What’s happening with COVID-19 in jails?

Most Pa. counties aren't sharing much info about epidemic in their prisons

• Joseph Darius Jaafari
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  Joseph Darius Jaafari was a staff writer for the PA Post. His work covering crime, the military and LGBTQ issues has been featured in The Marshall Project, Rolling Stone Magazine, The Atlantic and The New York Times. He is a graduate of the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced for VICE and The New York Post. He is a native Arizonan and infamous for his love of tacos.

Last week the Pennsylvania Prison Society – an organization recognized in state law that advocates for both prisoners and staff at correctional facilities – sent an email blast announcing that COVID-19 cases have been detected at two county jails.

The jails couldn’t be farther from each other geographically. Luzerne is in Pa.’s northeast corner, while Fayette is clear across the state on the West Virginia border.

The introduction of the virus into two county jails is no surprise for anyone who has been following the COVID-19 epidemic. Predictably, cities were hardest hit, at first. But as metropolitan areas took measures to halt or slow the virus’s spread, rural communities often took a more lax approach (why would you need to socially distance when your closest neighbor is two acres away?). Months ago, we started to see how that approach failed to keep the virus contained.

But it’s hard to know how the epidemic is playing out inside county correctional facilities. Unlike how the state Department of Health monitors the numbers of positive COVID-19 cases inside nursing homes, the department does not do the same for county jails.

Only a small handful of counties actually publish the number of COVID-19 cases detected in their jails. Others make the information available in a press releases after conducting a round of mass testing, which is the practice ad the Dauphin County and York County prisons. But even in those cases, the public is getting mixed messages.

The York Daily Record reported that on one single day, the county jail gave three different versions of how many people actually had the virus. When we tried to get COVID-19 numbers from county jails for a story we published two weeks ago, multiple county jails said we had to first file Right-to-Know requests. One county official gave us the numbers more than two weeks after we requested them.

It’s also unclear what steps county jails are taking to segregate sick inmates from the healthy, or whether new inmates are quarantined to ensure they are not bringing the virus into a jail. At least four different county jails are refusing to disclose their coronavirus plans, forcing PA Post to argue in court or pursue mediation to see what policies are in place to deal with the pandemic.

But there is a larger issue at play in county jails, especially ones located in rural areas. It’s unclear how willing or able medical staff will be when it comes to treating the physical problems associated with coronavirus. That’s because, historically, there’s very poor quality in the medical care provided at county jails.

In Lebanon County, I reported on an inmate who nearly died of a tooth abscess because the jail didn’t have a dental chair (they were doing dental procedures in a rolling office chair). I also reported on an inmate in Montgomery County who died after the jail dismissed multiple signs of a serious thyroid illness.

Until jails become more transparent about their coronavirus testing, results and processes for dealing with sick inmates, we run the risk of the virus spreading outside the jail, just as it did in other cities that failed to manage the outbreak in their jails.

Related reads:

• By me in PA Post: Tired of the politics, a press conference on prison reform is sidelined by its audience

• How a virus spreads: This PEW study looked at how COVID-19 spread into the communities after the virus got into local jails.

• ICE and COVID: Weeks ago, the New York Times published a visual investigation into how ICE detention centers knowingly deported positive COVID-19 patients to other countries. For the Intercept, hear the testimonials of people held in those centers.

• “This guy is dying next to me”: A great example of poor oversight of county jails’ medical treatment of inmates … this incredibly disturbing story by The Marshall Project looks at how a county jail’s practice of holding an inmate, Billy Ames, in a restraint chair during a seizure lead to his death. From the top of this story: “The booking area was filled with the sound of banging, as Ames’s fellow detainees tried to get the jailers to let him out of the chair. They also heard the chair rattle against the floor—which suggested to the family he was having a seizure, meaning the jailers had failed to give him his anti-seizure medication. ‘He will not STOP screaming and freaking out,’ a jailer wrote in an email to the rest of the staff. Three others held near Ames recalled a jailer referring to him as a ‘piece of shit.’”

• The Crime Report: ‘Dozens of Prisons’ Targeted in COVID-19 Civil Rights Lawsuits

• Mother Jones: 7 Detainees Sued ICE. Then They Were Transferred to a Notorious Alabama Jail.

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