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Pandemic's Effects On Ohio Prisons And Jails Will Linger After COVID-19

Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections Director Annette Chambers-Smith appears during an April 30, 2020 press conference on COVID-19 in Ohio's prisons. [Office of Gov. Mike DeWine]

Rufus Bowman is serving a nine-year sentence at Toledo Correctional Institution. He started getting sick one day in July.

His wife, Chazidy, recalls listening to him coughing and wheezing over the phone.

“He was taking short breaths after every word he was trying to talk to me. I knew what it was because I myself had COVID and was hospitalized for COVID,” Chazidy Bowman said.

Routine checks showed her husband had an elevated temperature. He also reported chills and loss of smell and taste.

Bowman, who also has asthma, spent seven days in the jail’s general population before being quarantined. And, according to Chazidy Bowman, he was moved only after sharing his symptoms with a doctor there to do a checkup for his asthma.

“And the way he explained it, the doctor pushed back his chair, told him to pull up his mask, the doctor pulled up his mask and immediately left the room,” Chazidy Bowman said.

Her husband went into isolation for two weeks and has since recovered from COVID-19.

“COVID inside of prisons is a public health crisis because as long as there is COVID in the prisons there is going to be COVID in the community,” Chazidy Bowman said.

Since its early stages, the virus prompted the closure of communal spaces like sports arenas, schools, theaters and courthouses. But, for places like jails and prisons that couldn’t close, the onset of the coronavirus became a scramble to deal with a deadly threat.

Early in the pandemic, Ohio’s prison director, Annette Chambers-Smith, took several measures to control the virus, including setting up a system for monitoring people’s health inside prisons and quarantining the sick. Rules prohibiting hand sanitizer were loosened.

Chambers-Smith said in a press conference last April that the difficult early search for personal protective equipment (PPE) led them to alternative solutions.

“We realized we weren’t going to be able to buy it in any sort of quick fashion so we decided that we were going to start making it,” Chambers-Smith said.

The corrections department, using prisoner labor, made face shields and masks for staff and inmates.

The system still struggled with intense early outbreaks at certain prisons. Marion Correctional Institution recorded the first positive test among prison staff statewide. In April, mass testing there found staggeringly high rates of infections – around 80 percent. To date, 12 inmates have died of COVID-19 at that one prison and 1,800 have tested positive and recovered.

Around the same time, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine agreed to allow the early release of some prisoners who were near the end of their sentences and also in high-risk coronavirus categories. A couple hundred were set free.

“The response in Ohio’s prison system was nowhere near sufficient,” said Sabrina Harris, a policy strategist with the ACLU of Ohio.

According to Harris, the prison system primarily failed by not releasing more prisoners earlier in the pandemic, either permanently or to temporary home confinement. According to a report from the ACLU of Ohio, the state’s 28 prisons were able to lower their populations by about 4,000 people from March to November of last year.

But Ohio’s prisons remain over capacity.

“As we’re having ongoing conversations – mass incarceration is a public health crisis in and of itself,” Harris said. “It was before COVID-19. It certainly was during the pandemic.”

Some county jails took more effective steps to reduce their populations and control any outbreaks of the virus, Harris added. One example is Cuyahoga County, where the jail had in recent years seen a population of around 2,000 but by the summer of 2020, brought its inmate count down to about 900.

Cuyahoga County Jail Administrator Ronda Gibson said officials spent the weekend right after COVID-19 appeared in Ohio searching for PPE. They ordered supplies on Amazon, such as colored wrist bands to indicate who had passed health screenings.

“We were just ordering from any place that we could put an order in, hoping to get something,” Gibson said.

Judges and attorneys in Cuyahoga County started speeding up bond hearings, including on the weekends, to move people out of jail. The sheriff restricted who could be brought to jail after an arrest. The fast reduction in population opened up space for quarantining sick prisoners and new arrivals.

Some of the practices adopted then will remain after the pandemic is over, Gibson said.

“The sanitation practices I’m sure will continue. The hand washing stations we purchased in order to promote frequent hand washing – those will remain,” she said.

What’s less clear is whether the population will remain nearly as low.

Measures like restricting transports from suburban police departments or limiting the probation violations that result in arrest don’t look likely to remain after the pandemic.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended in February that prison staff and incarcerated people be vaccinated at the same time “because of their shared increased risk of disease.”

But Ohio has not prioritized its prison or jail populations in its COVID-19 vaccination rollout.

DeWine has explained that inmates who are eligible for vaccination because of their age or health can get it, but they won’t receive priority by virtue of their confinement. Vaccinating staff should help mitigate their risk, he said.

Matthew Richmond is a reporter/producer focused on criminal justice issues at Ideastream Public Media.