‘They are terrified.’ A month into COVID-19 pandemic, state inmates plead for help.
Kentucky has barely reduced its state inmate population more than a month after the deadly novel coronavirus pandemic swept into the region, leaving 44 local jails still overcrowded and state prisons nearly as full as they were on March 2.
In the Larue County Detention Center, 49-year-old Scott Page is serving a one-year sentence for possession of meth and marijuana. His wife, Nelda Lowery, reluctantly turned him in to police, hoping he would get the treatment he needed for a drug addiction that began with a collapsed lung and pain pills.
Now Lowery wonders if she inadvertently condemned Page to death by getting him locked up at the worst possible time. If the confined populations of nursing homes can see a lethal spike in coronavirus infections, so can jails and prisons, she said Tuesday.
“He’s a sitting duck in here. If the virus hits, as bad as his lung is, he wouldn’t stand a chance,” she said Tuesday.
“They’re anxious. They’re scared,” she said of the men in the jail with her husband. “The cell he was in, it’s a 10-man cell, and they had 21 guys in there without any soap or shampoo or hand sanitizer. Right now they’re even out of hot water. How are they supposed to stay clean? And it’s not like they can keep six feet away from each other.”
Prodded by public defenders and the ACLU of Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear has signed executive orders releasing two groups of state inmates incarcerated in prisons and jails in an effort to reduce the facilities’ populations during the coronavirus outbreak.
The first group included 186 inmates determined to be more susceptible to contracting the virus because of their advanced age or existing health problems. The second group, who are supposed to be freed this week, includes 697 inmates convicted of nonviolent and nonsexual crimes who are within six months of their originally scheduled release.
The inmates are screened for symptoms of COVID-19, such as a cough and fever, before they can be released. They also must register a home address with the Kentucky Department of Corrections and agree to go into quarantine there for 14 days.
However, the Beshear administration’s efforts have not made much difference so far.
Working on their own, court officials collaborated over the last month to shrink the local inmate population in Kentucky’s jails by 35 percent, dropping it to 7,528 as of last Thursday. Most of those local inmates were incarcerated defendants sent home to await trial.
But the number of state inmates serving felony time in prisons and jails has fallen by only 4 percent, to 22,041.
“I haven’t noticed a great effort on the part of anybody to get these people out of jail,” said Doug Moore, directing attorney of the Hopkinsville trial office of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy, which provides public defenders for the poor.
As of April 2, the Christian County Detention Center — near Moore’s office — remained overcrowded, with 606 inmates stuffed into a 558-bed jail. Nearly 200 of those were Class D felons serving their time at the jail. In Kentucky, lower-level state inmates are housed in local jails because there haven’t been enough prison beds to hold the fast-growing inmate population for at least 40 years.
Behind bars, the inmates are aware of the potentially lethal health risks they face with every breath, said Jessica Buck, who manages the DPA office in Danville. Kentucky’s jails and prisons have canceled family visits and inmate programs that brought outsiders into the facilities, but employees come and go with every shift, and new inmates continually arrive.
“They are terrified,” Buck said Tuesday. “They keep calling me and begging to get out. Many of these are people serving sentences for some relatively low-level offenses, and they don’t want to die in there because they happened to be in jail when the coronavirus got in. There is nobody in the Boyle County Detention Center who deserves the death penalty.”
Buck said she and her staff attorneys managed to get more than 100 local inmates released in Boyle, Mercer and Lincoln counties, either through pre-trial bond reductions or plea agreements. But most of the state inmates aren’t budging, she said.
“We appreciate that the governor has released some people,” Buck said. “I have had clients who personally benefited. But to be honest, it’s not been enough. It is simply not enough. There are people in there who could safely be released, who would not be a threat to the community if they came out now instead of six or eight months from now. They are the ones facing the threat, in there.”
So far, state and local corrections officials have reported only a handful of positive tests for the coronavirus behind bars, including nine inmates and five employees at the Green River Correctional Complex in Central City.
The Corrections Department did not respond to a request Tuesday for information on how often and for what reasons inmates and staff are tested for the coronavirus.
But Buck said it’s implausible that the virus has not been passing into Kentucky’s jails and prisons, regardless of whether officials are detecting it.
“Think about how rampant Hepatitis A is in the jails. Flu is rampant in the jails. The conditions are ideal. There is no way a highly infectious virus like this one is not spreading through the county jails and the state prisons,” Buck said.
“The only way you could prevent it would be to test everyone in there and then rapid-test everyone as they came and went, to keep the virus from entering, but we obviously don’t have the tests to do that,” she added.
The Corrections Departments should give public updates on the health of inmates in its care, said Aaron Tucek, legal fellow for the ACLU of Kentucky. State officials should announce the number of coronavirus tests given at each jail and prison, how many positive results came back and how many related deaths there have been, if any, Tucek said.
“We need greater transparency so that we can know what’s going on,” Tucek said. “So far, that hasn’t been happening. It’s very frustrating given that lives are at stake.”
This story was originally published April 14, 2020 at 4:46 PM.
