Thread by @weareoversight

Today, a congressional subcommittee will hold a hearing to evaluate the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ pandemic response and Covid-19 outbreaks in prisons.

Here’s what we’ve learned in the past year about the coronavirus pandemic in prisons.
americanoversight.org/one-year-of-th…

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.
themarshallproject.org/2020/12/18/1-i…

We obtained and published documents showing that the Bureau of Prisons was slow to adopt key hygienic measures in the early months of the pandemic. The records included a complaint that management refused to provide cleaning supplies to staff in March.
americanoversight.org/bureau-of-pris…

The records also contained a memo instructing facilities to find alternative medicines for incarcerated people who used hydroxychloroquine—the drug dubiously promoted by Trump as a Covid-19 treatment—to treat long-term conditions like lupus and arthritis.
nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren released findings from an investigation of the American Correctional Association. The ACA reportedly responded to the crisis by reducing its auditing of prisons, rather than shifting its oversight to address health & safety concerns.
google.com/url?q=https://…

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

NBC & 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.
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/t…

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.
prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/08/1…

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

The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released findings from a remote inspection of a federal prison in California.
oversight.gov/sites/default/…

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.

The ACLU 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.
aclu.org/press-releases…

Many of the same problems also arose in detention centers, where nearly 10,000 immigrants have tested positive for Covid-19.
ice.gov/coronavirus#de…

A House investigation of nearly two dozen ICE detention centers noted that longstanding practices like overcrowding, lack of consistent and quality medical care, and unsanitary living conditions exacerbated coronavirus spread.
oversight.house.gov/sites/democrat…

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.
propublica.org/article/ice-de…

The transfer of hundreds of immigrants to different facilities also led to outbreaks in ICE facilities in Texas, Ohio, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
nbcnews.com/politics/immig…

A Washington Post investigation of one of the largest outbreaks revealed that the real purpose of the transfer was to bypass restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel so ICE response teams could be dispatched to protests in D.C.
washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/ic…

A leaked Homeland Security draft report showed officials acknowledged that transfers of immigrants between ICE detention facilities had “contributed to outbreaks.”
buzzfeednews.com/article/hameda…

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).
axios.com/most-states-ar…

For more information about oversight of Covid-19 spread among incarcerated people, visit our Oversight Tracker or read more about our investigations.
americanoversight.org/investigation/…