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On March 13, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections fell in line with the rest of the country and began imposing necessary additional limitations on the those of us incarcerated in the Wisconsin prison system. First they eliminated our medical co-pay (but only to address COVID-19 symptoms), suspended all volunteers and visitation (replaced by two free weekly phone calls), and directed all facilities to ramp up daily cleaning. On March 16, work release was suspended for the more than a thousand men and women working in the community. Throughout the rest of the week, they suspended schooling and programs, heavily reduced or eliminated recreation and library access, curtailed our movement between living areas, and stopped transfers between prisons and “new admissions” from county jails. But all these reasonable responses to the pandemic are made pointless by what isn’t being done.
The number one way COVID-19 will spread into a prison is via a staff member. Yet staff are still around us every day, socially-undistanced, searching our rooms and patting us down with no masks, not being tested for a temperature (which some jails and other state prisons are doing), or even made to wash their hands upon entering. Whenever we’re taken off grounds for medical appointments, we're quarantined in the hole for two weeks when we return, while the two guards that escorted us the entire time return to roam and hangout anywhere in the prison as if their correctional uniforms act as full-body prophylactics. Even if proper preventative measures were being taken regarding staff, the aforementioned preventative measures we're following are negated by our daily movement.
Crowded Conditions
Where I am, 500 men live in a four-story building made up of nine packed housing units. For meals, each unit is called to the cafeteria, as space allows. They now separate us during meals by leaving an empty row of tables between each seated unit. Reasonable. However, staff patrol the cafeteria while we eat, we walk back with groups from other units, and to get to the cafeteria we have to walk down a 3½ foot-wide, unventilated stairway passing, talking to, and shaking hands with those from other units returning from eating. Even if we happen to not pass anyone, men from those units were just breathing all up and down the same narrow stairway minutes if not seconds earlier.
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In addition, dozens of incarcerated workers interact closely with guys from different units multiple times a day, especially in the kitchen, before returning to their respective units and cellmates. In my investigative and advocacy efforts running the most widely-read anti-mass incarceration publication in Wisconsin, I hear similar if not identical reports of head-scratching sanitary policies and insincere enforcement from all over the state: cleaning supplies being restricted, sweeping banned because it might kick COVID-19 into the air, guys forced to wait together outside in the cold rain for medication to avoid having too many waiting together inside, and cleaning returning to its usual half-assed approach within days of the original directive, which was never even undertook at some places. In fact, many places have actually begun allowing more movement and interaction after the initial distancing response.
Even if appropriate measures were being taken and fully followed at each facility, COVID-19 could still spread rapidly and with high mortality in dense correctional populations. There aren't any respirators or hospital beds. The most they can do is put people in the hole to separate them from the general population, and these beds represent roughly 10% of bed space for a disease expected to infect 40%-60% of the U.S. The seriously ill would have to be sent to outside hospitals to take up their bed space or left to endure painful deaths in the hole or the one state infirmary, which is already near capacity. These sick would, in turn, infect other staff, who would carry it back home and reduce the number of guards available to monitor us, leading to desperation, chaos and violence for residents and the limited staff remaining. Protests have already begun at facilities in other states. To avoid this outcome, the circumstances demand a two-step plan: lockdowns and releases.
Statewide Lockdown?
I hate to say it, and my incarcerated community will hate me for doing so, but a statewide lockdown, with constant air-circulation and daily showers, laundry, and cell cleaning, gives us the best chance of fighting a crippling contagion. This is our equivalent of shelter in place. To make this difficult period easier on us and, therefore, easier on staff forced to deal with our understandable frustration, the DOC could do a variety of simple and cheap or free things (e.g., play more movies, process emails more than once a day, put quality items in our mandatory lockdown bag meals, and allow better features to be added to our exorbitantly high-priced tablets). But this will only work with a smaller, less vulnerable prison population.
County jails across the nation, including Wisconsin’s, have stopped holding people for various nonviolent crimes and have been releasing hundreds of others early. Trump and states nationwide are considering similar measures (Iowa’s DOC moved up hundreds of release dates). Via parole, pardons, and largely unused release statutes, Governor Tony Evers and the DOC can and should release those who are at high-risk of serious complications from COVID-19 and/or statistically very low-risk to recidivate (men and women with nonviolent histories or reformed minds and spirits from having served lengthy sentences for violent crimes). In fact, with the Wisconsin prison system being one of the largest per capita in the world, 133% of capacity, and about 20% understaffed, I could very well argue that all low-risk incarcerated individuals within, say, a year of release should be let out to ease the calamitous impact this virus could have in here and spread back into surrounding communities. (Objections that this would put criminals back on the street are ridiculous fear-mongering because these individuals are no more dangerous now than they will be in a year or less, which has been proven with the success of such early releases in other jurisdictions the past decade.)
Of course, it's possible our carceral society could beat the odds and avoid the same fate that has befallen every other society unprepared for COVID-19. But that’s what the U.S. thought (hoped) when it was still overseas. Why should Wisconsin repeat that mistake in its most unprepared environment?
Evers campaigned against Wisconsin’s bloated, largely underachieving correctional system and said in January that "... we could be the last state that embraces criminal justice reform, and I just can't imagine why we want to be in that position." Unfortunately, that’s because the Wisconsin legislature doesn’t share the governor’s forward-looking views on criminal justice reforms. We do hope that Wisconsin can begin to release the old, infirm, and officially low-risk individuals especially now that we are in this global health crisis..
Shannon Ross has been incarcerated in Wisconsin since he was a teenager for the past 16½ years. He manages and composes The Community newsletter, the most widely-read anti-mass incarceration publication in Wisconsin.
