An aerial view San Quentin State Prison on July 08, 2020 in San Quentin, California.
March 3 started out as a normal day for San Quentin Prison University Project students. At the time, news of the novel coronavirus was reverberating around the world, but the students — many of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent or drug-related offenses — still trickled in to their Tuesday evening composition class, eager, engaged, and ready to write. But then they noticed that their volunteer teacher, Rebecca VanDeVoort, sounded sick that evening. The students were worried that VanDeVoort had come down with the virus, and that they would too. She was eventually able to assure them it was just seasonal allergies, but her students’ fears that an outbreak would spread within the prison would soon be realized.
Following the transfer of 121 inmates from the California Institute for Men in Chino in late May — a prison where there’s been more than 1,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 — the virus took hold of San Quentin.
Referred to as “the worst prison health screw-up in state history” by Assemblymember Marc Levine, over 2000 men in San Quentin currently have coronavirus, and 19 inmates have died. Following the outbreak, San Quentin Prison Arts Project teachers have been compiling resources on how to demand their release, while former inmates are amplifying the voices of those who are still incarcerated. Together, their goal is to bring attention to the prison’s inmates, who say they’re being punished for being sick.
In response to the crisis, San Quentin are supplying inmates with tens of thousands of additional pieces of personal protective equipment such as N95 masks, reusable cloth masks, hand sanitizer, and cleaning supplies, per a recent press release.
“Over the last four months, we’ve set unprecedented measures,” said California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Press Secretary, Dana Simas.
Zoe Mullery, who’s taught creative writing at San Quentin for 21 years through the William James Association, is gravely concerned about her students, none of whom she’s been able to contact. That’s because up until July 22, prison officials suspended phone access — inmates who were lucky enough to be isolated in the gym were able to make phone calls, but most could only communicate with the outside world via mail. “San Quentin is like the Louisiana Superdome during Hurricane Katrina,” she says. “We’re here on the outside wringing our hands.”
Similarly, VanDeVoort, who was a volunteer writing professor through the Prison University Project, says she has been prohibited from contacting her students since education programs were suspended on March 10. She recalls the last day she taught class, which was around the time inmates began hearing about the virus. “They were worried, and I understood why. They can’t say ‘I want to be six feet away from someone else,’ that’s not an option.”
Rebecca VanDeVoort.
Since lockdown, Mullery’s been teaching her students through distance learning: a cumbersome process where she drops off lesson packets to her supervisor, who then delivers them cell-to-cell through an institutional mail system. Once students receive the packet, they complete it and send it back. However, this procedure, which has taken weeks for Prison Arts teachers to set up, is already experiencing issues. Since sending out the first lesson packet five weeks ago, Mullery’s only gotten six back out of 23 and doesn’t know why.
She’s especially worried about her student Juan Haines, an award-winning incarcerated journalist and senior editor of San Quentin News, who she’s taught for nearly a decade. Haines, who contracted Legionnaires’ Disease during an outbreak at San Quentin in 2015, tested positive for COVID-19 recently. Afterwards, Haines was sequestered to the 'Badger Unit,' a solitary confinement zone for sick inmates, reported Solitary Watch.
The Consequences of Getting Sick While Incarcerated
Despite the California Correctional Health Care Services direction that “medical isolation conditions should be as similar to regular housing as possible,” solitary confinement — colloquially known as the hole — is anything but.
“They locked me into a cell, they gave me cold meals (for every meal), I can’t even heat up water ... There’s no mental health services at all,” Haines said in a recorded phone call on July 2. About two dozen inmates in the Badger Unit went on hunger strike, demanding basic rights such as showers, phone calls, exercise, fresh air, hot food and mental health services.
By nature, the hole contradicts the CCHCS guidelines. Their website states that inmates in medical isolation “should be provided access to the same necessities and privileges that would otherwise normally be available.” Inmates should also be able to shower at least every other day (or more, if possible), and have time outside of isolation, like yard time. They should also be able to make phone calls, and have access to their personal property and the canteen.
Wayne Boatwright, an effervescent legal consultant and former inmate at San Quentin, says that solitary confinement is a frightening and multifaceted experience.
“Prison is the punishment. Being removed from society is the punishment. They’re not supposed to torture you while you’re in prison,” he says. “A lot of people don’t recognize that construct.”
For inmates, the biggest punishment of solitary confinement is losing their personal property and sense of security. Boatwright claims that if inmates fall ill and get sent to the hole, their belongings are seized by correctional officers and often go missing — usually because officers give them away to their favorites, who are either “workers or snitches.” And when inmates return, they get put back in a different cell with a complete stranger. “If you're sharing your cell with someone and have a 30-year sentence, you want to know you’ll be comfortable with them,” Boatwright added.
As a result, to avoid solitary confinement, some inmates are hiding their illness to avoid getting tested. According to Mullery, some inmates would even splash cold water on their faces and in their mouths before getting temperature checked. And when nurses would visually assess inmates and ask if they were experiencing symptoms, prisoners would never admit it.
For Adnan Khan, former inmate and Executive Director of Re:Store Justice, going to the hole wasn’t an option when he fell ill during the Legionnaires’ outbreak — it was common knowledge that if you were sent there, you wouldn’t receive adequate medical care, he claims. Inmates even had a running joke that whether you were sick or had a broken leg, you’d receive the same treatment: ibuprofen.
“Prisons aren't hospitals, therefore, they’re not hospitable,” he says over the phone. In an article about the time he fell ill, he wrote, “I chose to take care of myself. I believed I could do a better job than the prison’s punitive response to sickness and its poor health care system.” So for three days, he lay on his bunk in excruciating pain, shivering and weathering severe hot and cold flashes. Because he never sought medical treatment while incarcerated, he says he never found out what illness he contracted or how.
He also says that social distancing is impossible in prisons, which he calls COVID's best friend. This is because inmates are constantly getting escorted by correctional officers and sharing close quarters with hundreds of other men. Boatwright, who also served time at San Quentin during the Legionnaires outbreak, says that being under state control limits opportunities to protect yourself. When he was in a dorm with 200 men, there were only two bathroom areas with two large soap dispensers — both of which were always either empty or out of order. “Not because they weren’t filled, but because many inmates were so frightened they’d run out of soap,” he says. There, anxious inmates would regularly hoard soap, filling up plastic bottles in private. Subsequently, one man could deprive the other 199 of critical public resources.
But this nervous tendency to hoard, which takes place both behind prison walls and in American supermarkets, is understandable. “Prison is a pressure cooker. There’s high levels of vigilance and high levels of anxiety. Any additional stressor added to the system has a disproportionate impact on the community, because you're at such a high level of stress,” Boatwright said.
San Quentin’s COVID-19 Response Efforts
Despite recent criticism by former inmates and Prison Arts teachers, Boatwright said San Quentin is making steps in the right direction. This month, they began serving hot meals outdoors, and they converted the on-site California Prison Industry Authority furniture facility — where he previously worked on an assembly line — into an “alternative care site” with around 250 beds. According to a San Quentin representative, starting July 22 inmates will also have limited access to phones, ideally once a week.
On July 23, the prison partnered with a third-party organization for a one-time cleaning of its 593,637-square-foot interior. In addition to providing PPE and testing staff members every 14 days, the prison is addressing overcrowding: As of July 15, San Quentins’s inmate population has been reduced from 4,051 to 3,362. This is because the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation suspended intake from county jails, as well as expedited the parole of 3,500 men. And in a recent statewide decision, 8,000 inmates could be eligible for early release by the end of August.
However, Khan says that this response is performative at best. “[Releasing] 8,000 [men] is not a COVID response, that’s a response to public pressure. If they reduced San Quentin’s population to 2,000 men, that would be an effective response," he said. Aside from prison’s physical design, Khan says that the criminal justice system at large is partially responsible for exacerbating the COVID-19 outbreak.
“The reason we have COVID problems is because we have a mass incarceration problem,” he says. San Quentin, which was designed to house 3,082 inmates, is still over capacity.
Now that the coronavirus has invaded the prison, inmates must now also make the difficult choice between their physical health or their release date. In a recent phone call an anonymous San Quentin hospital worker told Khan that they are paid one dollar an hour to sterilize prison cells, and refusing to do work means getting written up. For those who are “lifers” and must appear before a parole board, writeups can push back their release date by a minimum of three years. “I gotta do the job, because then the [parole] board is going to look at that and say why did you get written up? Why did you disobey that order?” said the hospital worker in the video. “I’m being treated as though I’m not a person, I’m not a human being, that’s how you treat slaves.”
The hospital worker told Khan that they once cleaned up to 50 cells at a time with just three other inmates, were repeatedly denied showers and later tested positive for the virus.
Meanwhile, both VanDerVoort and Mullery, who care about their students and know many of their life stories, remain on the outside of the San Quentin Superdome looking in. When asked if she’s optimistic that the situation will improve, Vandervoort pauses.
“Ultimately, there are not enough people who understand and value the lives of prison inmates in the United States ... I'm not super hopeful, but I want to be. I think we should be trying harder,” she says. “I would say we’re the criminals, not them, if we don’t address the way that people in those circumstances are being treated.”
Ariana Bindman is a freelance writer in the Bay Area, find her on Instagram at @ariana.bindman.
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