Inmate families want answers as COVID tears through California Men’s Colony
As an outbreak of COVID-19 began sweeping through the California Men’s Colony prison in San Luis Obispo last month, Teresa said the skyrocketing numbers gave her grave concern for her incarcerated fiance, whom she said she hadn’t been able to reach for a month.
“It’s depressing, it’s sad — I don’t know if he’s OK,” the Ripon resident, who didn’t want her full name used, told The Tribune by phone this week. “I cry myself to sleep sometimes because I just want to hear from him.”
When Teresa was finally able to reach him after complaining to the prison’s administration, she said, what he told her confirmed her fears: sick and healthy inmates mixing together, inmates not receiving cleaning supplies or fresh face masks, inmates “on top of each other” in overcrowded dorm-style housing, and correctional officers not taking safety precautions seriously.
Worst of all, she said, is the silence from California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the prison’s administration.
The constant unknown of her fiance’s well-being has led Teresa and dozens of women with loved ones incarcerated at CMC to join a support group for any information on what’s happening behind the prison’s walls.
Though it’s one of the state’s smallest prisons, CMC with its currently 1,136 positive inmates has the highest number of active COVID-19 infections of any California prison facility by far.
The second highest number of cases — at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad — had roughly a quarter of the number of active cases.
“We want answers,” Teresa said Wednesday. “We want this to stop.”
According to CDCR, the prison currently has a population of just over 3,000 inmates — a reduction of more than 700 inmates since the pandemic hit in March — and approximately 1,800 employees.
Inmates have bore the brunt of the pandemic.
As of Friday, more than a third of CMC’s inmate population was sick with COVID-19. The agency reports that of its 2,258 total confirmed cases, 18 inmates have been released while they were sick, and 1,102 inmates had recovered.
Two have died.
A total of 442 correctional officers and other staff have tested positive since March, placing CMC somewhere in the middle compared to other California prisons in terms of positive COVID-19 cases among employees.
More than half of those staff have recovered and returned to work, the agency reports.
Amid the latest outbreak, CDCR confirmed in December in response to questions from The Tribune that CMC’s warden of five years, Josie Gastelo, would retire Dec. 31.
CDCR officials said this week that Gastelo’s retirement was known to the agency long before COVID-19 hit and was completely unrelated, but the announcement of its top administrator’s departure took even staff by surprise, one employee told The Tribune. An acting warden has been appointed in her place.
Though CDCR has repeatedly told news media since the beginning of the pandemic that it is taking the highest level of precautions and have put in place its most strict testing and sanitary protocols, nine people with loved ones incarcerated at CMC who spoke to The Tribune for this article say it’s become obvious that whatever measures being taken are not working.
They fear — at this rate — that by the end of the pandemic, every inmate at the prison will have caught COVID-19, including those at high-risk due to age and underlying health conditions.
“We understand the concerns and anxiety expressed by those who have loved ones incarcerated within our facility, especially during an unprecedented pandemic,” CMC spokesman Lt. John Hill wrote in an email Thursday. “We are a part of this community, which is why we have remained committed to implementing the robust measures we’ve described in an effort to protect the health and safety of all those who live in and work at CMC.”
‘Dead silence’ from prison administration
The first positive COVID-19 case of an inmate at the prison was reported in April. There had been smaller surges in COVID-19 cases toward the end of summer, but the facility in the last month has experienced its worst outbreak of coronavirus since the pandemic began to spread locally in March.
Since CDCR reported Monday that COVID-19 cases there had exploded to a third of all inmates, The Tribune has been contacted by more than a dozen women who have loved ones at the all-male facility.
The newspaper interviewed nine of those women and agreed to omit their last names, if they wished, in exchange for their stories in order to protect the identities of the inmates.
The Tribune independently verified that each woman — who contacted the newspaper from across California — was in correspondence with a current CMC inmate.
Many of the family members who spoke with the newspaper did so after reading articles posted to the “Women with an Incarcerated Loved One @ CMC” private Facebook group, which currently has 171 members.
Abby Love of Sacramento took over as an administrator of the page when her husband was transferred to CMC roughly a month before the pandemic hit.
She says the group is a platform to help those family members navigate the bureaucracy of the prison system, keep them informed about new laws and changes in CMC protocols, and serve as a support group to keep members “calm and at peace.”
Love said that as the outbreak at the prison sent COVID-19 cases skyrocketing, meaningful communication from the prison’s administration has all but ceased. Members of the group say their phone calls for information have been dropped, unanswered, or lost in the phone tree.
“There’s dead silence right now, and that’s a real problem,” Love said.
Love said of all the prisons she’s dealt with as her husband has gone through various transfers, she’s found CMC to be one of the least communicative with inmates’ families.
CMC says it’s limiting movement to stop the spread
Among the group members’ top concerns is the movement of inmates around the prison, which they say is likely furthering the spread.
Elizabeth Givens of Chico said her family member was transferred to the prison in November and did his best to avoid other inmates and stay healthy due to underlying heart problems. But doing so was impossible, she said.
Sure enough, she said, he tested positive for COVID-19 in early December.
Givens said her family member was moved to a quarantine unit, where he received showers only every four days, and his mail was withheld.
While in quarantine, which Givens likened to administrative segregation, he experienced intense chills and lost his sense of smell but was deemed recovered after he stopped showing symptoms. He was then transferred back to a dorm with other inmates without another test.
“This is real scary stuff,” Givens said Wednesday. “This situation, it needs to be fixed.”
Summer Slattery of Hemet said her boyfriend told her that he recently went five days without a shower due to the limited movement of inmates.
“He would ask the CO, who would say, ‘I don’t have time and to ask the next CO, who would just would push it off to the next,” Slattery said. “To me, that’s inhumane.”
CMC spokesman Hill says inmates are given the opportunity to shower at least once every 72 hours, or more often if available.
Hill wrote in an email that while movement has been “limited,” there is movement that is essential within an institution for a number of reasons, including safety.
“Any essential moves are being conducted with COVID-19 protocols in place, including (statewide guidance on safely transferring inmates) which outlines COVID-19 quarantine, testing and screening timeframes to mitigate spread of COVID-19 between and throughout our institutions,” Hill wrote.
According to Hill, the prison has ramped up its testing of inmates, and any inmate who tests positive for COVID-19 is “immediately placed in a medical isolation setting whether they are completely asymptomatic, mildly symptomatic or presenting significant symptoms of the disease.”
Whether a patient is in isolation or quarantine, medical staff conduct rounds daily on each shift checking temperatures, vitals and providing medication as needed, Hill said. If medical staff determines an inmate needs a higher level of care, the person is transported to an outside hospital.
Hill said that the prison’s medical staff will not release a patient from medical isolation until “sound medical judgment warrants such release.”
The release of a patient from medical isolation is laid out in CDCR protocols that Hill said was developed in accordance with all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as California Department of Public Health guidelines and recommendations.
Nevertheless, inmates’ loved ones remain concerned.
“I really just want it to be known that, inside, they’re not doing what they say their doing,” Givens said. “The inmates are in real trouble.”
Inmates say they’re not getting cleaning supplies
Hill said in an email that CMC has been conducting additional cleaning and providing inmates with extra cleaning supplies since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Hand sanitizer, cleaning materials and disinfectants are provided throughout the institution,” Hill wrote. “All areas where incarcerated individuals live, work and recreate are cleaned multiple times during the day.”
But every person who spoke to The Tribune for this article disputes that characterization, and they say that inmates aren’t even receiving basic items.
“TJ” Johnson of Rialto, who has three loved ones at CMC, said one of her family members hadn’t received a clean pair of sheets in 36 days and resorted to washing them himself in his cell’s sink.
“And he’s got no cleaning supplies at all,” she said.
Asked about CMC’s insistence that inmates are receiving all the supplies they need, Johnson said: “The inmates, they can’t all be lying — they’re all basically telling the same story.”
She said that given some of her family members’ ages and underlying medical conditions, her whole church is praying they don’t become infected.
“(One family member is) concerned he’s not going to make it back to see his family,” Johnson said.
Inmates claim officers joke about masks
Another recurring story told by those who spoke to The Tribune was a culture among correctional officers of dismissing face masks as a means to stop the spread.
Several people said their loved ones told them of instances where COs would joke about it.
Givens, of Chico, recalled a phone call with her family member at the prison, where the man could be heard asking a correctional officer nearby if he could put on a facemask.
“The CO is like, ‘How about this?’ and he hung up (the phone) on me,” Givens said. “Later in a letter, he told me the guard had hung it up and he was written up over it.”
Slattery, of Hemet, told The Tribune that her incarcerated boyfriend told her that even now, many COs refuse to wear face masks. She said she was told of multiple instances of officers entering a dorm unit mask-less before moving on to another dorm.
“They have them in their pockets and when the honchos come around, they slip them on,” Slattery said.
“They’re laughing — they think the situation is funny,” Johnson said.
Hill disputed those characterizations in an email Thursday, saying that all CMC staff are required to wear surgical masks, and additional personal protective equipment is required for staff working in any designated medical isolation or quarantine area.
“Failure to comply with mask or physical distancing mandates results in progressive discipline,” Hill wrote.
Staff says safety is ‘top priority’
Moving forward, Hill reiterated that the well-being and safety of inmates and staff “is our top priority.”
He says the prison has set up an incident command post on the prison grounds that allows immediate communication and coordination between custody and health care operations with public health experts, community stakeholders, and maintenance staff within the institution.
“Issues impacting the health and welfare of the incarcerated population are prioritized and addressed without delay,” Hill said.
He added that staff is also increasing the frequency of testing for both staff and the inmates, mandating the use of personal protective equipment, and dedicated medical isolation and quarantine housing units to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
But members of the Women with an Incarcerated Loved One @ CMC group are skeptical.
Asked what she would say to the administration if she had their ear, one member said: “I would tell them they need to get their crap together.”
