San Quentin faces California's deadliest prison outbreak after latest Covid fatalities
The Covid-19 death toll at California’s San Quentin state prison hit 22 on Tuesday, in the deadliest of several outbreaks that have hit prisons across the state.
Prison officials announced the most recent death on Tuesday morning. Authorities did not make public the name of the victim but said the prisoner died at a hospital. Over the weekend, authorities had announced the 20th and 21st deaths. The first announcement was of the death of Orlando Romero, the ninth person on San Quentin’s death row to die of Covid complications. The identity of the other victim – whose death was announced the same day – has not been released.
San Quentin – California’s oldest prison and home to the only death row for men – has experienced the largest outbreak of coronavirus among prisoners in the state, with 168 positive cases as of Tuesday morning. At the outbreak’s peak, the prison had 1,636 infections, more than a third of the institution’s population. The outbreak has prompted demands for California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, to grant mass releases in order to stop the virus from spreading further.
On 10 July officials announced new initiatives that will lead to the expedited release of 8,000 people from Californian prisons by the end of August.
Related: California to release up to 8,000 prisoners to curb spread of coronavirus
The most recent deaths come as the population of the notoriously overcrowded state prison system dropped to below 100,000 people for the first time in 30 years. The California prison population exploded in the 1990s due to tough-on-crime policies, longer sentences and the enactment of the “three strikes” law. The population reached its peak of 165,000 in 2006 (the system is designed to hold 85,000 people) and in 2011 the US supreme court ruled that the state must decrease its population.
The outbreak at San Quentin began after a late-May transfer of 121 people whom officials deemed to be at high risk of contracting and becoming seriously ill from Covid-19, from the California Institution for Men in Chino. Before the transfer San Quentin had zero positive cases; within four weeks of the move, it had reached almost 1,200 cases.
Although the number of people who are still testing positive for the virus has declined significantly at San Quentin, Covid-19 continues to be a stubborn presence throughout state prisons, with new cases being reported at facilities that had avoided previous outbreaks and upticks in locations where things seemed to be under control. Officials have reported more than 1,000 new cases in the past two weeks. These include a resurgence of cases at Avenal state prison and the California Institution for Women (CIW) and new outbreaks at the California correctional center and California correctional institution (CCC and CCI).
As of Tuesday morning, the state prison system had seen 8,362positive cases in total since late March, 6,720 of which have been marked as “resolved”, according to the state prison coronavirus reporting tool. Now that the number of active cases has decreased, Michael Bien, an attorney who has long fought to reduce prison populations, says that the state must start to re-establish programs that were paused to stop the spread of Covid. Prisons should allow people to earn credits that can decrease their sentences and establish remote psychiatry for those who need it, he said.
“There has been some good news, but the control they achieved is at the cost of totally locking down prisons and stopping transfers and rehabilitative groups. That is not a solution,” Bien said. “If this continues, people are gonna lose whatever rehabilitation they’ve had, and the mental health of patients will worsen.
“Just like we need to get society back to business in an appropriate way, prison officials need to restart groups and be smart about moving people.”
