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COVID Miracles (Performed by Statisticians) – Update for February 8, 2021

February 8, 2021 lisa-legalinfo Leave a comment

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

A COUPLE OF COVID MIRACLES… OTHERWISE, A BAD WEEK FOR THE BOP

Despite what was a pretty bad run last week, PR-wise, for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, we were privileged to witness a couple of miracles of Biblical proportion.

First, the numbers: The BOP continues to write down the COVID-19 inmate totals. As of last Friday, the BOP reported 2,273 sick inmates, down 43% from the week before. Curiously, the agency reports 1,729 sick staffers, a mere 3% reduction from the week before. Cynics might say that when you control the patients, you can say when they’re recovered and when they’re not. Controlling employees who go home at the end of each shift… not so easy,

At the end of the week, the BOP reported 229 federal prisoner deaths, an increase of five. The BOP says it has tested 68% of all inmates at least once, with a whopping 44.6% testing positive for COVID.

Now for the miracles: Three federal prisoners housed in private prisons have miraculously come back to life, at least on paper. Last Tuesday, the total number of inmate deaths in the private prisons dropped from 16 to 13 without explanation. The private operators, who are losing their federal contracts, seem to know something about how to cure people of COVID. Or perhaps they’ve taken the story of Lazarus to heart.

Meanwhile, the BOP is starting to provide vaccination information on its website, and – speaking of miracles – as of last Friday, the BOP was reporting that it had received 36,650 doses of vaccine, but somehow administered 2,638 more doses than it had received. The New Testament records that Jesus fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes, and had more left over than he started with. The BOP has apparently replicated that miracle.

The BOP’s detailed vaccination information is woefully incomplete. In its facility-by-facility data, the number of inoculations accounts for only a third of the doses the BOP says it had distributed. Last Friday’s numbers show 7,468 staff (20.7% of all BOP employees) and 5,751 inmates (3.8% of the population) receiving the vaccine. The data only report that vaccines have been administered in 33% of all locations, which clashes with BOP statements several weeks ago . The New York Daily News said lawyers for defendants at MCC New York told it “the vaccine’s distribution at the jail has been haphazard, with some high-risk prisoners still waiting for shots.”

Other than the miracles, it was a tough week for the BOP. First, FCI Ft Dix Warden David Ortiz, who presided over a COVID-19 explosion at that facility last fall, suddenly was relieved of duty, reassigned to the BOP Northeast Regional Office. You may recall that the BOP uses desks at its regional offices as “time-out chairs” for wardens and other management people on the outs. Last summer, for example, the BOP sent the FCI Oakdale warden to work on a desk at an office well away from inmates.

Ortiz was “temporarily” replaced by Lamine N’Diaye, the former warden at the MCC New York, who himself was placed on desk duty at the Northeast Regional Office in 2019 while authorities investigation the death of millionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. At the time, Jose Rojas, a BOP union leader and teacher at FCI Coleman, said N’Diaye should be home without pay instead of being reassigned. “I put this on the warden,” he said. “If he would have had common sense and followed policy, we wouldn’t be here discussing this.”

In Chicago, inmates filed a proposed class action suit against the BOP for conditions at MCC Chicago. The suit, Price v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, Case No 1:21-cv-00542, claims the high-rise jail’s “haphazard and insufficient” measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic led to two major outbreaks, endangering people in custody and staff. The suit alleges a lack of cleaning supplies and proper social distancing as well as a “poorly implemented and incomplete” isolation and quarantine process. Officials also allegedly turned “a blind eye” to staff who didn’t wear masks and ignored some people in custody who asked for tests.

As a result, almost 300 MCC Chicago inmates have tested positive for COVID-19, although the lawsuit claims that “the real infection rate was certainly higher” than that.

BOP correctional officers at FCI Mendota sued the BOP in the Federal Court of Claims last week for an extra 25% in pay for the hours they’ve worked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aaron McGlothin, an FCI Mendota employees union leader, said COs feel particularly strongly about the need for hazard pay because they believe the Bureau of Prisons has not taken the proper precautions to protect them.

“At some point you have to say enough is enough, you have to do what you have to do, and seek outside assistance,” McGlothin said. “If our agency took the proper precautions, we wouldn’t have to deal with this the way we have, and they owe us.”

The Associated Press last week reported that records it obtained showed that the BOP’s string of executions at FCI Terre Haute last December and January “likely acted as a superspreader events… something health experts warned could happen when the Justice Department insisted on resuming executions during a pandemic. The AP said BOP employees carrying out the executions “had contact with inmates and other people infected with the coronavirus, but were able to refuse testing and declined to participate in contact tracing efforts and were still permitted to return to their work assignments… Other staff members, including those brought in to help with executions, also spread tips to their colleagues about how they could avoid quarantines and skirt public health guidance from the federal government and Indiana health officials.”

Finally, an arrest: A federal grand jury has returned a three-count indictment charging a former BOP CO, Jimmy Lee Highsmith, with sexually abusing three female prisoners at FCI Tallahassee. Highsmith was arrested last Wednesday night. In fall 2019, Florida Sen. Marco demanded the BOP respond to newspaper reports of sexual abuse of female inmates at Tallahassee and FCI Coleman camp. In fact, Highsmith was identified nine months ago by a former FCI Tallahassee inmate as having raped her.

There’s a saying among BOP inmates that many of the COs are “only a uniform change away…” Jimmy has become the illustration for that aphorism.

New York Daily News, Ghislaine Maxwell receives COVID-19 vaccine at Brooklyn federal jail: source (February 2, 2021)

NJ.com, Warden at N.J. federal prison reassigned amid massive COVID outbreak (February 2, 2021)

Albany Times-Union, Jail’s warden reassigned (August 14, 2019)

Chicago Sun Times, Inmates file class-action lawsuit over handling of COVID-19 at downtown jail (January 31, 2021)

The Fresno Bee, California prison employees file lawsuit demanding hazard pay during COVID pandemic (February 5, 2021)

Associated Press, Records show 13 federal executions under Trump administration at Indiana prison likely acted as COVID-19 superspreader (February 5, 2021)

Associated Press, Former corrections officer accused of sexually abusing multiple inmates at Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee (February 4, 2021)

– Thomas L. Root

BOP Extends Quarantine As Questions About Its Competence Continue – Update for April 16, 2020

April 16, 2020 lisa-legalinfo Leave a comment

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

BOP SAYS IT’S “DOING PRETTY GOOD” ON COVID-19

Coronavirus has swept through the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the past three weeks, leaving over 725 confirmed cases among inmates, at least 16 prisoners dead, and, in the words of CNN, “raising concerns about the government’s handling of the crisis.” In response, the BOP has announced Phase VI of its COVID-19 response, which seems to consist primarily of another month of inmate lockdown.

Inside some facilities, CNN reported last weekend, inmates have said they are locked in crammed and cramped cells without face masks and enough soap, and guards have grown concerned that they could be spreading the disease to their families. At a prison in Butner, North Carolina, the number of cases jumped by dozens – nearly 400% – earlier this week. At FCI Oakdale, Louisiana, where six inmates have died in recent days, corrections officers had to quell a small uprising with pepper spray on Wednesday, an official at the prison said.

Last weekend, BOP Director Michael Carvajal defended the steps the agency has taken to address the pandemic: “I don’t think anybody was ready for this COVID, so we’re dealing with it just as well as anybody else and I’d be proud to say we’re doing pretty good,” Carvajal, who was named director in late February, told CNN.

Actually, the correct grammar would be “doing pretty well.” But mangled English is hardly the biggest problem with Mike’s auto-hagiographic assessment.

The Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette released emails yesterday in which Arkansas health officials discussed whether the BOP fully understood the “seriousness” of the coronavirus outbreak at the FCI Forrest City federal prison, and whether prison officials were fully cooperating with the mitigation effort. Although Director Mike spun the Centers for Disease Control inspection of FCI Forrest City as being the result of a BOP request for assistance, the released emails show that shortly after the first positive COVID-19 case at the FCI was disclosed on Friday, April 3rd, Dr. Naveen Patil, the Arkansas Department of Health director for infectious diseases, questioned the prison’s efforts and expressed a desire for CDC backup.

When an Arkansas state inmate came down with the virus, Mother Jones reported yesterday, prison officials immediately tested 48 other inmates in the unit, finding that 46 of them – almost all of whom had no symptoms – were infected. But the BOP’s COVID-19 planning has left the agency with no ability to test. “We have very, very limited amounts of the testing kits,” Brandy Moore, secretary treasurer of the national union that represents correctional officers in federal prisons, was quoted as saying by Mother Jones.

At FCC Terre Haute, Indiana, “we have between 2,500 and 3,000 inmates, and we were given four tests,” Steve Markle, another leader of the national union who works at the prison, told Mother Jones in late March. At FCI Oakdale, correctional officers were told to stop testing people and just assume that anyone with symptoms had been infected, according to Ronald Morris, president of the local union there — even though, as shown by the Arkansas state prison experience, plenty of people can be asymptomatic.

All of this, Mother Jones reported, “is to say that statistics reported by the Federal Bureau of Prisons are likely massive undercounts. “Our numbers are not going to be adequate because we’re not truly testing them,” Moore said.

Still, the BOP’s COVID-19 numbers – which the agency promised would be updated every day at 3 pm but which, each day, seems to be reported later and later – were updated after 6 pm last night to report COVID-19 had been confirmed in 449 inmates and 280 staff, spread across 43 BOP facilities. The number is undoubtedly much higher.

Meanwhile, in a filing in the Eastern District of New York yesterday, the BOP admitted that “‘because of the shortage of tests, testing is currently reserved for those meeting’ certain criteria, including the kind of symptoms the inmate is facing, his potential exposure, whether he is high risk and whether he works in a high-contact role such as food service.” Through Tuesday, April 14, the number of inmates tested at MCC New York and MDC Brooklyn remained at 11 (the same number reported the prior Friday).

If you don’t test, you cannot confirm. If you cannot confirm, your data are meaningless.

Perhaps most sobering was a report in the Santa Barbara Independent that an inmate, Efrem Stutson, was released on April 1st and put on a Greyhound bus to San Bernardino by USP Lompoc officials while he had a hacking cough and was so ill “he could hardly hold his head up.” Efrem refused to go to the hospital that night, but the next morning his family insisted. Paramedics wearing protective equipment rushed him to Kaiser Permanente medical center in Fontana. Doctors diagnosed him with COVID-19 and put him in quarantine. No visitors were allowed. Four days later, Efrem died.

His sisters are heartbroken — and furious, the Independent reported. “Why did they release him so sick?” one asked. “They sent him home on his deathbed.”

A USP Lompoc spokesman confirmed that Efrem was released on April 1st. But for “privacy, safety, and security reasons,” he said, he could not comment on Efrem’s medical condition at the time. “All inmates, prior to releasing from the BOP, will be screened by medical staff for COVID-19 symptoms,” he said. “If symptomatic for COVID-19, the institution will notify the local health authorities in the location where the inmate is releasing, and transportation that will minimize exposure will be used, and inmates will be supplied a mask to wear.”

Laura Harris-Gidd, Efrem’s sister, said he wasn’t wearing a mask when she picked him up at the bus station. “I just don’t understand why they would let him out instead of quarantining him and taking care of him,” she said. “I think they’re hiding a lot.”

“We’re dealing with it just as well as anybody else,” BOP Director Michael Carvajal said, “and I’d be proud to say we’re doing pretty good.” Right.

Hold you head up high, Mike.

CNN, Exclusive: ‘I don’t think anybody was ready for this Covid,’ says head of federal prisons (Apr 10)

Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Emails detail talks on illnesses at federal prison (April 15)

Mother Jones, Want to Know How Fast Coronavirus Can Spread in Prison? Look at Arkansas (April 15)

New York Law Journal, Brooklyn Federal Lockup Officials Describe ‘Shortage of Tests’ in Newly Filed Documents (April 15)