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BOP STARTS REPORTING COVID-19 IN PRIVATE PRISONS, BUT QUESTIONS REMAIN

After a letter from 41 advocacy groups and 55 families of inmates held at private prison North Lake CI, Baldwin, Michigan – all of them aliens convicted of federal crimes – the Bureau of Prisons has finally started providing some summary figures for federal inmates in private prisons suffering from COVID-19.

The letter, sent last week to Attorney General William Barr and BOP Director Michael Carvajal, accused North Lake operator GEO Group and the BOP of opacity as to COVID-19 at the facility:

Despite its status as a federal facility operating under the authority of the BOP, and despite GEO’s knowledge of positive test results among staff since the first week of April, the North Lake Correctional Facility has never appeared on [the BOP COVID-19 map]. Only daily requests from journalists, addressed first to the GEO Group and then to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, have yielded any results. Precise figures for incarcerated people who have tested positive remain unavailable. Families continue to search for any information, while the risks facing the more than 1,500 people held at this facility, where social distancing is out of the question, grow more severe every day.

The BOP first posted information on the private prisons last Friday, reporting 66 active COVID-19 cases at five facilities. North Lake reported 18. As of last night, the number had risen to 82 active cases. North Lake still reported 18.

Critics complain that the report is not enough. University of North Carolina professor Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, who is tracking COVID-19 in state and federal prisons, said, “You cannot convince me that there are only 110 cases in these prisons. It’s impossible to understand what is going on at the facilities.”

Two of the private facilities, Great Plains CI in Oklahoma (27 cases) and Rivers CI in North Carolina (18 cases), qualify as COVID-19 “clusters” under CDC guidelines. States that have responded to prison clusters with comprehensive testing have found that a majority of inmates test positive for coronavirus.

The Professor is right: the math does not work. According to daily COVID-19 data provided by Michigan’s Dept. of Health and Human Services, Michigan’s two federal prisons have 110 prisoner cases as of last Saturday. DHHS does not provide a breakdown, but on Saturday, BOP reported that FCI Milan had 14 inmates with COVID-19. If the Milan number is right, then North Lake 90 infected inmates. If the North Lake number is right, the Milan’s number is wrong. Perhaps both are undercounts.