Open Letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom from Criminal Justice and Prison Scholars

Dear Gov. Newsom,

More than a decade ago you showed courage, initiative, and deep commitment to human rights and dignity when, as Mayor of San Francisco, you opened the door to same-sex marriages. As Governor, you showed the same courage and commitment in deciding to place a moratorium on the death penalty in California.

As criminal justice and corrections scholars, we are writing to urge you to once again do the right thing. Throughout California, COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are ravaging state prisons. As of July 6, 5,343 people in California prisons have tested positive for COVID-19, 25 people have died, and hundreds are struggling with active symptoms and hospitalizations. At San Quentin Prison, a botched transfer from the California Institute of Men allowed the virus to spread like wildfire, with 1,421 people who have tested positive.

A recent report on San Quentin Prison from a team of UCSF physicians revealed flawed, negligent protocols for isolation and treatment, lack of consistent and updated testing, unconscionable delay in providing testing results, inappropriate grouping of staff members, and physical locations for isolations that are terrifying and alienating to the population. These inadequate practices are happening against the backdrop of prisons already bursting at the seams, with many of them overcrowded not only well beyond their design capacity, but over the 137.5% limitation set for the entire correctional system by federal courts more than a decade ago.

The men and women in California prisons are serving sentences meted out by law. The California Penal Code did not sentence them to neglect, abuse, illness at overcrowded institutions with the potential to become mass graveyards. As to those falling ill and dying on death row, surely your moratorium on the death penalty, and the decades and billions of dollars spent litigating capital punishment protocols, should not end with deaths by COVID-19.
Moreover, COVID-19 infection is not a zero-sum game, and prioritizing the prison crisis does not come at the expense of the state overall — rather, it protects all of us. In both Marin and Lassen counties, spikes in community infections followed closely after spikes in infection within state prisons; all correctional institutions are permeable to the outside through staff mobility. Protecting people in prison protects people outside prison, too. By contrast, incubating the virus at our state prisons puts the entire state at risk, potentially rendering all your important prevention work, all the efforts at public education about masks and social distancing, and the immense sacrifices of all Californians futile.
We urge you to exercise all the powers at your disposal and release people from prisons to their communities — not just at San Quentin, but systemwide. Given the overcrowding and contagion spread, the release of a few thousands is but a drop in the bucket. A robust body of research in our field confirms that such releases, via executive orders, clemency, and parole (hundreds who have been found eligible for parole are still behind bars), will not endanger public safety. A quarter of the California prison population is aged 50 years and older; this population consists largely of people whose crimes of commitment were committed decades ago, and who do not pose any public risk, violent or otherwise. Previous declines in the California prison population, through the Criminal Justice Realignment and through Prop. 47, did not put the public at risk. We urge you to follow solid findings in criminology, public policy, criminal justice, and public health, rather than misleading and fear-mongering media reports.

We appreciate and admire your willingness to courageously do the right thing in previous pivotal moments; your initiative on same-sex marriage and on the death penalty moratorium have shown your prescience and will be remembered kindly by history. This is precisely such a moment. We urge you to lead us in the right direction.

Respectfully,

Hadar Aviram, Thomas E. Miller ’73 Professor of Law, UC Hastings College of the Law
Sharon Dolovich, Professor of Law and Director, UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project, UCLA School of Law
Aaron Littman, Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow and Deputy Director, UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project, UCLA School of Law
Susan Coutin, Professor, Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine
Arielle W. Tolman, Law and Science Fellow, Northwestern University
Adelina Iftene, Assistant Professor, Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University
Michael Gibson-Light, Assistant Professor of Sociology & Criminology, University of Denver
Valena Beety, Professor of Law, Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
W. David Ball, Professor, Santa Clara School of Law
Keramet Reiter, Associate Professor, Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine
Zachary Psick, Graduate Student, UC Davis
Nicole Kaufman, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Ohio University
Kitty Calavita, Chancellor’s Professor Emerita, UC Irvine
Susila Gurusami, Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice at UIC (UCLA doctoral alum)
Angela P. Harris, Professor Emerita, UC Davis School of Law
Tasha Hill, Managing Attorney, The Hill Law Firm
Gabriela Gonzalez, Doctoral Candidate, University of California, Irvine
Aya Gruber, Professor, University of Colorado Law School
Shannon Gleeson, Associate Professor, Cornell University
Melissa McCall J.D., PhD Student, UC Berkeley Law
Gennifer Furst, Professor, Sociology & Criminal Justice, William Paterson University of NJ
Dvir Yogev, PhD student, UC Berkeley
Caity Curry, PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota
Alessandro De Giorgi, Professor, Department of Justice Studies, SJSU
Brett Burkhardt, Associate Professor, Oregon State University
Russell Rickford, Assoc. Prof. of History, Cornell University
Brianna Remster, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology, Villanova University
Aaron Kupchik, Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware
Sarah Russell, Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University School of Law
Caitlin Henry, Esq., Faculty, Criminology and Criminal Justice Studies, Sonoma State University
Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Professor, Yale Law School
Sharon Dolovich, Professor of Law and Director, UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project, UCLA School of Law
Naomi Sugie, Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine
Beth A. Colgan, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Hope Metcalf, Clinical Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School
Jonathan Simon, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley
Victoria Piehowski, PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota
Shira Shavit MD, Clinical Professor, UCSF
Isaac Dalke, Graduate Student, UC-Berkeley
Kristin Turney, Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine
Christopher Seeds, Assistant Professor, University of California-Irvine
Joshua Page, Associate Professor, University of Minnesota
Franklin Zimring, Simon Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley
Elizabeth Brown, Professor, San Francisco State University
Daria Roithmayr, Professor of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law
David Garland, Arthur T Vanderbilt Professor of Law, NYU School of Law
Laura Gomez, Professor, UCLA
Nikki Jones, Professor, UC Berkeley
Chrysanthi Leon, Associate Professor, University of Delaware
Ingrid Eagly, Professor, UCLA School of Law
Sarah Smith, Assistant Professor, California State University, Chico
Keith P. Feldman, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Jessica Cooper, Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
Vanessa Barker, Professor, Stockholm University
Valerio Bacak, Professor, Rutgers University
Jackson Smith, PhD Candidate, New York University
Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware
Colleen Berryessa, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice
Nicole B. Godfrey, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Denver Sturm College of Law
Mariella Pittari, Public Defender — Brazil, Ph.D. Candidate University of Turin, Italy
Scott Cummings, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Catherine M. Grosso, Professor of Law, Michigan State University College of Law
Sebastián Sclofsky, Assistant Professor, CSU Stanislaus
Chloe Haimson, Sociology PhD Student, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jodi L. Short, The Hon. Roger J. Traynor Chair & Professor of Law, UC Hastings Law
Gabriela Kirk, Graduate Student, Northwestern University
Matthew Canfield, Assistant Professor, Drake University
Julie Novkov, Professor, University at Albany, SUNY
Qudsia Mirza, Birkbeck, University of London
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Postdoctoral Fellow, Prison Education Program New York University
Danielle S. Rudes, Associate Professor, George Mason University
Alex Aguirre, PhD Student, UC Irvine
Paul A. Passavant, Associate Professor, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Lauren McCarthy, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Tracey Roberts, Associate Professor, Samford University, Cumberland School of Law
Menaka Raguparan, Assistant Professor, UNCW
Lindsay Smith, Graduate Research Assistant, George Mason University
Mona Lynch, Professor of Criminology, Law & Society, UC Irvine
Christine Harrington, Professor, NYU
Lisa L. Miller, Rutgers University
Heather Schoenfeld, Associate Professor, Boston University
Alex Rowland, PhD Student, University of California Irvine
Thea Johnson, Associate Professor, Rutgers Law School
Stephen Gasteyer, Assoc. Professor of Sociology, Michigan State University
Amanda Petersen, Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University
Brittany Arsiniega, Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Furman University
Dr. Ciara O’Connell, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Dr. Orna Alyagon Darr, Sapir College Law School (Israel)
Jill McCorkel, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, Villanova University
Mary R Rose, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Smadar Ben-Natan, adjunct professor, UC Berkeley
Heather Elliott, Alumni, Class of ’36 Professor of Law, University of Alabama
Jack Jin Gary Lee, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies, Kenyon College
Jason Sexton, Visiting Research Fellow, UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities
Li Sian Goh, Research Associate, Institute for State and Local Governance
Anna Reosti, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation
David Levine, Professor of Law, UC Hastings College of the Law
Tina Lee, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Stout
Rosann Greenspan, PhD, Executive Director (Retired), Center for the Study of Law and Society, UC Berkeley School of Law
Rebecca Bratspies, Professor, CUNY School of Law
Jonathan Marshall, Director, Legal Studies Program, UC Berkeley
Eliana Branco, PhD, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Shelley Tuazon Guyton, Graduate Student, UC Riverside
Maryanne Alderson, Doctoral Student, University of California, Irvine
Nina Chernoff, Professor, CUNY School of Law
Hana Shepherd, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University
Smita Ghosh, Research Fellow, Georgetown University Law Center
Carrie Rosenbaum, Lecturer, UC Berkeley
Niina Vuolajarvi, Rutgers University
Jane McElligott, Professor, Purdue University Global
Elizabeth L. MacDowell, Professor of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas
William Darwall, PhD Student, Berkeley Law
Allie Robbins, Associate Professor of Law, CUNY School of Law
Michelle Phelps, Associate Professor of Sociology and Law, University of Minnesota
Justin Marceau, Professor, University of Denver
Christina Matzen, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto
Tony Platt, Distinguished Affiliated Scholar, Center for the Study of Law & Society, UC Berkeley
Christopher Slobogin, Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University
Erin Hatton, Associate Professor, University at Buffalo
Michael McCann, Professor, University of Washington
Marina Bell, PhD Candidate, University of California, Irvine
David Green, Associate Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Toussaint Losier, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts — Amherst
Dan Berger, associate professor of comparative ethnic studies, University of Washington Bothell
Sarah Kahn
Rebecca Tublitz, Doctoral Student, University of Californa, Irvine
Meghan Ballard, Graduate Student, University of California, Irvine
Jocelyn Simonson, Professor, Brooklyn Law School
Lisa McGirr, Professor of History, Harvard University
Courtney Echols, PhD Student, Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine
Susan M. Reverby, Professor Emerita, Wellesley College
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Associate Professor, Cornell University
Tal Kastner, Jacobson Fellow in Law and Business, New York University School of Law
Elizabeth Wilhelm, PhD student, University of Kansas
Sheri-Lynn S. Kurisu, PhD; California State University San Marcos; Assistant Professor
Timothy Stewart-Winter, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University-Newark
Joss Greene, PhD student, Columbia University
Kimberly D. Richman, Professor, University of San Francisco
Matthew Canfield, Assistant Professor, Drake University
Dallas Augustine, Ph.D. Candidate at UC Irvine; Research Associate at UCSF
Leigh Goodmark, Professor, University of Maryland
David Greenberg, Professor, New York University

Full text of letter, plus updated list of signatories, posted to Medium here. Scholars who wish to join are welcome to email me with their name, title, and affiliation.

Feed the Right Wolf: Questions and Answers about the COVID-19 Crisis in Prison

I thought prisons were safe. How did the virus even get into prison? Because prisons in California are often in remote, rural areas, it’s easy to think of them as impermeable and far away, but that is not the case. In all prisons, staff members go in and out of the facility, and often live in the surrounding counties. This is how infections can permeate the prison from the community. But CDCR has also made some horrific decisions to transfer people between institutions without proper testing and quarantine protocols. These transfers are probably the source of the serious infection at San Quentin and the spread at Corcoran, as well as in Lassen County and other places. Recently, the medical officer of CDCR was ousted because of these instances of mismanagement.

Why is the virus spreading in prison? Almost all the prisons in California are overcrowded, some of them to the tune of 150% of their design capacity. Social distancing is difficult to do under these conditions. Some well-intentioned, but shortsighted, strategies we took to resolve this problem has just made prisons and jails more vulnerable to the virus. Staff circulate around the prison, as do workers who are incarcerated themselves; there are no solid protocols on cohorting these populations to prevent the spread.

Aren’t the sick people receiving free healthcare in prison? What people in prison receive is not “healthcare” as you understand it. It is appalling and neglectful, and often features weeks (sometimes months and years) of delays. Not too long ago, a person would die behind bars every six days from a preventable, and sometimes iatrogenic, disease. And, until recently, people paid copays for the “healthcare” they receive. The medical system was overwhelmed before the pandemic, despite desperate efforts to turn things around; overcrowding was, and still is (albeit to a lesser degree) still a complicating factor.

Aren’t the sick prisoners safer in prison, where they can be isolated from the rest of the community? No. By and large, prisons are doing a very poor job putting together social distancing protocols. COVID-19 is ravaging death row, where people are single-celled and you’d think would be protected from each other. And we are not safer if the virus is incubated in prisons, either. In at least two counties, Marin and Lassen, infections in the community spiked shortly after infections in prison spiked. Prisons are part of the community, and people in prison are members of the community. Staff go in and out of prison every day, sometimes multiple times a day. They live where you live; they eat where you eat; they shop where you shop. Keeping people in prison, where prevention and treatment are impossible, incubates the virus in prison, creating, essentially, a reservoir of illness to ravage the surrounding community.

Can’t we use solitary confinement to isolate sick people? No. Medical isolation and solitary confinement are two completely different things, as Cloud et al. explain in this article. Threatening people with solitary or death row celling terrifies them and disincentivizes people from reporting their symptoms and from getting tested. It is counterproductive and cruel.

But didn’t we already decide to release some people? So far, Gov. Newsom has only released 3,500 people, and is planning on 3,500 more. It is a mere drop in the bucket. We need to release tens of thousands of people to see improvement in the contagion. Remember that, following the 2011 Realignment, we released 40,000 people, are still wrestling with quality of healthcare, and that was without a pandemic going on.

Didn’t the Governor say that the prisoners don’t have anywhere to go? The Governor’s approach to this–to examine cases one by one for “worthiness” or “eligibility”–might have been a good fit three months ago. Now, we need to triage because we are facing a disaster on an enormous scale. Many people do have loving family members and friends who are happy to welcome them back to the community. Volunteers and advocates are at the ready to help with housing solutions.

If we release people, shouldn’t we prioritize nonviolent drug offenders over violent criminals? The distinction between so-called “nonviolent” and “violent” offenders doesn’t mean anything in terms of the risk they pose to the community. A quarter of the California prison population are people aged 50 and older. These people do not pose a risk to public safety, regardless of the crime they committed decades ago. At this point, “prioritizing” is no longer a luxury we have. We must let people out in large numbers to contain the virus and prevent the prison from turning into a mass grave.

If we release criminals into the streets, won’t that endanger public safety? No. We did large-scale releases before, in 2011 and in 2014, and crime rates, particularly violent crimes, did not go up. If we see an uptick in crime in the following months, it will likely be the natural outcome of the relaxed pandemic prevention restrictions, and will not reflect people released from prison. When you see newspaper articles

Aren’t people on death row going to die anyway? No. California has a moratorium on the death penalty. And before the moratorium (and even now, because the death penalty is still in the book), we have litigated for decades, to the tune of billions of dollars, how to appropriately and constitutionally execute people. We were even careful, absurdity of absurdities, to examine whether people were healthy enough to be killed by the state. We have not made this effort and spent this money so that people could die via COVID-19. Also, keep in mind that a proportion of these people are innocent of the crimes they were sentenced to death for.

We have limited resources, and I’d rather spend them on deserving people than on people who committed violent crime. It is true that we have limited resources, and because of that, they must be spent where they can help us prevent contagion, illness, and death. COVID-19 is not a zero-sum game; it’s not like there’s an allotted number of sicknesses and you get to decide who deserves or does not deserve to get sick. Prisons are not separate from the community; they are part of the community. Allowing the contagion to ravage prisons incubates the disease within the prisons and poses a risk to all of us. If people in prison get sick, people outside of prison get sick, including you and your loved ones. It is an urgent priority to spend the resources where they can prevent illness and death for all of us.

I don’t care about people in prison. You do the crime, you do the time. The people serving prison sentences in California were sentenced under the California Penal Code. The Penal Code does not sentence people to neglect, abuse, contagion, illness, and death. Moreover, many of the people serving time in prison, and even on death row, are factually innocent. But more profoundly, ask yourself what role your lack of compassion for fellow human beings is playing in your life. A Cherokee story tells of a wise grandfather and his grandson. The grandfather says, “Son, within each of us there is a battle between two wolves. One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.” The grandson asks, “Which wolf wins?” The wise grandfather replies, “the one you feed.”

CA Prisons as COVID-19 Incubators: Data Analysis

Building on the work we did in the last couple of weeks based on the CDCR COVID-19 tool, my partner Chad Goerzen spent a few days and nights synthesizing the numbers from the tool with the numbers for the surrounding counties from the L.A. Times tool. We think these plots tell stories about the interplay between prison and community infections, but the stories are incomplete because testing (and retesting) is so lacking, so take them with a grain of salt.

Up on top you see our plots for Lassen county prisons and for Lassen county population. Please keep in mind that the L.A. Times ticker does not include prison populations (though it does include residential homes, as per their data page, and we don’t know whether it includes county jails.) As you’ll see, the Lassen plot confirms that the prison and outside community outbreaks happened in tandem, and that we cannot rule out a causal story that explains the spike in Lassen County as an outcome of the botched transfer from Quentin to Lassen. The spike makes more sense if you notice that our Y axis is exponential, not linear.

The Marin county plot tells a very similar story. Notice that the outbreak in Quentin slightly preceded the sharp spike in county cases, confirming the theory floated in the Chron a few days ago that attributes the Bay Area spikes in great part to the Quentin outbreak.

In other counties, it’s more plausible that the prison outbreaks occur either as a consequence of a community contact or some CDCR snafu, against a backdrop of a county that sees exponential increase in new cases (seen in this graph as linear). A classic exam is Kern County, which we looked at a few days ago. Kern is a relatively open county with low levels of shelter-in-place compliance, and it’s not surprising we’re seeing contagion in all three prisons, which is more consistent with a story of surrounding county chaos than a particular transfer to a particular prison.

Seeing a similar pattern in Kings county. You can see a discrete outbreak in the local prison, against a backdrop of rising cases in the neighboring county. We see the county spikes closely following prison spikes (or vice versa; we’re not sure whether the 6-day testing lag in prisons is the same in the counties), but it’s hard to tell a causal story.

Same thing in San Luis Obispo. We’re seeing the outbreak at CMC against the backdrop of community infections, and it could be attributed to a community contact or to CDCR mismanagement:

At Imperial county, we see parallel outbreaks in prison and county, both of which follow the same pattern over time.

Same deal (with worse numbers) in San Bernardino, where the virus continues unabated in both county and prison:

At L.A. County, which has the worst numbers in the state, there was early on a serious outbreak at the local prison, which has now abated, but their jail is facing some serious problems.

Now take a look at Riverside county, where outbreaks at local prisons are staggered (and all in different stages of abatement.) The county numbers continue to grow–started rising exponentially in mid-May after rising at the same rate since late March — and it’s hard to tell a story about community contacts.

Given the variety of patterns and the low quality of the data, it’s hard to tell a consistent story about this, except the Marin and Lassen stories, which are the most obvious. The only takeaway, which I think is not an unimportant one, is the two-way permeability of prison and county populations. This should provide a rather solid answer to whoever in your life is telling you “but I don’t care about ‘those people'” when you sound the alarm about prison outbreaks.

UCSF Town Hall Report on Quentin COVID-19 Crisis from Amend

My UCSF colleagues Brie Williams and David Sears, among others, are at the helm of Amend, an organization seeking to transform the toxic correctional culture inside U.S. prisons and jails to reduce its debilitating health effects. They partner with correctional institutions to provide a multi-year immersive program drawing on public health-oriented correctional practices from Norway and elsewhere to inspire changes in correctional cultures and create environments that can improve the health of people living and working in American correctional facilities.

Recently, Drs. Williams and Sears gave a talk at the UCSF Town Hall. You can hear and see their findings here (from minute 19:00 to 34:00.) The team visited San Quentin on June 13 and were horrified by what they found:

The AMEND team made a series of recommendations. I recommend reading their entire report, which details possible isolation sections within the prison, as well as the importance of creating a true sense of partnership with the prison population instead of frightening them even more.

Among the AMEND recommendations was the urgent need to prioritize tests coming from San Quentin, which now take an astounding 5-6 days to come back positive or negative. They also noticed a disturbing neglect in staffing shifts, where staff was not “cohorted” with the same people, but mixed around to mill with new people every day. This was the situation when they visited:

Now, of course, things are more dire; we already have five confirmed deaths. But, and this is important, the picture we are getting is partial and misleading, because testing is so lacking and inconsistent. This gives you a comparison of cumulative testing and the testing positive rate (TPR). You’ll notice that the testing has slowed down, and there’s very little in the way of repeat testing.

If anyone reading this is in a position to help AMEND, either by offering your medical skills or in another way, here’s the contact information:

What Can We Learn from Prisons where COVID-19 Has Abated?

We got more much-needed media attention yesterday to the crisis at San Quentin and elsewhere; here’s my interview at KALW, and here’s a fantastic episode of Fifth and Mission. Also, the Quentin outbreak is now considered one of the “three big reasons” for the outbreak in the Bay Area–as per the graphs in my post a few days ago.

Let’s take a moment to look at two other prisons this morning: Avenal and Chuckawalla. Both prisons belong to the first group in my prison typology from a few days ago: places where there was serious outbreak that seems now to be petering out. The Avenal data is in the image above; the Chuckawalla data is in the image below.

The two prisons have numerous features in common. First, they are both overcrowded below, but near, the limit set in Plata. Avenal has 4,158 prisoners in a facility built for 2,920, housed at 124.4% of design capacity, and Chuckawalla has 2261 people in a facility built to house 1738, at 130.1% of design capacity. The course of the pandemic in both prisons has been remarkably similar: an alarming rise in cases, to the tune of hundreds of cases, which then gradually slowed down. In both prisons, 99% of the population has been tested, so the numbers tell a fairly complete story. A few people died of the virus (three at Avenal, two at Chuckawalla.) A few people were released (30 at Avenal, 17 at Chuckawalla.) The vast majority of cases (871 at Avenal, 710 at Chuckawalla) resolved with the person still in custody. Overall, about 1,000 people in each prison tested positive, and the contagion seems to be abating.

Even though I’m not an epidemiologist, it seems to me that studying what happened at Avenal and Chuckawalla has immense epidemiological importance. The most important question is: How did the contagion abate? This is where I enter the realm of speculation. One possibility might be that, at some point, even without prison intervention, the virus simply reaches saturation, the population develops herd immunity, and infection rate gradually slows down. Another possibility might be that the populations at these prisons are younger and healthier, and they recover more quickly. We know that a quarter of California prisoners are aged 50 and up, but they might not be evenly distributed throughout all facilities; San Quentin, for example, has a higher concentration of older prisoners. Yet another possibility might be that the few releases they did were targeted toward key transmitters, though I doubt there’s that level of epidemiological knowledge within CDCR at this point. If the answer is mostly the former–natural abatement–then the follow-up question might be: what is the risk of a second outbreak if there’s a new botched transfer into the prison, or a staff member contracts the virus outside and brings it in? Does the herd immunity hinder a second outbreak?

The answers to these questions are important because they can shed light on other epidemiological questions we are facing. The topic de jour in my social media circles today seems to be the reopening of schools–if, when, and how. It strikes me that, given the real possibility of outbreaks in schools (albeit minimal, because kids do not seem to be carriers or transmitters to the same degree), the experience of Avenal and Chuckawalla can provide the worst-case scenario of contagion and give us a sense of what to expect–as well as how to prevent it. This is relevant to other indoor spaces in which social distancing may be a challenge: workplaces, movie theaters, etc. If epidemiologists want to provide knowledgeable advice, they might want to learn from the experience of these prisons–what can be expected when the virus runs its course and, if any interventions were used, which of them was fruitful.

Rising COVID-19 Rates in Kern County Prisons Likely Reflect County Statistics

Media attention has thankfully shifted to COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons, focusing, understandably, on the horrific crisis unfolding in San Quentin. Yesterday’s KTVU story (below) and another one at The Appeal are a step in the right direction (also, today at 5pm KALW will broadcast an interview in which I explain some dimensions of the problem.)

I think it’s important, though, to perceive what is happening not just at the individual prison level, but on a systemic level, and through the lens of organic connections between prisons and the surrounding community. Which brings us to the site of some recent rises in infections: prisons in Kern County.

A few important things to know about Kern County: Just by looking at the CDCR tracking tool, you’d think that there are four prisons there – California Correctional Institution (CCI), Kern Valley State Prison (KVSP), North Kern State Prison (NKSP), and Wasco State Prison (WSP). But there’s a fifth one, California City Correctional Facility (CAC). The story of CAC explains a lot about the dynamics of California corrections. It was originally built in 1998 on speculation by Correctional Corporation of America (CCA), now rebranded in its gentler, kinder image as CoreCivic. By contrast to CCA’s wild success nationwide, it was unable to open a private prison on California soil because our powerful prison guards’ union, the CCPOA, resisted. Think about it as a Terminator-vs.-Godzilla epic fight: as Josh Page explains in his book The Toughest Beat, the union was so powerful that it beat the private contractors. The facility lay empty until 2006, when it was used as an ICE detention center (this was part of the “portfolio investment diversification” I talk about in Cheap on Crime.) But in 2013, as part of the state’s difficulty complying with the Plata population reduction mandates, they leased CAC from CCA, and it remains a privately-owned, state-run facility–confirming the speculative strategy of CCA, encapsulated in “if you build it, they will come.” I don’t know why the CDCR tracking tool does not provide information about CAC, and if you do, please email me–if there are people incarcerated there under CDCR management, their health is as important as that of people in state-owned facilities.

Let’s talk about what we do know. California Correctional Institution (CCI) started seeing cases on June 16. There are now 109 cases (there were 110; one person was released) and they have tested 41% of their population of 3,655 prisoners. Their infection rate is, therefore 7% of their tested population, and with an overcrowding of 131.3% as of last count, this could become a more serious problem.

Kern Valley State Prison (KVSP) has no cases at all (here’s hoping that, barring staff carriers or more botched transfers, it will stay that way), but North Kern State Prison (NKSP) has a few. They had one isolated case in late March, which resolved itself in April, and on June 3 they had one case. They currently have five. They have tested 18% of their population, so there are probably more, and they are at 107.3% capacity.

The situation at Wasco State Prison (WSC) seems more recent. They currently have 24 cases; the first five were diagnosed June 1st. Again, they have only tested 13.5% of their population, so it’s hard to say how things might evolve. They are at 109.7% capacity.

I’ve looked at the corresponding numbers in Kern County, and there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding spike. In fact, contagion Kern County is an ongoing disaster regardless of what happens at the prisons–their infection rates has been rising, unabated, since March. You can see the overall county picture in yellow in the graph below; the county numbers are dwarfing the prison numbers, even though the latter, in themselves, seem significant.

As I’ve explained before, it is impossible to tell airtight causal stories based on these graphs without careful contact tracing. Nonetheless, it seems like what is happening in prisons there is a consequence of excessive reopening countywide: their restaurants and bars are open for indoor dining, as are their gyms, salons, and tribal casinos, to name just a few. The L.A. Times page for Kern County offers another dimension to the story: a tragic focal point of infections there is their nursing homes which, like prisons, are vulnerable to contagion once the virus is introduced from outside. It seems more probable, then, that infection in Kern County prisons is attributable to staff who live, shop, dine, or gamble in the county. The imperative seems to be to avoid transferring anyone into Kern Valley and to release everyone over 50 or otherwise immunocompromised/vulnerable.

More Known Unknowns: Where’s COVID-19 Data on County Jails?

Today we learned that there are outbreaks at jails in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, and these have been tied to surges in the community. There is no sign of a COVID stats page on either county’s Sheriff’s Department’s webpage. Why not?

Agnotology, a term coined by Robert Proctor and Iain Boal, is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. In this era of post-truth, studying agnotology, in such areas as climate change and vaccines, can be valuable and instructive.

In criminal justice, we spend a lot of time focusing on the persistence of myths and disinformation, such as myths about racial violence and sex crimes. But our agnotology pays attention, as it well should, not only to misinformation, but also to glaring lacks of information. For example, Franklin Zimring spends a big chunk of his book When Police Kill discussing the huge gaps in data collection about incidents in which police officers kill citizens, and explaining how his analysis required relying on journalistic projects, rather than on official FBI statistics. Similarly, in American Roulette, Sarah Beth Kaufman takes the time and space to discuss the sociological meaning of a lack of any centralized database containing information about capital trials.

Which brings me to today’s topic: COVID-19 in jails. The UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project, spearheaded by my colleague Sharon Dolovich, is doing an important service to all of us by collecting longitudinal data on the development of contagion, hospitalization, deaths, recoveries, transfers, testing, etc., for correctional institutions nationwide. If you look at their database, you’ll see impressive coverage of state prisons. County jail coverage, however, is a different story. Yesterday on Twitter we were exchanging notes on the frustrations of trying to find data on COVID-19 spread in jails:

These folks do such a terrific job, and if even they can’t find what we’re looking for, then getting this data is going to be a painstaking job of making requests county-by-county. A few counties, such as Orange and Los Angeles, publicly provide the statistics on their websites. Others, such as San Francisco, send emails to lawyers, etc., when someone in jail tests positive (here are the press releases.) It’s easy enough to find webpages devoted to visiting and testing policies, but the statistics are elusive.

I’m a social scientist, and so lack of information in itself strikes me as an important social fact. When my colleague Margo Schlanger wrote this brilliant piece about the Plata litigation, she expressed concern that shifting control over prison healthcare from one centralized actor, the state, to the counties, would create a “hydra problem”: 59 new, separate sources of healthcare problems. At the time, the thinking was that the state was doing so poorly that surely the counties would be a better solution. In some ways, they were indeed better–that is, as Jeffrey Lin explains, some counties were. In some places, the judges made full use of the option of community supervisions, whereas in others, all the resources and energy went into building bigger jails.

We see the problem of diversification in the way we are getting information. As you saw in my previous posts, CDCR has an excellent and informative tracking tool; one only wishes their actual containment and healthcare management rose to the level of their pandemic documentation. By contrast, in the counties, you’re not dealing with one master, but with fifty-nine. Almost no one is obligated to report, and those who do, do not do it in a uniform manner that would enable us to compare counties effectively.

This is a huge problem for several reasons. The fragmentation of data makes it difficult–perhaps impossible–to track down interactions between correctional outbreaks and spikes in the surrounding counties. For example, we don’t know nearly enough about COVID-19-related releases from jails, nor do we know how to assess the contagion behind bars without clear, accessible information about population, design capacity, and testing protocols. For that reason, it’s impossible to draw connections that are hugely important–especially because jail staff is likely to be coming in and out of the facility into the surrounding county. Moreover, transfers between prisons and jails, which are important points of interface between systems and with the community, remain invisible. In an ideal world, there would be an excellent data interface between the CDCR tool and the county tools, and the latter would all look the same and provide the information that CDCR is doling out (as well they should.) But this is not that world, and perhaps we’ve gotten so used to administrative fragmentation that many don’t see what a hindrance it is.

Jails are not the only place where fragmentation is a problem. A decade ago, Jeremy Seymour, Richard Leo and I wrote a piece called Moving Targets, in which we explained that the fragmentation of police departments in the U.S. allows for all kinds of negligence and shenanigans in which one municipal police department can blame its mishaps on another. The current interest in policing has floated another nefarious aspect of this: cops who beat people up and lie in court might get fired by Department A, but might be immediately rehired by Department B, given that there are no state or federal licensing requirement. “This person beats people up and lies in court in a different municipality” does not seem to be a hindrance to getting rehired; in fact, the glorified disbanding of police departments has led to the county sheriff’s department taking over and rehiring all the cops that the disbanded department fired in the same geographical area. The absurdity goes beyond just cops–incompetent coroners get fired and rehired by other agencies all the time.

What we urgently need is for counties to liaise with whoever is doing the work for CDCR, get the same platform, collect the same information, link their databases, and get to work. This would be incredibly helpful to the good folks doing the work at the UCLA data collection project, but to epidemiologists and to all of us. Until that happens, a word of advice to other folks doing work on this: please, keep in mind this glaring gap in knowledge when you theorize about what is going on behind bars.

From the CDCR Tracking Tool: New Outbreaks to Watch and New Questions to Ask

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense Briefing, February 12, 2002

The two previous posts about San Quentin and Susanville finally moved the needle on public attention. After swearing off Twitter, I finally posted some links there, and thankfully (after months of predicting this would happen!), some people with the ability to investigate are biting. This is crucially important, because current trends require more consideration, particularly in prisons of which we have heard very little so far.

Looking at the “active cases in custody” curve in prisons only gets us so far, because, as the testing curve shows, oftentimes we only find out the peak of an outbreak after (or because) testing has been ramped up. It’s also difficult to tell a causal or even temporal story because we know so little about prison policy. The two previous posts benefitted from the information we had about the two botched transfers: from Chino to Quentin and from Quentin to Susanville. Why and how different institutions peak at different times could be a corollary of staff transfers, or could be completely coincidental (i.e., a staff member infected out in the community and bringing the disease to incubate in the prison.)

Keeping these considerable limitations in mind, as of yesterday, June 27, CA prisons fall into five categories:

Outbreak came and gone. Examples: Avenal, Chuckawalla, LA County, California Institution for Women, California Men’s Colony. Peaked weeks ago, by now all or most cases are resolved. These prisons have a high percentage of tested inmates and seem to have gone through the worst of it, with a few or zero new cases.

Outbreak ongoing and unabated. Examples: Corcoran, California Rehabilitation Center, Ironwood. In these places, there’s a considerable number of new cases, but also a bulk of old cases. Testing is underway, and so, these could be “outbreak came and gone” cases in disguise.

Recent outbreak. Examples: San Quentin, California Correctional Center, Wasco. In some of these cases, notably San Quentin and CCC, we know of specific events–botched transfers–that might have caused the outbreak.

Handful of cases. Examples: Centinela, North Kern, CA State Prison Sacramento, Salinas Valley, High Desert, It is unclear what this means, because these prisons typically have tested a small number of prisoners. There could be a successful isolation of a handful of people or a recent outbreak as-of-yet undetected because of a lack of testing.

No cases. Examples: Valley State Prison, R.J. Donovan, Pleasant Valley State Prison, Mule Creek State Prison, Kern Valley State Prison, Deuel Vocational Institution, Correctional Training Facility, CA Medical Facility (Vacaville), California Health Care Facility.

There are, likely, a lot of “unknown unknowns” here, which worries me. There are also a few “known knowns”, such as the situation at San Quentin and at Susanville. The only thing I can add to that, at the moment, are some “known unknowns” to think about. Here are some places to watch out for and some questions to ask in the coming days:

  1. For the places where the outbreak seems abated, what’s happened? Is there ongoing retesting after transfers from places where the virus might still be alive? What is going on in the neighboring communities, where the staff members live?
  2. For the places where the outbreak has been ongoing for a long time, what is going on? Are these places more overcrowded than places that have things more under control?
  3. For how many of the places in the third category, in addition to the “known knowns” I covered because I had the information, do we have a plausible theory of infection? Do we know, for example, of other population transfers beyond the one from CIM to Quentin and from Quentin to CCC? Have staff been transferred there? What was going on in the surrounding communities before the outbreaks?
  4. At this point, per the tracking tool, only 13 prisons (mostly from the first category) have tested more than a quarter of their prisoners. What is going on? Are people refusing to get tested? Is there a shortage of tests?
  5. Which of the places in the fourth category are merely isolated cases, and which are huge outbreaks a-la-Quentin waiting to happen? This is unanswerable without more testing, so expect things to be changing soon. I am especially disheartened to see the first case in Pelican Bay crop up on the tool today.
  6. Are there any transfers, etc., planned to the institutions that so far have no cases?

I am particularly worried about Category Four. Any of these could develop, in the next few days, into a horror show, or resolve itself with a relatively few number of cases, and a lot of this depends on administrative decisions that we are unlikely to learn about without reliable information from within. If you have such information, because you or a loved ones are behind bars as a prisoners or a staff member, please write and let me know immediately.

COVID-19 Ravages Susanville Prisons, Spikes in Lassen County a Few Days Later

Yesterday’s horror show–the botched Chino transfer, a dramatic (who knows how dramatic with 35% testing?) rise in infections in San Quentin, subsequent (who knows if consequent?) spikes in the surrounding population–seems to be playing out in Lassen County. As of a few days ago, the two state prisons in Susanville–California Correctional Center (CCC) and High Desert State Prison (HDSP)–have started seeing new cases, arguably as a consequence of a botched transfer from–you guessed it! COVID-19-ravaged San Quentin. The Lassen County Times reports:

The outbreak at CCC came after CDCR transferred four inmates from San Quentin State Prison in a effort to reduce the inmate population there as it struggled with a COVID-19 outbreak that some health experts said could explode to threaten the entire Bay Area. Officials said the inmates had previously tested negative for the virus sometime before their transfer, and they were not tested or quarantined immediately upon their arrival at CCC.

Lassen County Times, June 26, 2020

Again, we’ve checked the numbers. As of the Wednesday weekly count, CCC holds 3,828 in a facility designed to hold 3,883, which puts it as 98.6% capacity. The prison has tested 58.1% of its population so far, finding 187 new cases, which are eight percent out of its tested population of 2284 prisoners. And don’t be fooled by the relative calm at HDSP. So far, only one prisoner has tested positive yet, but HDSP has tested only 15.41% of its population so far, and the potential for contagion there is frightening, given that they have 3,580 prisoners in a space designed to hold 2,324 prisoners–overcrowded to the tune of 154% (and yes, for those still clinging to the arbitrary numbers from ten years ago, if Plata compliance were applied to individual prisons, this would be noncompliant.) HDSP 3580 2324 154% capacity. It has tested only 15.41% of its population so far.

Matters with staff, as per the CDCR daily report, are also grim. One staff member has tested positive at CCC and 5 at HDSP, 3 of which have been returned to work. This is crucial, because Lassen prison staff are more likely to reside in Lassen than San Quentin staff to reside in Marin (after all, that was the point of making Susanville into Prison Town, U.S.A.)

We’ve looked up the Lassen numbers on the L.A. Times database (we extracted it from this github tool.) Graph 1 shows the total number of cases in Lassen County and at the two prisons. As you can see, the spike in Lassen County happens after the spike at CCC, though it is hard to provide an airtight causal story because testing rates at the prison and the county differ.

Data for CCC and HDSP from CDCR tool. Data for Lassen County from L.A. Times tool.
Data synthesis and charting Hadar Aviram and Chad Goerzen.

The second graph shows new cases, rather than cumulative cases. It’s easier here to see the timeline. You’ll also note the spike in cases at CCC, whose shape likely reflects the spike in testing (you can see the testing spike on the CDCR tool.)

Data for CCC and HDSP from CDCR tool. Data for Lassen County from L.A. Times tool.
Data synthesis and charting Hadar Aviram and Chad Goerzen.

Again, I want to emphasize that, without contact tracing, telling an airtight causal story here is impossible, but the numbers tell a plausible story. This seems to have finally driven home the point that prisoners are actual people who live in the county, whether or not they are being “counted” as such. Realizing that Lassen County people’s health depends on what goes on at CCC, Brian and Megan Dahle, respectively a Senator and an Assembly Member for Lassen County’s First District, Megan Dahle, who is running for State Assembly, wrote a letter to CDCR Secretary Ralph Diaz, asking him “to provide answers on questionable protocols that have led to a surge of inmate #COVID19 cases in Lassen County.” Waking up to this reality has finally made the county and the prison work together, even though there’s still a bunch of posturing about “jurisdiction”:

While CDCR’s attorneys allege in a June 5 statement the counties lack jurisdiction over the prisons, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the past two days the Lassen County Public Health Department and our local prisons worked together to test more than 2,000 inmates and approximately 180 employees for the virus according to a Friday, June 26 statement from the Lassen COVID-19 Incident command.

In a previous statement on June 5, the general counsel for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation issued this statement in regards to a local health officer’s orders in Kings County: “While local health officers are able to issue orders to other governmental entities to control the spread of the communicable disease, this is limited to entities within the local health officer’s jurisdiction. The state is not an entity under local health officers’ jurisdictions, and thus local health officer orders are not valid against the state. As a state agency CDCR and its institutions will follow the direction for CDPH.”

Lassen County Times, June 26, 2020

I said this in yesterday’s post and, unfortunately, I have to say it again: Nothing here was unforeseeable. My colleagues and I repeatedly warned, months ago, that being timid about releases, because the uninformed public would grumble about “violent inmates”, was tantamount to incubating the virus to the detriment of the general population. Without decisive action from Gov. Newsom, we won’t be able to make a dent in the cumulative disaster that is unfolding. Yesterday I got a missive from the Governor’s office, asking all Californians to “do their part” by wearing masks and keeping social distancing. Gov. Newsom, please do YOUR part. You have many tools at your disposal to alleviate prison overcrowding. This is already a human rights disaster, but immediate releases of everyone over 50 or otherwise at risk can make the mass graveyard nightmare less threatening. It had to happen weeks ago, but some lives might still be saved if you act quickly.