I'm totally vaccinated and boosted in opposition to COVID-19. I do every thing I can to comply with the CDC’s pointers for shielding myself in opposition to an infection. But I concern catching COVID-19 a second time from the sick folks throughout me in San Quentin State Jail.
I'm one among 300 plaintiffs who sued the state of California, looking for a courtroom order that will have pressured jail officers to ease overcrowding and home one individual to every cell, as an alternative of two. Our objective was to extend social distancing within the enclosed, unventilated housing items which can be packed at effectively greater than 100% of supposed capability.
In his ruling within the lawsuit final November, Marin County Superior Courtroom Choose Geoffrey Howard acknowledged that “in double-occupancy cells, one individual can not keep away from an infection if the cellmate has contracted the virus.” Wanting again on the 28 deaths within the jail up to now, he dominated that officers’ mismanagement quantities to merciless and strange punishment, violating the U.S. Structure.
Nonetheless, he wouldn't order the jail to deal with just one individual per cell. He denied the petitions, saying that vaccines had been “a recreation changer.”
At present, because the extremely infectious Omicron variant swamps hospitals throughout the nation, shatters caseload data (together with among the many vaccinated), and has contaminated 335 folks in San Quentin within the 14 days main as much as Jan. 25, this assertion has not aged effectively.
My neighbors and I knew it wouldn’t. It was by no means “speculative” to notice that the coronavirus is mutating into unpredictable variants. On the time of the decide’s determination, the Delta variant had already ravaged the U.S. for months. As an April 2021 article within the New England Journal of Medication famous, vaccines alone usually are not sufficient to cease coronavirus outbreaks in prisons. San Quentin’s present unfold is additional fueled by the truth that 23% of directors and correctional officers have chosen to stay unvaccinated — a alternative vigorously defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In the meantime, as an alternative of releasing folks to deal with overcrowding, California has packed extra folks into San Quentin, with the inhabitants swelling from a low of two,418 final Might to about 3,092 this January. Greater than 500 of the jail’s 3,081 cells stay unused, leaving folks doubled up in 4-by-9 cells, with entry to contemporary air left to the whim of jail officers. Coronavirus circumstances are stacking up.
Choose Howard’s gamble is being examined. The stakes are our lives.
The San Quentin coronavirus outbreak, which a state appeals courtroom referred to as the “worst epidemiological catastrophe in California correctional historical past,” will be traced to Might 30, 2020, when the California Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation transferred 122 prisoners from the California Institute for Males (Chino) to San Quentin, in opposition to medical suggestions and the division’s personal insurance policies. The consequence: hundreds of lives unraveled.
Because the pandemic unfold by way of the jail, officers made mistake after mistake — mixing sick and wholesome folks, failing to separate housing items, failing to implement a masks mandate, delaying testing and sustaining a dangerously excessive inhabitants within the jail.
“The tragic, inevitable results of this bumbling sequence of occasions was an exponential COVID-19 outbreak at San Quentin that, up to now, has killed 28 folks,” Choose Howard wrote.
He additionally famous that the state has a “lengthy and infamous historical past of offering constitutionally insufficient medical care to California inmates.” In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Courtroom dominated that “extreme overcrowding” made it unattainable for the state to supply constitutionally required medical and psychological well being care in its prisons. At present, California prisons stay at 112% of design capability. Till numbers are lowered — not solely at San Quentin, however all through the state — incarcerated folks won't ever be secure.
It’s not simply COVID-19 we've got to fret about. We additionally can not escape another infectious illness introduced inside this jail. Lowering jail populations and housing just one individual per cell won't alone remedy the issue, however these steps would lower an infection charges and save lives.
It’s not rocket science. The extra human beings are crowded into tight areas, the better it's for sicknesses to unfold.
“We’re nonetheless in peril each second, bodily and psychologically,” Miguel Sifuentes, a fellow plaintiff within the lawsuit, advised me. “Whether or not it’s one other variant or a unique sickness, or the cumulative results of overcrowding, we stay in peril as a result of we don’t know when both is coming.”
He stated he would really like Choose Howard to reconcile the logic of acknowledging the violation of our rights in the course of the pandemic, the lengthy historical past of prisons’ deliberate indifference to our medical wants and even what the decide referred to as the “evolving nature of the pandemic” — but not offering us any reduction.
Richard “Rock” Lathan, 52, one other plaintiff, has been incarcerated for greater than 30 years. He testified that he contracted COVID-19 whereas engaged on a group that cleans up after medical emergencies. “I nonetheless do it, as a result of I care about these nonetheless being affected by COVID, the lengthy haulers and the sick,” Lathan advised me.
“These cells are initially constructed for one man. It’s like residing in a fuel station rest room with two folks,” he stated. “Spend an evening or per week in one among these so you'll be able to see for your self what it’s like and the way the ambiance is and the way simply somebody can get COVID once more, though we’re vaccinated.”
We will solely hope that the courts — in addition to the governor, state legislators, policymakers and the folks of California — will hear our pleas.
Incarcerated journalist Juan Moreno Haines is senior editor of the San Quentin Information and a contributing author at Solitary Watch.
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