Kentucky’s overcrowded jails could be ‘Petri dishes’ for coronavirus, officials fear
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has moved to close schools, child care centers, churches, gyms, theaters, bars and restaurants — any place that people might congregate and spread the novel coronavirus.
But in roughly half of Kentucky’s 80 local jails, inmates cram together at 125 percent of capacity or greater. They breathe stale air in packed cells, flush communal toilets that seldom have lids and sleep alongside each other on dirty concrete floors.
Kentucky’s 24,138 jail inmates — 45 percent of them state prisoners serving felony time — are especially vulnerable to infectious diseases. Although Beshear has recommended a temporary end to family visits during the viral outbreak, there is a steady influx of new inmates and jail staff, increasing the chances that COVID-19 will enter the facilities from surrounding communities, and vice-versa.
Greg Belzley, an Oldham County attorney who specializes in inmate abuse lawsuits, warned Tuesday that Kentucky jails could become “gigantic Petri dishes for coronavirus.”
“Jails and prisons are filthy,” Belzley said. “Isolating infected inmates from the rest of the inmate population will be impossible. So once the virus is introduced into the institution, it will spread rapidly.”
“I have no illusions about the competence or preparedness of medical staffs in jails and prisons. When it comes to infectious disease, the Kentucky Department of Corrections has been mismanaging Hepatitis C for years,” he added. “Given the profit motive of most private jail and prison medical providers, I expect them habitually to wait too long to send people to the hospital, with catastrophic results.”
In the absence of an organized state-led effort, many court officials across Kentucky are working frantically to clear the jails of anyone they think safely can be released. Officials are lowering or waiving bonds, sending inmates home on supervised release and finding other solutions.
“Everyone seems to be doing the same thing, and that is an effort between prosecutors and the public defenders and private bar to see who we can tolerate being out of jail right now who we maybe wouldn’t accept under any other circumstances,” said Kenton Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Sanders.
Between Friday and Monday, Sanders said, about 120 inmates were released from the Kenton County jail, which had held 697. Many more releases are coming, the prosecutor said.
“With a few exceptions, anybody nonviolent who didn’t offend against a child stands a very good chance of being released,” Sanders said. “We all know that that the coronavirus getting into one of these jails would be a bad thing for everybody.”
Fewer places pose a bigger viral target than the Madison County Detention Center in Richmond. It housed 368 inmates last week, exactly twice as many bodies as it had beds. That made it the state’s third most-crowded jail, after Whitley and Letcher counties.
Distraught by the prospect of COVID-19 exploding in such a facility, local court officials are trying to shrink the population of inmates awaiting trial. Many of these defendants can’t afford their assigned bond, so they spend months behind bars as their cases slowly drag through the justice system.
Making the system even slower, Kentucky’s chief justice has ordered a one-month hold on all trials and most hearings in response to the coronavirus, to avoid having large audiences gather in courthouses.
“We are extremely mindful of the situation we now face. We have too many people in that jail,” said Madison Circuit Judge Jean Chenault Logue.
Logue said she asked the commonwealth’s attorney and chief public defender on Monday to review the jail inmate list and find candidates for release.
Not everyone will qualify, she said. Some inmates are charged with violent crimes or sex crimes, or they have a history of bond violations that indicates they cause problems when released before trial. Others seem like a reasonably safe bet, she said.
“I think the review will result in quite an improvement,” Logue said. “On top of that, I will be hearing every bond reduction motion. This is all happening somewhat suddenly for us, but we all agree we only should be jailing the inmates that really need to be housed in there.”
Ken Armstrong, Lexington’s commissioner of public safety, said he’s speaking with the Fayette County attorney’s office and Fayette District Court judges about early release for 49 local inmates held on non-violent misdemeanor charges at the Fayette County jail.
“Some of these inmates are age 60 or above and have pre-existing health conditions that may make them more susceptible to COVID-19. Others have fewer than 45 days left in their court-mandated sentences.,” Armstrong said.
Elsewhere in Central Kentucky, Chief Circuit Judge Jay Delaney presides over a judicial district that includes Harrison, Pendleton, Nicholas and Robertson counties. None of those has its own jail. Instead, they send their inmates to jails in Bourbon and Campbell counties.
Like Logue, Delaney said he knows a captive population will be vulnerable as COVID-19 spreads. So right now, he said, he is trying to not incarcerate defendants unless he thinks it absolutely necessary, and he is reviewing bonds for inmates awaiting trial to determine if they might be lowered, allowing them to go home.
“It just depends on the nature of the folks who are in there,” Delaney said. “If it’s someone who seems especially violent or if it looks like they would pose a threat to the community, then we’re going to leave them in there. Otherwise, we’re going to see what we can do.”
Bail reform briefly was a popular subject this winter at the Kentucky General Assembly, with lawmakers pledging to pass legislation that would make bonds more affordable to poor people and more consistent from judge to judge. But those efforts quickly stalled, as they have in past sessions, leaving thousands of defendants stuck in jail.
Then the virus hit.
“In some ways, we’re now conducting a big statewide experiment in bail reform,” said Sanders, the Kenton County prosecutor. “We’re going to learn a lot of lessons in June, July, August, once the courts are back up and running and we see who shows up for their hearings and who has been getting in trouble.”
Meanwhile, elected jailers are holding conference calls with the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet to prepare their facilities for the coronavirus following the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control, said Brad Boyd, Christian County jailer and president of the Kentucky Jailers Association.
All contact between inmates and outsiders has been terminated, including in-person family visits and volunteer-led programs inside the jail, Boyd said. Most jails can provide family visits through video technology, he said.
“We’re just locking down,” Boyd said. “Not even law enforcement officers can talk to them once they’re in. Like, if there are probation and parole officers who need to conduct an interview with an inmate, we’re asking them to do that through a glass partition so there is no contact.”
Also, staff and prisoners are screened at the intake area for fevers and other virus symptoms, such as a dry cough, Boyd said.
Staff who appear sick are sent home until they recover. Some jailers say they refuse to accept prisoners who appear ill, leaving it to law enforcement to find another place to take them; other jailers say they are establishing quarantine rooms where sick prisoners can be isolated and medically monitored.
The overcrowded Madison County jail doesn’t have much free space, but there are a handful of small cells used for suicide watch and isolation, said Jailer Stephen Tussey. If necessary, those could be used instead as medical isolation rooms if a prisoner arrives with possible COVID-19, Tussey said.
“We ordinarily keep them full of disciplinary cases, but this obviously takes priority,” Tussey said.
If a Kentucky jail does get a coronavirus case, it immediately should be sealed off, with no new admissions or releases, to protect the surrounding community, said Belzley, the inmate rights attorney.
On the other hand, he asked, “Should jails and prisons keep infected inmates past their release date? Where do persons arrested for violent crimes or felonies go if the local jail is in lockdown?”
Another possible source of bed space for jails during a health emergency, Boyd said, are the 13 state prisons operated by the Kentucky Department of Corrections. This week, the prisons have 415 available beds between them. Until now, the state prison system has sent thousand of its lower-level inmates to jails to be housed, but it’s possible the reverse could happen on a limited scale for a short time.
“It’s an issue for jails that don’t have any available space whatsoever if they’re going to need it,” Boyd said. “The Department of Corrections is definitely going to have to step up in for jails that are in a seriously overcrowded situation.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment.
This story was originally published March 18, 2020 at 10:50 AM.
