because people who tested positive once were not retested, residents of the “clean” dorms worried that the transfers could be introducing the virus into new areas of the prison.
Whether the virus was introduced through these transfers or from some other source — like staff, who were not tested by their employer until late May, and were instead asked to seek their own tests and self-report — every dorm at CIM had been infected by the end of May, and new positive cases popped up again in O’Brien’s dorm shortly after the transfers. One of these was his bunkmate. The dorm has never gone two weeks without a positive case. It’s entering its fourth month of quarantine.
The prison administers twice-daily temperature checks, to isolate potential vectors of the virus, but Menefield said that his own experience calls into question their effectiveness. On the evening of June 7, his body temperature clocked in at 101 F. He says he was instructed to return to his bunk, take Tylenol, and return for another check in an hour. By then, his temperature had normalized and he was again cleared to return to his bunk.
That night, however, prison staff shook him awake and told him to report for another temperature check. This time the reading was 103 F. A doctor ordered that Menefield be given a Covid-19 test and transferred to an isolated unit. Four days later, his results came back positive. Menefield thinks the gap between his first reading and his isolation could have put many other residents in danger.
“For seven hours after presenting with a fever, I was allowed to be around other inmates,” he told me. “Every inmate in that immediate area — within 10 bunks of me — has [since] tested positive.”
O’Brien, for his part, has not broken a fever or had any unusual respiratory difficulty since the outbreak began. He did, however, experience extreme fatigue and mild body aches in late June and spent the better part of the week doing little besides sleeping. His temperature checks came back normal, so, in the fog of sickness, he wrote it off as a depressive episode. (O’Brien has a history of bipolar disorder and depression.) He recovered after about five days. Later, when I asked him if he might have had an undetected case of Covid-19, he thought for a second and said, “It could be, I don’t know.” He added that he’d never had an illness that felt the same way. Whatever the experience was, O’Brien endured it in close proximity to dozens of other inmates.
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With only three widespread Covid-19 tests administered since the facility’s first cases appeared in March — the most recent occurred on August 6 — it’s entirely unclear the extent to which asymptomatic or partially symptomatic transmission has gone unchecked at CIM. Another potential blind spot is CIM’s decision not to retest people who have tested positive in the past. Since July, even the temperature checks have largely been limited to inmates who have only ever tested negative, according to O’Brien.
A round of testing in July revealed 13 additional positive cases in his dorm, including his new bunkmate, who had arrived in June to replace the first bunkmate who left after catching the virus. O’Brien says this new bunkmate was exhibiting symptoms for weeks prior to being tested — constantly coughing and sweating profusely — but he was not isolated until his results came back positive. Once the 13 positive cases were moved out, 15 formerly positive people were moved into the dorm to replace them. Another test in early August, too, resulted in seven new positive cases being shuffled out of O’Brien’s dorm.
The result of the facility’s piecemeal and largely unexplained mitigation measures has been the festering of low-level paranoia in the dorms. O’Brien avoids the many inmates who cough and sneeze regularly, and he eyes the formerly positive cases that get moved into his dorm with suspicion. “They’re not completely healed,” he told me. “I don’t know if you’re ever completely healed.”
Suspicion of prison authorities is even more acute. More than once, O’Brien has told me that he thinks the corrections department’s goal is to expose everyone to the virus. Menefield was slightly more circumspect. “Given all of these facts, either staff were grossly incompetent in handling this crisis, or they did this intentionally,” he told me.
CIM’s internal coronavirus policies have received relatively little publicity, but CDCR’s transfer of hundreds of inmates from CIM to other facilities without timely testing in late May was widely condemned after it caused the outbreak at San Quentin. One California legislator called it “the worst prison health screw-up in state history.” As a result, CDCR’s chief medical director was demoted to an advisory role in early July.
O’Brien points to this ousting as acknowledgment that the system is not taking appropriate measures to keep him and thousands of others incarcerated at CIM safe. But it has changed little about the day-to-day operation of the facility. The paranoia caused by the ongoing outbreak has been blunted by the continuing banality of a regimented daily life spent between the crowded dormitory and the spartan yard. The summer heat makes the air in the dorm even more stifling than usual: It’s cooled only by fans, not air conditioning, and the exhaust vent on O’Brien’s side of the building is broken. So when things start to get unbearable just after noon, he puts his head under a faucet and goes out into the yard to sit in the shade of one of the trees. He’s not as hopeful as he was when he first arrived at CIM, but he can still see the cars zooming by on Central Avenue, reminding him of what it might be like to be free — and to be able to finally prioritize his own safety the way he sees fit. He’s learned in prison that nobody else will.
PRESSED ON CORPORATE PAC FUNDING, RICHIE NEAL CITES HIS GENEROSITY TO BLACK AND BROWN CANDIDATES
Rep. Richard Neal and Alex Morse faced off in a debate Monday night for a congressional seat in western Massachusetts.
Aída Chávez
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/17/alex-morse-richard-neal-debate/
DURING A congressional debate in Massachusetts’s 1st District on Monday night, Rep. Richard Neal defended his acceptance of corporate PAC money by pointing to the money he has spent to support Black, Hispanic, and LGBTQ+ members of Congress.
“I will not apologize for the idea that I raised $13 million for Democratic candidates,” Neal said. “I contributed to every single member of the Black Caucus, every single member of the Hispanic Caucus, every member of the Equality Caucus, and I have recruited candidates for Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi, helped them with message discipline, and helped to fund their campaigns.”
Neal is one of the top recipients of corporate cash in Congress, raking in huge sums from private equity and Big Pharma, which his left-wing challenger Alex Morse frequently highlights. In asking about Neal’s corporate funding, the debate moderator pointed to a recent ad by the progressive dark-money group Fight Corporate Monopolies, which accused Neal of working to maintain President Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts. “Corporate power is corrupting democracy,” the ad says. “And Richie Neal is part of the problem.”
Neal’s response lays bare the argument presented by incumbent Democrats who are reliant on corporate dollars: Our corruption is necessary because it raises lots of money and we use that to elect Black, brown, and queer people and to beat Republicans, who are worse. It’s an honest argument, which is rarely stated so clearly. For voters, the race is between whether that’s good enough for you or whether you want more.
Neal, who has been in Congress for 30 years, is the chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the tax code. Morse, the 31-year-old mayor of Holyoke, is running on a platform that includes Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and defunding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The race is tightening as the September 1 primary nears, according to an internal poll conducted for Morse’s campaign over the weekend that found that he’s trailing Neal by only 5 percentage points. The pollsters also asked about “an issue” involving Morse and the College Democrats of Massachusetts and UMass Amherst — a reference to accusations of sexual impropriety levied against Morse by the student groups, which had accused him of matching with students on dating apps and making them feel uncomfortable; 85 percent of the voters surveyed had heard about it, with 55 percent saying it doesn’t affect their vote. For those whom it mattered, they were slightly more likely to say it made them inclined to support Morse.
IN THE FIRST exchange of the debate — which was cut out in the livestream for anyone watching online, an issue that persisted throughout the evening — Morse was asked about the recent misconduct allegations, and whether he had evidence to prove these allegations were a setup to try to smear his campaign. As The Intercept recently revealed, the accusations were part of a nearly year-old scheme by some members of the College Democrats of Massachusetts and the organization’s UMass Amherst chapter to sink Morse’s campaign. Leaders of the College Democrats explicitly discussed plans to find Morse’s dating profiles and then lead him into saying something incriminating that they could leak to media outlets, according to message logs. Some senior members of the Massachusetts Democratic Party had also coordinated with the CDMA, coaching the students ahead of the release of the letter and connecting them with an attorney: the powerful state party figure Jim Roosevelt.
“You’re now claiming you were the victim of a political hit job that began a week and a half ago when allegations came to light about the relationship you’ve had with college students,” the moderator told Morse, who has said he believes Neal’s campaign was involved, a charge the congressman has denied.
“As a human, I would never want to make someone feel uncomfortable, and I need to honor that truth,” said Morse, who has admitted to having consensual relationships with students in the area but never with anyone he himself taught at UMass Amherst, where he used to teach a class. “But then I come to find out over the last week that this was a backroom coordinated political smear against our campaign by folks that support this congressman’s campaign.”
“This is exactly what turns people away from politics,” Morse continued. “It’s why people don’t participate. It’s why people have given up on the process: that three weeks before a primary election, I was put in a position to talk about my personal life — not talk about health care and climate change and our economy and the small businesses shuttering.”
Morse added that the timing of the allegations is no coincidence, saying they “go all the way to the heights of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, the chair of that party that took me to lunch over a year ago to discourage me against running against this congressman right here.”
Neal denied that his campaign had anything to do with the allegations, condemned homophobia, and said that the students stepped forward independently. “I don’t even know the names of the students that have stepped forward,” Neal said. He also expressed support for UMass Amherst’s investigation into Morse. The university’s policy prohibits professors from having romantic relationships with their own students, which Morse has not been accused of doing.
The incumbent, meanwhile, repeatedly hit Morse on his Holyoke School Committee meeting attendance, saying that the mayor had missed 28 of 62 meetings.
“These are recycled attacks from former mayoral opponents of mine,” Morse replied, adding that Neal has not held a town hall in the district for the past three years.
Monday night’s debate, which was hosted by New England media outlets, also covered heath care policy and criminal justice reform. At one point, Neal attacked Morse for saying he would have voted against the CARES Act, Congress’s massive coronavirus relief bill, saying that only five members of the House opposed it. Morse fired back, arguing that a one-time payment of $1,200 wasn’t enough to help working families or justify a “$500 billion slush fund for corporations.”
AS A RISING STAR, JOE KENNEDY DIDN’T WANT TO HELP DEMOCRATS BEAT REPUBLICANS
Kennedy now argues that he’s a more valuable asset than Sen. Ed Markey largely due to his fundraising for the Democratic Party.
Rachel M. Cohen
August 18 2020, 3:07 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/18/joe-kennedy-ed-markey-democrats-republicans/
IN THE high-profile, expensive Senate race between Rep. Joe Kennedy and incumbent Ed Markey, Kennedy has made one argument particularly central to his bid: that Markey has not “leveraged” his Senate seat as effectively as he could to further the goals of the Democratic Party. The two men broadly align on liberal policy priorities, but Kennedy has repeatedly emphasized that there’s more to being a senator than just casting votes and filing bills, and that he would make better use of a Senate seat than Markey has or will.
To underscore his point, Kennedy regularly refers to the way he’s leveraged his seat in the House of Representatives, where he has served since 2013, namely the many fundraising trips he made during the 2018 midterm cycle, when he raised nearly $5 million for other Democratic candidates and helped his party flip the House. During that cycle, Kennedy served as a mid-Atlantic and New England regional vice chair for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and stumped for candidates in at least 15 states and D.C., including battleground races in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
While Kennedy acknowledges that he has not used his platform to bring national attention to policy issues like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ayanna Pressley have, he speaks proudly of leveraging his seat “in a way that is most natural to me.”
Yet his eagerness to claim credit for flipping seats two years ago contrasts with how Kennedy used to talk about such partisan efforts.
Following a rough 2014 midterm cycle, during which Democrats — already a minority in the House — lost 13 seats in that chamber, party officials began discussing how one of the party’s young, rising stars might be key to reversing Democrats’ fortunes in 2016. Party operatives turned their sights to Kennedy and Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas as top candidates to potentially take over the DCCC and guide the party forward. One of the primary goals of the DCCC and its counterpart in the upper chamber, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is to flip seats held by Republicans.
Kennedy, then 34 years old, was just finishing up his first term in Congress and was seen as a particularly appealing contender given his knack for fundraising, driven by his lineage and last name. The DCCC chair at the time was New York Rep. Steve Israel, who had already declared that he would not continue on for the 2016 cycle. California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who was expected to be reelected as House minority leader, would get to select the next DCCC chair.
But after Politico reported that party leaders were looking at Kennedy, the Massachusetts representative quickly made clear to House Democratic leadership that he had no interest in a role that would mean dedicating his energy to unseating Republicans.
“It’s an important job,” Kennedy told Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. “But it’s not something that interests me. If I do the job right, I would be finding ways to beat those guys.”
Since joining Congress, Kennedy had been making a point to cast himself as more open to working with Republicans than many of his Democratic colleagues. He was a member of a small 6:30 a.m. exercise group led by Republican Rep. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, and a study from the Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy ranked him as the most bipartisan House member in all of New England.
In 2013, amid the federal government shutdown, Kennedy earned headlines for defending his tea party colleagues at a time when many, including President Barack Obama, were describing them as much more akin to extortionists. “They’re people too,” Kennedy said, when asked his opinion of the tea party. “Everyone here got elected. Everyone here got someone to vote for them. Everyone is genuinely trying to do the right thing for the country.” At the time, nationwide public opinion of tea party Republicans had declined precipitously.
Kennedy then proceeded to dismiss the media’s depiction of congressional divisions and said he understood that tea party Republicans are just seeking to represent their constituents who have a different worldview than those who live in Massachusetts. “We talk about the Red Sox, their kids, and whether they’ll have a chance to see them on the weekend,” Kennedy told the Boston Globe. “Regular old things co-workers would talk about.”
When asked about his lack of interest in 2014 to lead the DCCC and if his thinking on partnering with Republicans has evolved, campaign spokesperson Brian Phillips Jr. said in an emailed statement, “Congressman Kennedy’s legislation has always been guided by building relationships with his constituents and learning the needs of his district. In those efforts, he has developed diverse coalitions to deliver on those priorities, including tackling racial inequities in our education and health care systems, building a national manufacturing network, and enacting environmental justice policies. Beyond his efforts in Washington, he has served in a leadership role in the DCCC, campaigned in dozens of Congressional districts, raised millions for Democratic candidates and traveled the country to fight for progressive causes.”
The high-profile race between Kennedy and Markey has grown increasingly competitive in the final days ahead of the September 1 primary. A new poll released on Monday of likely Democratic primary voters found Markey leading Kennedy by 2 points — 44 percent to 42 percent — with 15 percent still undecided. Another poll, conducted by University of Massachusetts Amherst/WCVB and released last week found Markey with a more substantial 15-point lead over Kennedy. Two polls released in early May had shown Kennedy up by 2 points and 16 points, respectively. On Tuesday night, the candidates will face off in their final debate.
Politico reported earlier this week that Markey had raised $1.55 million in the preprimary period, which runs from July 1 to August 12, in addition to the more than $10 million he had raised by the end of June. The incumbent has $3.5 million on hand to spend in the last two weeks. Kennedy had raised nearly $1 million during that same period, on top of his nearly $8 million raised by the end of June. All told, more than $20 million has been raised for this contest.
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