A second coronavirus-related death following a weekend surge of positive COVID-19 cases at the Marion federal prison has inmates with medical conditions worried about their health in a prison that is not allowing them to distance, family members and inmates told the Tribune.
The Bureau of Prisons, which was reporting 72 positive cases July 31 at Marion in southern Illinois, reported 133 positive cases Monday. On Tuesday, the number went down to 88, with 49 inmates reported recovered, and then to 84, including four prison employees, on Friday. The number of positives reported fluctuates based on new cases being added and resolved cases being removed, federal prisons spokesperson Emery Nelson said in an email.
Federal officials announced Monday that one inmate at Marion had died after testing positive for the coronavirus. Late Wednesday, the mother of a second prisoner who had been hospitalized because of COVID-19 told the Tribune he had died. After the man was listed in the Bureau of Prisons inmate directory as having died Wednesday, officials confirmed late Thursday the man, Taiwan Davis, had died after testing positive for the coronavirus.
Experts who have been studying rates of COVID-19 in prisons say the infection rate, death rate and growth rate are significantly higher in prison than in the general population. Between April and June, the mean daily case growth rate was 8.3% in prisons. In the general population, it was less than half that, according to one study. The age-adjusted rate for COVID-19-related deaths was three times the rate in the general population.
Three inmates the Tribune communicated with complained this week about other decisions the prison administration has made in recent weeks, such as banning the use of phones and email, using isolation rooms for inmates needing to quarantine, and, for several days, keeping those who tested positive all together in a recreation room. Thursday, phones were turned back on, according to inmates.
And although low-security inmates typically are able to go outside for most of the day, the prison administration has stopped allowing this for weeks.
“What really worries everybody is now that we have (COVID-19 in the prison), once you get it again, it’s going to get worse,” if someone has it and then develops symptoms a second time, said an inmate.
Inmates the Tribune communicated with did not want their names published out of fear of retribution from prison administrators. Despite the unavailability in recent weeks of phones and computers provided by the prison, inmates have been trying to keep family members updated and get the word out about the surge of positives.
Neither the Marion administration nor prison warden Daniel Sproul responded to calls and emails. In a statement, Nelson detailed steps the bureau has taken to address the spread of COVID-19: limiting inmate transfers and movement, implementing screening procedures, and suspending social and legal visits. The statement also said that the Bureau of Prisons has been prioritizing reviewing cases for granting home confinement since Attorney General William Barr’s latest memo in April.
Nelson said phone and computer access were limited to stem the spread of COVID-19 through keyboards and handsets.
The prison at “Marion will continue to evaluate this approach and will make these communication avenues available as soon as possible,” said Nelson in an email. “The institution recognizes how important it is to maintain family contact during these uncertain times. As such, inmate friends and families are strongly encouraged to continue corresponding by mailing letters through the U.S. Postal Service.”
A low-security inmate, Taiwan Davis, was sent to the hospital after testing positive for COVID-19 in the prison. His mother, Gwendolyn Davis, said she found out through an inmate that he had been taken to the hospital, and that she wasn’t informed by the prison that he had tested positive until after he was at the hospital. She said that when she called the prison, officers told her he was fine.
An inmate contacted her “over the weekend and told me that he was not fine, and that they had taken him to the hospital,” Davis said.
She wasn’t able to see her son while he was in the hospital before he died.
“They have taken him from me,” she said. “That’s how it feels, that they gave him a death sentence.”
Other family members of Marion inmates said prison officials have been unresponsive to their concerns over the past several months.
The son of a Marion inmate, who did not want to be identified, said that when the prison administration barred the use of phones and computers, he tried to get more information about what was happening inside the prison, but officials said they couldn’t tell him anything.
“The guard I spoke to really directly referenced the fact of not wanting media coverage on the situation,” he said.
He said his father was previously rejected for compassionate release, even though he has health issues that affect his breathing, has served 50% of his sentence and was convicted of a drug crime, rather than a violent crime. The son said he received a call Wednesday from a case manager saying that his dad would once again be put in for compassionate release.
“It’s a really big scare because I want to know my dad, I want him there for life milestones,” said the man. “I want him with me. I don’t want him to die in there.”
One inmate said he was made to stay in an isolation room for several days after he tested positive for the coronavirus and developed a fever.
“They had to put us in isolation so we wouldn’t infect others,” he said. “Their idea of doing that was putting us in a cell by ourselves in medium security, even though we’re qualified to be in the camp.”
After he and about 20 others tested positive, they were told to walk to the medium-security building and were put in isolation rooms. The rooms did not have air conditioning and only had hot water, and he slept on a “concrete slab” with a plastic covering and a sheet, he said.
Federal prisons officials didn’t answer specific questions about housing and conditions for inmates who have coronavirus, instead sending the same language about all prisons having isolation and quarantine areas in answer to three separate questions.
The inmates were allowed one 15-minute shower every two or three days, and were given a bottle with two weeks’ worth of Tylenol, to take if they had a fever or pain, he said.
“It feels like we’re being punished for catching corona,” he said.
The surge in cases at Marion mirrors the spread of COVID-19 in federal prisons throughout the country.
One positive aspect of a reported COVID surge in a prison is that it means that the prison is doing COVID-19 testing, which wasn’t always the case, experts who have been studying the coronavirus in prisons said. This isn’t enough of an improvement, though, said University of California, Los Angeles law professor Sharon Dolovich.
“For the longest time, there were many facilities that were reporting zero or one or five cases in a population with 2,000 people,” said Dolovich, who also heads a data project that tracks COVID cases in prisons.
“Of course, the cases were already there, you just didn’t want us to know they were,” and it wasn’t known because there wasn’t enough testing, Dolovich said.
By early June, the COVID-19 case rate for prisoners was more than five times higher than the U.S. population case rate, according to a paper published recently by Dolovich and others.
An author of the report, Kalind Parish, said the team behind the UCLA tracking project gathers data from the official federal and state reports on prisons, and from news sources. Parish remains skeptical of prison data accuracy.
“I’ve heard stories of someone being transferred to a hospital to receive treatment for COVID, and the DOC might not necessarily count them as one of their deaths,” Parish said. “I think it’s safe to say the death data is underreported.”
This spring, Attorney General Barr issued memos instructing prisons to prioritize home confinement as an option for inmates convicted of nonviolent crimes, especially older inmates in low-security facilities. So far, of the approximately 128,000 federal inmates in Bureau of Prisons facilities, about 7,000 have been placed in home confinement, according to federal figures.
Dolovich said Barr’s language could have been stronger; he could have made home confinement mandatory for older or infirm inmates.
Inside the prison in Marion, one inmate who tested positive expressed frustration at the prison administration for not prioritizing home confinement for the most vulnerable earlier on in the year, when there were fewer cases.
“No one’s exactly breathing easy right now, thinking they’ll do the right thing. They should be pushing the vulnerable people out of here first,” he said. “They had three months and they did nothing, and now people are dying. I’m scared I’m going to be next.”
