One Year of the Coronavirus Pandemic: Covid-19 in Prisons

As of March 2021, at least 388,000 incarcerated people have contracted Covid-19, more than one in every five people in U.S. prisons. In the last year, news outlets, watchdog groups, and federal oversight offices have investigated the conditions inside prisons during the pandemic as well as the causes of specific outbreaks. 

Documents and reports showed how officials managing vast prison networks, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and those running private prisons, mismanaged the crisis. 

• American Oversight published documents showing that BOP was slow to adopt key hygienic measures in the early months of the pandemic. The records included a complaint about management having refused to provide cleaning supplies to staff in March, and contained a memo instructing facilities to find alternative medicines for incarcerated people who used hydroxychloroquine — the drug dubiously promoted by Trump as a miracle Covid-19 treatment — to treat long-term conditions like lupus and arthritis. 
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren released findings from an investigation of the American Correctional Association, the nation’s largest accreditor of prisons and immigrant detention facilities. The investigation found that the ACA responded to the crisis by reducing its auditing of prisons, rather than shifting its oversight to address health and safety concerns.

As the pandemic spread, officials across the country did not implement proper protective measures or policies that could have lessened the spread.

• NBC News and the Marshall Project reported that in the first three months of the pandemic, wardens approved only 156 of the 10,940 applications of federal prisoners for compassionate release. Fulfilling these requests would have decreased overcrowding in prisons. 
• The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (DOJ OIG) released reports showing that in March and April, two residential reentry centers in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Newark, N.J., did not conduct effective Covid-19 screening or testing, and delayed providing masks. In Newark, residents did not receive face masks until nearly three weeks after the CDC recommended that all individuals wear cloth face coverings whenever they were unable to maintain distance. 
• According to the New York Times, in June, multiple states, including New York, Illinois, Mississippi, and Alabama, had tested fewer than 5 percent of people in prisons. By mid-August, only half of all states required prison staff to wear masks.
• The Los Angeles Times reported that in California, thousands of incarcerated people — many housed in different units, and some having been exposed to the virus — continued cleaning, cooking, and working in factories as the pandemic raged on. 
• State officials shut down prisons and conducted large-scale transfers, which likely spread the virus to other facilities.

Across the country, outbreaks occurred in federal and state prisons. 

• The DOJ OIG released findings from a remote inspection of FCI Terminal Island, a federal prison in California. The analysis found that half of the incarcerated people at Terminal Island who died from Covid-19 did not receive a test until they were hospitalized. Additionally, Terminal Island staff did not comply with BOP policy in notifying the families of inmates with serious illnesses; in one instance, an individual who ultimately died from Covid-19 was on a ventilator for six days, but staff did not inform their family until after they died.
• The American Civil Liberties Union investigated an outbreak at a BOP facility in Indiana, where a staff member who had tested positive for Covid-19 continued to have extensive contact with staff and prisoners without wearing a mask. By Sept. 18, there were more than 200 cases, though the BOP had tested less than a third of the incarcerated population. 
• The New Yorker reported that at Cummins Unit, a penitentiary in Arkansas, officials covered up coronavirus cases among staff and inmates for weeks during the early days of the pandemic, until widespread testing in late April revealed that more than 800 incarcerated people had contracted Covid-19. 

Many of the same problems also arose in detention centers, where nearly 10,000 immigrants have tested positive for Covid-19.

• A House investigation of nearly two dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers noted that longstanding practices like overcrowding, lack of consistent and quality medical care, and unsanitary living conditions exacerbated coronavirus spread. Some ICE officials and contractors deprived people in detention of necessities like soap and hand sanitizer, in some cases leaving immigrants with no choice but to fashion masks out of scraps of clothes or disposable meal containers.
• Limited testing allowed the virus to spread undetected. At the Mesa Verde facility in Bakersfield, Calif., ICE avoided testing until a judge ordered it in August; more than half of detained individuals at Mesa Verde tested positive that month. 
• The transfer of hundreds of immigrants to different facilities also led to outbreaks in ICE facilities in Texas, Ohio, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. A Washington Post investigation of one of the largest outbreaks, in a detention center in Farmville, Va., revealed that although ICE claimed its June transfer of immigrants to this facility had been to mitigate overcrowding, the real purpose was to bypass restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel so ICE special response teams could be dispatched to protests in Washington, D.C. A leaked Homeland Security draft report showed officials acknowledged that transfers of immigrants between ICE detention facilities had “contributed to outbreaks.” 
• Covid-19 outbreaks in detention centers also spread the virus in nearby communities, with Detention Watch Network finding that ICE detention facilities contributed to more than 245,000 Covid-19 cases in the U.S.

Incarcerated people remain at risk. As of March, only 15 states have begun vaccinating people in prisons, even though 28 percent of incarcerated people have tested positive for Covid-19 (as opposed to 9 percent of the total U.S. population). For more information about oversight of Covid-19 spread among incarcerated people, visit our Oversight Tracker or read more about our investigations.