Federal judge: San Quentin COVID-19 outbreak result of ‘significant failure’

Advertisement

Close

A federal judge wiped away tears Friday as he addressed an increasingly disastrous coronavirus outbreak at San Quentin prison, calling the recent transfer of infected prisoners to the facility a “significant failure of policy and planning.”

Advertisement

Close

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of Oakland said during the hearing that prison officials could still save lives if they act fast in transferring medically vulnerable prisoners to a brand-new facility, use a furlough-like system of releases or allow some inmates to serve their sentences at home under house arrest.

“We know what’s going to happen. We know,” Tigar said, his voice cracking. “So, you have the chance to avoid some unnecessary infection and mortality at San Quentin. Probably.”

The hearing, which was live-streamed, occurred as coronavirus infections at the Marin County facility began to spread at a breakneck rate, rendering useless any efforts to contain the cases to a single unit.

San Quentin had no coronavirus cases among its prisoners until an ill-fated transfer from Chino late last month. By Sunday morning, that figure exploded to 193. On Monday evening, it reached 337 prisoners — about one in every 10 housed in the facility — as well as more than 30 prison staffers.

Tigar stopped short of ordering the state to release or relocate prisoners, saying he wasn’t sure he had the power to do so.

“But I’m just saying, I think that needs to happen,” he said.

A Chronicle investigation revealed that the nearly 200 men transferred from Chino to San Quentin and Corcoran state prisons in late May were not tested for the coronavirus for up to a month before they were bused by the dozens. There were 121 transferred to San Quentin and 66 to Corcoran.

Corcoran has experienced a similar outbreak. After recording no cases prior to the transfer, the facility had 138 as of Monday evening.

Corrections officers and medical staff at San Quentin said they were blindsided by the transfer, which was forced on them by state officials in Sacramento.

San Quentin employees initially were told that the Chino prisoners had tested negative. Staff only discovered the truth only after it was too late and the prisoners already had arrived — some of them sick with COVID-19 symptoms.

A handful of the Chino prisoners tested positive immediately upon reaching San Quentin.

Despite assurances by state officials that the Chino men were not exposed to the general population, interviews with San Quentin employees and prisoners found this was not the case. The prisoners who recently arrived on buses were placed in the upper tiers of a unit called “Badger,” and San Quentin prisoners were housed in the lower tiers.

Badger’s cell doors are made of bars, not solid materials, allowing vapor and droplets to travel from the upper tiers to the lower levels.

The virus quickly spread from Badger to other housing units, including Donner, which holds nearly 250 incarcerated men; East Block, home to 500 prisoners who have been sentenced to death; and North Block, with 800 closely packed residents.

“Unfortunately, what we’re seeing now is the result of the setting itself,” said Matt Willis, the Marin County public health officer. “When you have so many individuals in such close quarters with shared space, it’s almost impossible to control spread, once the virus really has a foothold.”

He said that though the county has given some public health advice to the corrections department, the state made it clear “right off the bat” that they were in charge of pandemic planning for San Quentin.

“Government moves slowly, and viruses move rapidly,” Willis said.

“I just don’t know what their plan is,” said Adnan Khan, a justice-reform activist who was formerly incarcerated in San Quentin’s North Block. “They haven’t had a plan since the beginning.”

In a federal court filing Thursday, state attorneys representing Gov. Gavin Newsom blamed the outbreak on the prison system’s provider of medical care, California Correctional Health Care Services, or CCHCS, which reports to the federal court instead of the state.

Newsom’s attorneys wrote that Health Care Services on May 23 gave prison leaders a list of 691 men at the Chino prison who were especially vulnerable to COVID-19 and had tested negative for the virus. Health Care Services directed prison officials “to transfer the listed inmates” out of Chino, according to the court documents.

“CCHCS did not notify DAI (Division of Adult Institutions) that a retest would be necessary of the inmates before they were transferred, nor had CCHCS issued a general directive concerning the timing of COVID-19 tests in relation to inmate transfers,” Newsom’s attorneys wrote.

A Health Care Services spokesperson did not provide direct answers to questions about the claims in Newsom’s filing, but instead said that decisions about the transfer were made “jointly” with the Corrections Department.

Megan Cassidy and Jason Fagone are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: [email protected], [email protected] Twitter: @meganrcassidy, @jfagone