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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/I-got-COVID-in-San-Quentin-and-watched-as-16519424.php">sfchronicle.com</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">I got COVID in San Quentin and watched as hundreds more were infected and 29 died. Here's our story</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Juan Moreno Haines - October 9, 2021<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><img src="cid:ii_kuk499et0" alt="image.png" width="452" height="301"><br><br><p>On
June 27, 2020, a guard came to my cell at San Quentin’s North Block to
tell me that I tested positive for the coronavirus. Later that day, I
was ordered to pack up my belongings and herded to South Block along
with 62 other infected prisoners — part of a scramble that one
infectious disease expert would later describe as “reckless.” The virus
spared my life, but killed 28 prisoners and a beloved correctional
sergeant. A court would later call it “the worst epidemiological
disaster in the history of California corrections.”</p><p>As the disease
spread throughout the prison, more than 300 San Quentin residents filed
a lawsuit asserting that the state’s mishandling of the virus violates
their Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
The case is making its way to the California Supreme Court.</p><div id="gmail-paywall">
<p>I am one of the plaintiffs.</p>
<hr>
<p>On May 30, 2020, John Dean Mattox, 63, was put on a bus
at California Institute for Men, commonly known as Chino, for an 11-hour
ride to San Quentin. Before boarding the bus, he told Chino prison
officials that he had COVID-19 symptoms.</p>
<p>I’m a reporter with San Quentin News, a newspaper
produced by incarcerated journalists inside the prison. Shortly after
Mattox got to San Quentin, he told me in an interview that Chino
officials said, “Tell it to medical when you get there.”</p>
<p>Court papers and independent reports show that some of
the 122 prisoners on the Chino buses, Mattox among them, were already
infected. In later court testimony, Mattox would recall that passengers
were tired, but couldn’t sleep with masks on, so some pulled them down.
Several were coughing. When they reached San Quentin, Mattox said they
weren’t screened for COVID-19. Nevertheless, he informed medical staff
that he had COVID-19 symptoms. Two days later, a nurse tested him. After
the results came back, she told Mattox that he was “the first inmate to
have the disease of COVID” at San Quentin.</p>
<p>A couple of weeks later, infectious disease experts from
UCSF toured San Quentin. The experts wrote an “urgent memo” explaining
that San Quentin is “an extremely dangerous place for an outbreak” and
urged, “everything should be done to decrease the number of people
exposed to this environment as quickly as possible.”</p>
<p>The team recommended that prison officials halve its
prisoner population “to allow every cell in North and West Blocks to be
single-room occupancy” and to allow leadership at San Quentin to
prioritize which units to depopulate further, “including the high-risk
reception center (South Block) and gymnasium environments.”</p>
<p>North Block (414 cells) and West Block (449 cells) were
identified as the most vulnerable to contagion. They are enclosed and
unventilated buildings with outer windows welded shut. Each block has
five tiers of windowless cells that are roughly 4-feet wide and 10-feet
long — smaller than the average parking space. The cells are furnished
with a stainless-steel sink and toilet. Each cell has bunk beds to
accommodate two people.</p>
<p>There are bars on the cell front doors, allowing air to circulate freely from one cell to the next.</p>
<p>In October 2020, a California Appeals Court declared that
“in the face of this pandemic, which appears to take its greatest toll
among older individuals and in congregate living situations, and in an
aged facility with all the ventilation, space, and sanitation problems
referenced in the Urgent Memo, (prison officials’) failure to
immediately adopt and implement measures designed to eliminate double
celling, dormitory style housing and other measures to permit physical
distancing between inmates is morally indefensible and constitutionally
untenable.”</p>
<p>The prisoners were not the only ones endangered.</p>
<p>In February, Cal/OSHA, the state body that regulates
occupational safety and health, fined San Quentin $421,880 for “willful”
violations of worker protection. “San Quentin staff were not provided
adequate training or equipment for working with COVID-19 infected
individuals, and employees who had been exposed to COVID-19 positive
inmates were not provided proper medical services, including testing,
contact tracing and referrals to physicians or other licensed health
care professionals.”</p>
<p>The family of Sgt. Gilbert Polanco, who died from
COVID-19, filed a lawsuit against the California Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation. News reports said that although <a href="https://www.ktvu.com/news/family-of-prison-officer-who-died-of-coronavirus-sues-san-quentin">he suffered from diabetes,</a> leaving him vulnerable to COVID-19, as a duty bound public employee, he continued to work — even double shifts.</p>
<hr>
<p>Marin County Superior Court Judge Geoffrey M. Howard was
appointed to oversee a reduction of the prisoner population, but during a
Nov. 30, 2020, preliminary hearing, prison officials said that they
“did not intend to comply” with a reduction order.</p>
<p>The Corrections Department has a combative history with
the courts. It took nearly 20 years of litigation before U.S. Supreme
Court, in its 2011 ruling in <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2010/09-1233">Brown v. Plata,</a>
ordered the state to reduce overcrowding, saying that it had grown so
severe that one prisoner a week was dying of treatable conditions. More
than a decade later, the department remains <a href="https://cchcs.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/60/2018/09/Receiver-FactSheet.pdf">under receivership</a> because it cannot maintain the population level set by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is a generous 137.5% of designed capacity.</p>
<p>Almost a year from the date of the UCSF experts’ urgent
memo, an evidentiary hearing was held to give the California Supreme
Court relevant facts to make a final ruling.</p>
<p>I watched as masked Judge Howard was Zoomed into San
Quentin’s Protestant chapel. Dozens of the more than 300 prisoner
plaintiffs sat alongside with me to watch 11 days of testimony from
their fellow prisoners, medical and mental health experts as well as
prison officials, including the acting warden, Ronald Broomfield, who
Gov. Gavin Newsom has since officially appointed warden.</p>
<p>Broomfield told the court that he could not have refused
the transfer of prisoners from Chino to San Quentin. He said that he had
concerns about receiving prisoners from “an outbreak institution,” but
he testified that he “had no knowledge that prisoners were exposed to
someone with confirmed cases of COVID-19.” He acknowledged that the
transfers from Chino were not immediately tested upon arrival.</p>
<p>Officials say that since the outbreak is over, and San
Quentin is getting vaccinated (87% of prisoners and 60% of staff as of
September), there is no need to reduce the population.</p>
<p>The department also says it is prepared for future
outbreaks thanks to its “Surge Mitigation and Management Plan,” which
includes putting tents on San Quentin grounds as well as opening up its
churches and furniture factory for additional bed space that would allow
more social distancing. The plan increases testing and contact tracing
procedures. It calls for isolating coronavirus-infected prisoners in
cells with solid doors and provides an unlimited supply of N-95 masks
and surgical face coverings for every prisoner and guard.</p>
<p>This plan may soon be put to the test.</p>
<p>Since the evidentiary hearing, six people tested positive
for the coronavirus in San Quentin, and there have been outbreaks of
two unrelated but miserable infections, norovirus and cryptosporidium,
according to memos issued by the San Quentin medical department and
hearing testimony.</p>
<p>The prison responded by reinstating the lockdown imposed
in the spring of 2020. Most prisoners were allowed out of their cells
only every other day, one tier at a time, for 90 minutes with an option
to shower in one of the racially segregated community showers, and/or go
to the prison yard, and/or make a 15-minute telephone call.</p>
<p>Under normal conditions, prisoners may spend the majority
of the day outside of their cells. Cell doors first open at 6 a.m. and
don’t permanently close for the night until 8:30 p.m. During open times,
prisoners make their way around the prison to educational, substance
abuse and support service jobs as well as the yard for recreation.
Telephones are available from 7 a.m. through 8:30 p.m.</p>
<p>Prisoners were kept in lockdown for 14 days.</p>
<p>Inspector General reports and testimony by prison
officials show that the Corrections Department and its medical staff
knew San Quentin conditions were dangerous before the COVID-19 outbreak.
Prison officials ignored their own guidelines, which would have
required a negative test before the transfer, and testing and
quarantining of the transferred prisoners when they arrived at San
Quentin.</p>
<p>Dr. Meghan Morris, an expert in infectious disease
epidemiology, testified in court proceedings that the pandemic was “a
textbook outbreak that can be traced back to a single event, which is
the transfer of individuals from CIM without testing, quick testing, and
appropriate isolation and quarantining.” She deemed the state of
affairs “reckless.”</p>
<p>One of the men watching the video of the hearing in San
Quentin’s chapel was Andrew Lee Hildreth, 38. He was among those
transferred in from Chino and contracted COVID-19 sometime along the
way. Hildreth told me he felt an unexpected level of “comfort and
closure.” He found the testimony of witnesses defending the Corrections
Department’s actions “so lacking in compassion” that the net effect was
“just about a direct admission of guilt.”</p>
<p>I admit I felt similarly. Even as a journalist, trying to
remain objective as I reported what I saw in San Quentin, it was not
hard to become emotional. <a href="https://theappeal.org/authors/juan-moreno-haines/">Writing about people I knew</a> who <a href="https://sanquentinnews.com/mourning-our-losses/">died from the virus</a>
— particularly well-liked men like Michael Hampton and John Stevens —
was devastating. I was at Mike’s wedding and every time I went to
church, he was there to give me a big hug.</p>
<p>Sgt. Polanco’s death, too, affected me. He just isn’t
missed by his co-workers, but also by some of the men in blue, who he
counseled, gave support during rehabilitative programs and debated
sports trivia with.</p>
<p>COVID-19 admittedly presented unprecedented challenges to
preserving health and safety inside San Quentin. But after reporting on
the spread of the disease, and suffering from COVID-19 myself, it’s
impossible not to feel these losses were needless and born of a failure
to grasp the deadly consequences of merging mass incarceration with
COVID-19.</p>
<p>The Marin County Public Defender’s office called me to
testify about the conditions in North Block. On cross-examination, the
Corrections Department’s lawyer asked me if I thought things at San
Quentin were better. The record doesn’t reflect all of what I wanted to
say: “I’m in 3 feet under water and I’m drowning. Then, you let me up 2
feet to say things are better. No! I’m still drowning. I’m drowning
because of overcrowding.”</p>
<p>Many of us inside San Quentin are doubtful that
significant change is coming, but at least the hearings in our case
amount to a dose of public accountability.</p>
<p>San Quentin’s population, which fell slightly in the COVID spring of 2020, has begun to grow again as buses continue to arrive.</p>
<p><em>
</em></p><p><em>Juan Moreno Haines is an incarcerated journalist who has
been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists since 2015. In
2020, the California News Publishers Association awarded him a
first-place prize for coverage of the pandemic fallout. This story is
supported by the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship.</em></p><em>
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