Updated
Feb 19, 2021
He Got COVID In Prison. The Government Said He Was Recovered. Then He Died.
The death of a federal prisoner in Indiana illustrates the incomplete and often misleading nature of COVID-19 data released by correctional facilities.
Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/HuffPost; Photos: Getty
When Joseph Lee Fultz arrived at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, in January to begin a 27-year sentence, the prison was fighting to contain a COVID-19 outbreak.
Positive cases at the sprawling complex ― which consists of a maximum-security prison where death row prisoners are housed, a medium-security prison and an adjacent camp ― had jumped from fewer than a dozen in early November to more than 400 by the end of December, coinciding with a rash of executions conducted there.
In December, Covid-19 infections in prisons in the United States hit a record 25,000 in one week. Among correctional staff that month, there were an additional 5,000 new infections a week, leading to spread in surrounding communities. According to a New York Times database, collectively, more than 580,000 people at correctional institutions have been infected. The prisoner death toll has now surpassed 2,000.
Please share this article - Go to very top of page, right hand side, for social media buttons.
Eleven months into the pandemic, the U.S. prison system has not gotten control of its rising caseload, which is likely still underestimated, according to The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism outlet focused on criminal justice issues. Doctors, attorneys, prison reform advocates, and public health researchers are increasingly concerned about one of the tactics that prisons are using to isolate symptomatic individuals: solitary confinement, the prolonged use of which is an intern
Though virus has torn through correctional facilities, most prison workers are declining vaccines
By Laura Crimaldi Globe Staff,Updated February 14, 2021, 5:04 p.m.
Email to a Friend
An inmate is returned to his cell by a correctional officer at the Worcester County Jail and House of Corrections in West Boylston. Officials started administering COVID-19 coronavirus vaccines in Massachusetts correctional facilities in late January.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
More than half of the employees in the Massachusetts Department of Correction have declined the stateâs offer to get the COVID-19 vaccine at work, even as the virus has wreaked havoc across the prison system, infecting roughly 900 workers and killing 21 inmates.
Illinois prisons and jails will soon be required to notify families when their incarcerated loved ones die. As part of the sweeping criminal justice overhaul now awaiting Governor J.B. Pritzker’s signature, state correctional facilities must investigate deaths in custody and report them to immediate family members, as well as the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, a state agency that conducts research and analysis.