Vulnerable Inmates Left in Prison as Covid Rages - The New York Times

At a federal compound in Connecticut, inmates in precarious health “are like sitting ducks,” one lawyer said.

The Danbury Federal Correction Institution in Connecticut is one of three federal prisons that were singled out for prompt action last spring by former Attorney General William Barr because of its vulnerability to Covid outbreaks.Credit...Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times.

When the pandemic erupted last spring, federal prisons were told to move quickly to grant home confinement to medically vulnerable inmates who did not pose a risk to the public.

But the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been slow to act.

The coronavirus has infected more than 620,000 inmates and correctional officers in the nation’s prisons, jails and detention centers, according to a New York Times database.

Yet just 7,850 of the 151,735 people serving federal sentences right now have been granted home confinement — about 5 percent.

State prison populations have fallen by 15 percent since the pandemic began, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, but not because inmates are being released to home confinement.

The Danbury compound, one of 122 federal prisons, offers a prism into the bureau’s failure to contain the virus.

Barr because it had seen an outbreak, only about 100 inmates have been granted home confinement so far, many as recently as December.

Court declarations and interviews with inmates who were granted home confinement shed light on the missteps that contributed to the outbreaks.

Symptom checks were cursory in the prison, and suspended altogether for a period of about a week after Thanksgiving for no apparent reason, inmates said.

Under a settlement reached last July with inmates who sued, prison authorities agreed to re-examine the cases of some 600 prisoners with medical problems like diabetes and obesity who had been denied home confinement.

“What’s frustrating about our case is that we have a settlement agreement and the Bureau of Prisons is disregarding it,” said Marisol Orihuela, co-director of the Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic at Yale University, who is representing the inmates, along with attorneys from law schools at the University at Buffalo in New York and Quinnipiac University in North Haven, Conn., and the firm Silver, Golub & Teitell in Stamford, Conn.

Justin Long, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, said federal facilities have taken steps to control the spread of the coronavirus, including educating inmates and staff about preventing transmission, maximizing social distancing to the extent possible, and providing surgical and cloth masks, soap and cleaning supplies to incarcerated people.

Minimum- and low-security settings like the federal prison at Danbury, where many inmates live in large dormitories separated by partitions that don’t reach the ceiling, are even more conducive to the spread of the virus than maximum-security prisons with cells that house only one or two inmates.

“I was freezing, actually, and they didn’t want to give us extra blankets,” said Stacy Spagnardi, 53, who was recently granted home confinement.

One woman could not stop coughing,” said a written declaration by Jasmir Humphrey, who had spent nearly two weeks in the visiting room but was recently released for home confinement.

Long, of the prisons bureau, said in an email statement that all inmates who test positive or have symptoms are “provided medical care in accordance with C.D.C.

But infected women who were placed in a men’s visiting room said they were not given over-the-counter drugs like acetaminophen for fever and body aches, despite their requests.