We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
THE BOP’S COLLAPSING COVID UNIVERSE
The famed physicist Stephen Hawking theorized that there would come a time when the universe stopped expanding and would start collapsing instead. When that happened, he said, time (and everything else) would run backward.
The BOP has made it happen. How else does one explain the fact that the total number of COVID tests done by the agency peaked at 129,677 on January 25, 2022, and has fallen ever since? As of last night, the BOP claimed to have tested 790 fewer people since April 2020 than it claimed to have tested a little more than a month ago.
At this rate, the BOP is “untesting” more inmates a day than it is testing.
This is not surprising. The total number of inmate COVID cases peaked a year ago in February and then began a steady decline that made keeping accurate records of how many BOP prisons had caught the virus since April 2020 impossible. The number dropped by 5,300 until just before Christmas. In other words, about 3% of the inmate population “uncaught” COVID in the last year.
How is this possible? Only Hawking knows…
Then there’s the problem with the official vaccine count. Forty-one BOP facilities claim to have vaccinated more than 100% of their inmates. For instance, FCI La Tuna (on the Texas-New Mexico state line) has an inmate population of 967. Yet as of last Friday it claimed to have vaccinated 1,239 inmates. To be sure, inmates come and go. Some transfer, some are released, some newbies arrive. But across the system, the BOP claims to have vaccinated more than 4,000 prisoners than it has in custody.
A year ago, the agency quietly adopted the voodoo standard that it would subtract from its inmate COVID total anyone who had gotten COVID while a BOP prisoner but later was released. Sort of like the person was never an inmate and the COVID case had never occurred. That metric was weird enough, apparently intended to obscure how badly the BOP COVID mitigation plan had failed. Ironically, the agency has seemed to go the other way on vaccinations: a prison counts an inmate vaccination on its tally long after the prisoner is released.
The BOP keeps its finger on the COVID scale. Its rule for recordkeeping is to adopt whatever standard that makes it look good, accuracy be damned.
The BOP claimed 459 inmates recovered from COVID between a week ago last Friday and last Wednesday. But then, only three recovered over the next three days. As of Friday, 1,253 prisoners and 1,019 employees were sick. As of last night, the number fell to 475 inmates and 671 staff still with COVID. The BOP said COVID remained in 113 facilities.
At least 305 inmates remain dead. There’s not much the BOP can do about those numbers. The BOP reported last week that two inmates, one at Tucson and one at FMC Lexington, have died of COVID. One got sick on January 14 and was quickly declared “recovered” on January 24. The second got sick on January 18, and “recovered” even more quickly, after only seven days.
Despite being declared “recovered… in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines,” as the BOP always defensively puts it, one prisoner went to the hospital eight days after recovery and died there. The other died in his cell.
The BOP currently reports that 70.7% of staff and 76.4% of inmates have been vaccinated. Both of those numbers are squishy for reasons already mentioned. (The total number of BOP employees (36,553) has dropped by 138 over the past few weeks).
Remember a month ago, when a BOP employee gave two U.S. senators a tour of FCI Danbury after the top brass there refused them entrance? On Feb 11 Shaun Boylan, a BOP financial program specialist and vice president of the BOP employees’ union at Danbury, has filed a complaint with the BOP’s Equal Employment Opportunity Office claiming he has been repeatedly retaliated against for engaging in union activities, including giving Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy (both D-CT) a tour of the facility in January.
Boylan said the harassment included his supervisor telling others that “I would be assigned to the phone room and that criminal charges are pending against me.”
The BOP said it “altered” the congressional tour to maintain COVID-19 protocols. Danbury FCI is currently the subject of a federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration complaint for its COVID management.
At this point, does COVID matter anymore? The Wall Street Journal suggests we’re not out of the woods yet. The paper said last week that a more infectious type of the Omicron variant, known as BA.2, “has surged to account for more than a third of global Covid-19 cases sequenced recently, adding to the debate about whether countries are ready for full reopening.” Health authorities are examining whether BA.2 could extend the length of Covid-19 waves that have peaked recently.
“We’re looking not only at how quickly those peaks go up, but how they come down,” World Health Organization epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said. “And as the decline in cases occurs…we also need to look at: Is there a slowing of that decline? Or will we start to see an increase again?”
BOP Press Release, Inmate Death at FMC Lexington (February 24, 2022)
BOP Press Release, Inmate Death at USP Tucson (February 24, 2022)
CTInsider, Records: Danbury federal prison named in two complaints alleging work place issues, infrastructure problems (February 22, 2022)
Wall Street Journal, Fast-Spreading Covid-19 Omicron Type Revives Questions About Opening Up (February 23, 2022
– Thomas L. Root