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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. What if we took the coronavirus case rate and quadrupled it, took the death rate and doubled it? What if instead of deliberating whether or not we could have spent Thanksgiving with family this year, we knew we couldn't? This was the reality for over one and a half million men and women who are incarcerated in our federal and state prisons. At least 225,000 inmates tested positive for the virus by December 1st.

This has been determined by The Marshall Project, a criminal justice news organization that has been tracking COVID numbers in these facilities. That would be one out of every six people behind bars, so much higher than the rate in the general population. How did it get this bad and where do we go from here? As the prospect of receiving a vaccination comes closer and closer, where does this population stand in the long line of those waiting for this preventive shot? To talk about this and more is Keri Blakinger, staff writer at The Marshall Project. Keri, thanks so much for joining us.

Keri Blakinger: Thanks for having me.

Brian: This 225,000 number out of 1.5 million behind bars, totally approximately 1 out of every 6 incarcerated people. Even with that, you estimate that that's probably lower than the real number. Why is that?

Keri: There's a few reasons. For one, when people are tested, it isn't necessarily when they should have been tested or when they were even symptomatic. There were a lot of people in the spring and a lot of prisons that weren't getting tested when they were symptomatic. You might have tested, you might be able to say, "We tested everyone at this prison," but you did it after the wave of coronavirus already went through that prison.

There's also just generally questions about the accuracy of data that we get out of prisons. It's really hard to say whether that's complete number, but I think it's likely not.

Brian: I wonder if there are parts of the country where prisons are doing worse, or if this is a pretty consistent problem at a pretty consistent rate around the country, because I want to play you a clip of Mayor de Blasio on this program on Friday when I asked him if, given the concentration of cases in jails and prisons, people who are incarcerated will be prioritized for the vaccine in New York City. Here's what he said. "I've seen the priority list for vaccinations, start with front-line medical workers and go next to people in nursing homes at risk in those congregate care facilities. What about people in jails and prisons? Shouldn't they be also high considering the outbreak rates there?"

Mayor de Blasio: We're watching that carefully. I looked at the numbers a couple of days ago. To date, thank God, we have seen a pretty steady situation, but we're concerned because of the physical setting, to say the least. To date, we have not been seeing major problem in our city jails.

Brian Lehrer: Do you agree with that? I don't know if you've taken a local look, I think this is a national angle article, but I was surprised to hear the mayor say that, that, to date, there hasn't been much of a problem in Rikers or in other city jails?

Keri: Generally, I don't think that that is something I would agree with. Even if you had a jail that happened to have done pretty well, it is still basically a cruise ship in the middle of your city. It should still be a priority. Prisoners have more health problems than the average person, they're high-risk population, they're living basically on top of each other, social distancing is not really possible. They're not getting good medical care, and you have staff coming in and out of the facility three shifts a day.

If you do have a massive outbreak behind bars, it's hard to keep it from getting back into the community. Just in the interest of self-preservation, like people on the outside, even if you don't care about people behind bars, you should care that you want those hotspots to not be hotspots in the middle of your city.

Brian: Also with us now-- Is this caller ready to go? Is our other guest? Yes. We're going to welcome to the show a special caller. William Clanton is currently an inmate at the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, a jail barge affiliated with Rikers that is also known as "The Boat," and he's going to talk to us directly about what is happening there in his experience. William, can you hear me? Oh, William is not ready yet. Okay, Keri, do you want to try to set up William for us? Are you familiar with him?

Keri: I don't know him personally. [chuckles]

Brian: Okay, now he's ready. Forgive me. William, welcome to WNYC, thank you so much for a few minutes of your time.

William Clanton: Oh, thank you, Mr. Lehrer and Miss Keri Blakinger. Just very briefly, before we begin this discussion, I just wanted to make a couple of quick comments. Before beginning this discussion, I'd like to take the time to extend our deepest regards and appreciation for the heroes of this nation, our health care workers, who have been without equivocation, steadfast and caring and preserving the life and health of the men, women, and children who's been infected and affected by this COVID-19. We thank you.

Furthermore, our sincere and heartwarming condolences to the families of those who have lost their lives in this egregious pandemic, to them we extend our prayers. Okay. I presume that that's a great segue to begin our topic of discussion.

Brian: Absolutely, and very nice of you to reach out and acknowledge those people who are suffering and those people who are helping. For people who have never been inside, describe the facility that you're in and describe the COVID situation there, as far as you could tell.

William: Oh, sure. The facility itself, I find it very interesting that who would ever come up with the idea of putting prisoners on a boat? It's similar to the transatlantic boat movement because the place is so small, it's maybe 30 by 60 feet, with about 40 to 45, sometimes even 50 men on a unit with 7.5 maybe inches high ceiling. It's a very congested environment, and the COVID situation has been quite dire.

PPE has been very limited, there's no real way for us to keep each other safe because the beddings are bumped. There is literally head-to-head one mattress is against the head of another. So, you have two prisoners who are laying down with their heads to each other, or with one prisoner's head to another prisoner's feet.

On the ends of those beds, what we have is maybe a foot to two feet apart. It's really unfathomable, and it's really insignificant for us to walk around in the unit with mask on when we're going to bed at night in this very congested place, not to mention or to exclude the fact that there was a testimony that was given by the commissioners in September, that these facilities were down to 25% capacity. We are now at 80%, which means that usually there are 25 men in the unit, we now have 45, sometimes 50 people in the unit.

Brian: Do you think that that amount of thinning out is protecting you and the other inmates?

William: Not at all. Not at all. I think that one of the very difficult situations that we are dealing with is the one is that they haven't really been doing any testing. There has been some talk about a couple of people who had come in, and they were infected. What they do is, they move them out quickly, but they don't test anybody else. I overheard supervisors say one day, she was very irritated, and she said, "I guess we just have to wait till somebody dies for somebody to do something." This is the situation that we are in. It's very, very grim.

Brian: On the testing, Mayor de Blasio says he wants every New Yorker to get tested, and maybe once a month, whether they think they have symptoms or not. What's the amount of testing that's going on inside the facility? Is that the city would be in charge of that obviously?

William: That's correct. That is correct. I tell you something, Mr. Lehrer. It's very interesting at the level of apathy, and what some of these supervisors are doing without compunction when they are not testing. I've been here for about three months, and there hasn't been one test since I've been here, and there are men who have been here even longer than that. I've done some research with some of these guys, and they don't send them out for testing either.

When there is someone who comes in, and they find out that this individual was tested-- The interesting thing is that they test somebody, and for some reason or another, I don't know how he ends up getting into a unit, and then they come and get him two, three, maybe four days later, after they found that he is positive, and then they don't test anyone else. I'm almost certain than many of us here perhaps are asymptomatic. We probably have been infected. It's unfortunate, because we don't know how this is going to affect out lives, in the next couple of months, but it is very, very difficult, and we have been doing everything in our power to have someone take a stand and make sure that we are facing--

Automated Voice: You have one minute left.

Brian: I see you get a time to call from--

William: They do, but I will be calling you right back, so I do have more time.

Brian: We're just about out of time. Anyway, why don't you use that last minute to say if you've been in regular contact with your defense attorney or anybody else who could advocate for better testing and for vaccine prioritization, or anything else?

William: No, I haven't. In fact, access to the courts have been limited. We have not had any access to that. All of the services here have been denied on some level for some reason or another, for we have not had any opportunity to speak to anyone to come in and advocate on our behalf. Before we follow up, I'd like to just give some quick information so people who may be interested in helping in this movement. We have a Twitter setup of @concentration, or you can contact us--

Automated Voice: Thank you for using Securus. Goodbye.

Brian: @concentration was that Twitter, if you want to call back and give the rest of the contact information, you can do that. That was William Clanton, currently an inmate at the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center or jail barge affiliated with Rikers that is also known as "The Boat." Still with us, Keri Blakinger, staff writer at The Marshall Project, who's been recording on COVID in prisons. Keri, that was not a source in your article. We got to William through another reporter. I'm just curious if you learned anything there or you'd like to put what you heard from him in context of your national reporting on this issue.

Keri: Yes. The things that he's saying are pretty much what we're hearing everywhere. Some of the things that he's said simply reflect the reality of what jails and prisons are, that we're talking about dorm style housing in a lot of places where you're not socially distanced even in your bunk, none of this is surprising.

The idea that there hasn't been testing, again, I'm not surprised. I also wanted to say that when we're talking about testing, the other issue with prisons and jails is that even if you do test, if you do the right thing, if you're proactive and you're testing your whole population on a regular basis, it still can be pretty meaningless if you don't have procedures in place for quarantine and if you don't bother to do contact tracing. Now, it sounds like he's talking about a situation where they're not bothering to do contact tracing, that something I hear pretty broadly, which is kind of ridiculous because jails and prisons, there should be literally no easier place to contact trace.

You're supposed to know where everyone is, when and who they were in contact with. In Texas, which is where I am, there was a lawsuit where several prisoners sued the prison system over their handling of coronavirus, and that's actually-- They're waiting on a decision from the Fifth Circuit on that now. In one of the things that came up in that testimony was, there one of the early deaths, this man died at the Pack Unit, and he was in a 54-person dorm.

They started the contact tracing, measured from when he died, at which point he'd already-- They went back 48 hours from the point that he died, but he'd already been in the hospital for a few days at that point. They weren't actually going back to when he'd been on the unit. Even when you have some effort to contact trace, it's not necessarily done in an adequate manner or- sorry, I misspoke, it was actually from the moment that he tested positive, which is after he died.

Some of the contacts they were measuring were post-mortem, not when he was actually ill. If you can't do meaningful contact tracing, or you're simply not competent to do so, and you don't quarantine adequately, then the testing is not doing a whole lot other than measuring how bad you're doing at containing the disease.

Brian: William did let us know the contact information for his group. For anybody who's interested, the group is called "Concentration COVID," the Twitter, as he said before he had a hangup was @concentration. The email address for anybody who wants to write to them is concentrationcovid@gmail.com, concentrationcovid@gmail.com, or @concentration on Twitter. I want to play a clip of Governor Murphy. He announced an executive order allowing for the temporary release back in April, temporary release or home confinement for low-risk prisoners in the New Jersey state prisons. This is him at a press conference explaining the logistics.

Governor Murphy: We are setting up a robust process through which each potentially eligible individual must be determined to be safe to place on home confinement. Each will be required to have an individualized release plan to ensure they will have access to all necessary services, medical services, and housing.

Brian: The Bureau of Prisons began a similar practice, even earlier than the governor. The numbers show, as you report in your Marshall Project article, that the vast majority of compassionate release applicants, as they're called, were rejected at the beginning of the pandemic, and while the rate of acceptance did grow over the year, it stayed low. What's the current state of this?

Keri: That's hard to say because the Bureau of Prisons take so long to provide data, we don't have the sort of granular data update that I had in that report. That took, I think, three months to get, but--

Brian: That's the federal prison system, to be clear, right?

Keri: Yes. Federal prison system. Yes. Not all states even have any sort of equivalent option for compassionate release. As much as we wrote about the federal prison system, not approving so many, they did also let some people out on home confinement, and by some measures they did better with releasing people than some prison systems. Texas, which is roughly the same size, their parole board repeatedly said that they were not doing anything to consider parole differently or release more people.

I think that there's many states that they either belatedly started considering compassionate release or didn't really do it in any sort of meaningful way. In many cases, instead prison populations have gone down due to other factors. I think that when we look at the fact that there has been a huge decrease in many prison populations this year, it's important to realize that that's not, because leaders knew that they needed to release people and did so. It is simply because there was decreases in the number of people coming in the door.

Brian: You're a news organization, not an advocacy organization, but as the second wave is cresting all around the country, what are advocates calling for with respect to protecting people in prisons? Because it's really anybody in a congregate facility, we know how bad the problem is in nursing homes. You gave us the stats at the beginning of the segment for how bad the COVID concentrations are in jails and prisons around the country. What's the current state of the politics around compassionate release?

Keri: Advocates are continuing to push for people to be released, which is what they've been saying for months. I don't think that's going to change. Frankly, advocates calling for releases, for many other reasons before COVID, I think it's just a matter of, does this get serious enough that leadership actually listens to them?

Brian: We leave it there with Keri Blakinger, staff writer at The Marshall Project who has taken an investigative look into COVID in the nation's jails and prisons. Thank you so much for your reporting and for joining us to share it.

Keri: Thanks for having me.

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