Nearly half of respondents overall described conditions where social distancing was impossible. Many of the findings may not come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following the pandemic’s impact behind bars and the California prison system’s poor track record of handling it.
To do that, they turned to researchers at UC Irvine, who had already received thousands of letters and phone calls for their PrisonPandemic project, an ongoing initiative to document the experiences of people in California prisons.Īfter poring over hundreds of calls and letters sent to PrisonPandemic researchers between April 2020 and April 2021, the UCLA team coded and analyzed the contents of each response. The UCLA team wanted to find a way to examine problems that are harder to quantify, such as deteriorating conditions, neglectful staff and the toll of extreme isolation in prison. But the usual quantitative measures - death and infection data - tell only part of the story. The findings come more than three years into a pandemic that has killed 260 incarcerated people and sickened more than 93,000 in California prisons, according to state data. “We have and continue to work diligently to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic with transparency and federal court oversight,” she added. The researchers also found widespread reports of abuse, extreme isolation and medical neglect that were often never reported by official oversight bodies, they said.Ĭalifornia Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Terri Hardy told The Times on Tuesday that the agency could not fully respond without reviewing the report, but she stressed that officials take “very seriously” the health and safety of staff and prisoners. Roughly half of respondents overall expressed concerns about the quality of healthcare they received during the pandemic, and 14 said they were explicitly denied medical care after contracting the virus. raid on B lack inmates turned into a superspreader event.īut there were red flags at all 28 of the facilities included in the report.
Although the San Quentin facility made headlines early in the pandemic for its high infection rate and death toll, Soledad drew criticism a few weeks later when a 3 a.m. Right behind those four were the prisons in Calipatria, San Quentin and Soledad. "As a result, class actions brought on behalf of a large number of incarcerated people - so-called institutional reform litigation - may be particularly apt for these four facilities.” “These were the places where there have been the most people highlighting problematic responses - in an egregious sense.”Īt all four prisons, the "medical care and conditions of confinement" stood out as particularly troubling, the report noted. “These four facilities were routinely the worst,” said Joseph Gaylin, one of the law students behind the study. More than three years after the pandemic started sweeping through the California prison system, a report from UCLA offers a new measure of just how bad it was - and which prisons handled it the worst.Īfter analyzing nearly 300 letters and interviews from people in prison, a team of law students ranked which facilities had the most red flags for potential constitutional violations between April 2020 and April 2021, the first year of the pandemic.Īt the top of the list were the prisons in Chino, Solano, Chuckwalla and Mule Creek.
The 700 inmates selected for transfer had medical conditions that made them especially vulnerable to the virus. The Chino prison reported more than 600 cases of COVID-19 and nine deaths. Outside the California Institute for Men, Chino, in 2020.
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