Cloe Poisson / CTMirror.org
When her son Michael told her in June that he was being transferred to the Osborn Correctional Institution from a prison in Newtown, Dorothea Ferrigon thought his two-year ordeal was almost over.
Osborn’s location in Somers was much closer to the family’s Bloomfield home, which meant it would be easier to visit him. Even better, he’d been placed on a waiting list for a halfway house that would likely be in the Hartford area. His release, it appeared, was imminent.
But then COVID struck the prisons, the state Department of Correction halted visitations, and the family worried about “Big Mike,” who had both diabetes and asthma.
Advocates call for closure of Northern Correctional, reinvestment in community supports
Northern Correctional Institution in Somers.
About a decade ago, Sen. Gary Winfield went on a tour of Northern Correctional Institution, the most secure prison in the state. As he walked through the windowless, gray hallways, Winfield’s tour guide seemed “gleeful” at the “marvel of engineering” that was the Somers prison.
What made it such an architectural feat, the guide seemed to think, was the prison’s ability “to break people,” Winfield recalled on a Tuesday afternoon Zoom call.
“Everything that we’ve done, all of the things that we have done, are choices we’ve made. They’re policy choices,” said Winfield, a New Haven Democrat. “We should be doing something about the fact that those are the choices we’ve made and never make those choices again.”
Cheshire Correctional Institution on Sept. 23, 2020.
The Department of Correction’s routine mass testing of prison staff and inmates has made it logistically difficult to quarantine and transfer people to different facilities, according to a recent report from a monitoring panel.
“The DOC has undertaken a herculean effort to test everyone who resides and works within the facility, far and above that which was expected as part of this agreement and far more than any other state prison system to our knowledge,” the panel wrote in its report about Cheshire Correctional Institution. “The high volume of testing has required frequent movement of people within the facility based on test results, which has been logistically challenging.”
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Another inmate housed at a Connecticut Department of Corrections facility has died of COVID-19, the agency said, bringing the total number of virus fatalities behind bars in the state to 13 this year.
The 69-year-old inmate died on Tuesday, Dec. 22 after he had been treated in an external hospital for seven days.
According to the Department of Correction, he was serving a 12-year sentence for first-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a child, and was not eligible for parole until April.
Due to medical privacy laws, the names of inmates who have succumbed to the disease have not been released.