“It’s Like a Horror Movie”: Trapped Inside San Quentin During an Explosion of COVID-19
Public health experts warned that the crowded, aging prison could spark a “full-blown local epidemic.”
By, Madison Pauley at Mother Jones
On the morning of June 22, as the coronavirus was spreading through the dormitories and cells of San Quentin State Prison, a prisoner I’ll call Gabe picked up a blue pen and a half-finished letter he had put down the night before. Elsewhere in his cell block, prison staff were escorting a sick prisoner away. “As I sit in this cell and hear another person go out [because] they are having trouble breathing I cannot help but contemplate my own death,” he wrote to his partner, Jordan, who requested I use pseudonyms for them both out of fear that Gabe could face retaliation. “I think, what if that was me going out?”
San Quentin is currently the site of one of country’s worst COVID-19 clusters, with 1,300 prisoners and 184 staff having tested positive for the coronavirus as of July 7. At least six prisoners have died from the virus. Sick prisoners are being put in isolation or treated in tents, while those who have not fallen ill are locked down in crowded dormitories and cell blocks where fear of the coronavirus is sometimes overwhelming. Gabe, who has spent about 25 years inside, including several in solitary confinement, told Jordan the lockdown was the hardest time he had ever done. In his letters, he describes being locked in his cell for more than 23 hours a day, unable to go out on the yard, with limited access to showers and programs. “I began to feel hopeless the more helpless I become,” he wrote on June 25. “We sit and wait, wait for what? That is the anxiety.”
On May 30, the prison of about 3,500 people on the edge of San Francisco Bay had zero coronavirus cases. Then California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officials transferred 121 people to San Quentin from the California Institution for Men in Chino, which was struggling with a fierce outbreak. Some of the men, who had medical risk factors and hadn’t been tested for up to four weeks, were packed onto buses where a handful fell ill even before they arrived at San Quentin. There, they were placed in a housing unit called Badger, where tiers of cells opened onto a shared atrium, according to a San Francisco Chronicle investigation.
The virus spread swiftly in the overcrowded, poorly ventilated prison, where 42 percent of inmates are considered medically high-risk. By June 30, about 1 in 3 San Quentin prisoners had tested positive, along with 106 prison staff. Thirty incarcerated people were hospitalized, including 16 sent to ICUs, according to a recent filing in an ongoing lawsuit over healthcare in the California prison system. San Quentin now accounts for more than half the coronavirus cases in the state’s prisons.
The rapid spread of the virus inside San Quentin was predicted by a group of health experts who toured the the facility on June 13. They visited at the request of the federal receiver who had been appointed by a judge to oversee health care in California’s prisons. In an urgent memo, the experts reported that the outbreak, then affecting 16 prisoners, could develop into a “full-blown local epidemic and health care crisis in the prison and surrounding communities.”
Read the full article as it originally appeared in Mother Jones.
