Officials can’t duck COVID-19 nightmare at Butner
Prisons are designed so no one breaks out, but at the Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, the coronavirus has too easily broken in.
As of Tuesday, 60 people have tested positive at the complex, nearly five times what the federal Bureau of Prisons reported over the weekend. And it’s highly unlikely that will be the end of COVID-19’s spread within the complex about 25 miles northwest of Raleigh. Butner, which includes the federal prison system’s largest medical center, has space for 948 inmate patients and low- and medium-security prisons that can house a combined 3,767 inmates.
The crisis is being complicated by a lack of transparency. Officials at the Butner complex and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have been slow to reveal details about the virus’ spread and what is or can be done to prevent it from infecting more inmates and staff. Bureau of Prisons and Butner officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Kevin Tamez, a managing partner of The MPM Group, a New Jersey-based consulting agency that advocates for federal prisoners, told the editorial board Tuesday that the Butner outbreak is the beginning of a rampant spread in prisons. “I predict it’s going to be a nightmare in the not too distant future. That’s why (federal prison officials) are playing it close to the vest. They know it’s coming.”
Federal prison officials should have acted against well before the spike at Butner. There’s also been an outbreak at a federal prison in Oakdale, La., where at least 25 inmates and 21 workers have tested positive, according the The Wall Street Journal.
Now it appears that the federal prison system, like the Trump administration overall, didn’t prepare early enough or respond aggressively enough to the COVID-19 threat. At Oakdale, the Wall Street Journal reported that a corrections officer escorted an inmate with COVID-19 symptoms to a hospital and returned to work without being quarantined. The inmate later died from the disease.
As of Monday, eight inmates in the North Carolina prison system had tested positive for COVID-19 and prison officials shut down the acceptance of new inmates from county jails for 14 days.
As a matter of human rights, prisoners deserve to be protected from disease. But with the coronavirus such protection has been undercut by overcrowded conditions, lack of testing and rules and procedures that limit inmates’ access to showers, cleaning products and disinfectants.
The threat of a prison-wide infection is not limited to inmates. Corrections officers and other workers are also exposed and can bring the disease into the community. Butner has its own hospital, but as the disease hits other federal and state prison populations, local hospitals will be called upon to admit prisoners who not only need to be treated, but also guarded.
Prison officials should have been more active earlier by testing any inmate or worker with symptoms, thinning inmate populations to allow space for prisoners to be quarantined and shutting down work-release programs and visits.
Before the outbreaks at Butner and Oakdale, Attorney General William Barr said at a news conference, “We don’t want our institutions to become petri dishes. We have the protocols that are designed to stop that.”
Somewhere those protocols broke down. Now COVID-19 is spreading in confined populations and creating hot spots that threaten everyone. Federal officials, starting with Barr, need to be open about the extent of the infections and quickly announce a strenuous new effort to contain the virus in the nation’s prisons.
This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 12:00 AM.