The Pandemic Hits New York’s “Prison Nursing Home”

In June, the state agency that oversees New York’s prison system released a plan for a “gradual” reopening. The plan included a brief statement noting that the state would repurpose a facility in upstate New York for incarcerated men aged 65 and older who are at a higher risk of death if they contract COVID-19.

By moving them into the Adirondack Correctional Facility, a 100-bed medium-security prison located in a county with a low number of cases, the men would in theory face less exposure to the virus.

Yet within the past two weeks, at least two of the men recently transferred to Adirondack have tested positive for coronavirus.

Anne, a 71-year-old prisoner rights’ advocate who lives near Albany, has a loved one who was transferred to Adirondack in June. (Anne asked that both their full names be withheld to prevent retaliation by prison officials.) He has been incarcerated in nearly every New York prison during his almost three decades behind bars, and has repeatedly told her that Adirondack was “worse than Attica.”

He told Anne that he was not tested upon arrival, and wouldn’t receive his first test for over three weeks. During that time, he was not quarantined from the other men.

“They’re being threatened all the time,” Anne told Gothamist. “The guards tell them, ‘We got a box here, you know.’” (“The box” refers to being placed in solitary, 23 to 24 hours a day locked into a cell.) “The rules change every day, including rules that he’d never heard of,” she said, adding that the men are no longer allowed to take items, including water bottles, to the yard with them. “They’re being treated like they’re at a Max A [maximum security prison].”

As more men were transferred from other prisons, social distancing became difficult and sometimes impossible. At first, Anne’s loved one told her, meals were eaten at the mess hall with one person per table. Now, they sit one chair apart—less than six feet away from one another. “But they have to take their masks off to eat!” she said.

“He tries not to say too much because the calls are recorded,” Anne added. He did tell her that, after one other man spoke to media, prison staff tightened restrictions around movement, including limiting their time in the day room.

Theresa, a Harlem grandmother of two and member of the Release Aging People in Prison campaign, fears that her 65-year-old husband Morris, now on his 15th year of a 40-year sentence, will be transferred to Adirondack. (Theresa too asked that the couple’s full names not be used to prevent retaliation.)

The Adirondack Correctional Facility is closer to the Canadian border and Montreal than to New York City. Before the pandemic stopped prison visits, Theresa visited her husband two to three times each month. But if he is transferred to Adirondack, she estimates that she will only be able to afford to visit twice a year. “To be honest, I believe it will kill him,” she told Gothamist, adding that her husband has told her that seeing her helps him get through his lengthy prison sentence.

“This is Governor Cuomo’s new prison nursing home,” charged Jose Saldana, director of Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) campaign. “It’s his state prison system and it’s up to him whether or not people grow sick and die, or are safely released to their families and home communities.”

Saldana fears that COVID-19 will rapidly spread among this particularly vulnerable population, as it did in nursing homes across the state. “It would be a prison nursing home disaster.”

According to data provided by RAPP, nearly 30 percent of the 95 men at Adirondack were transferred from Fishkill Correctional Facility, which has the highest number of COVID cases and deaths. Another quarter of the men were transferred from Otisville which has the third highest number of COVID cases, and one death).

According to the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which oversees the state’s prison and parole systems, all 95 people at Adirondack have now been tested once. (DOCCS insists that Adirondack is not a nursing home, that those who require nursing home levels of care would be transferred to a regional medical unit.)

The pandemic has caused a 12 percent drop in the state’s prison population. Prisons stopped accepting new transfers, court closures stalled sentencing, and parole officers have sent fewer people back to prison for low-level violations.

New York’s prisons have logged 545 cases of COVID-19 and 16 incarcerated people have died of the virus, a low number compared to prisons in other states such as Texas, California, or even New Jersey. However, DOCCS has only tested 4,055 (or around 10 percent) of its 38,390 state prisoners.

Dr. Bobby Cohen, a physician and prison health expert, told Gothamist that in order to properly address COVID-19 in state prisons, “The state should immediately implement a policy of weekly repeated testing, contact tracing of positive test results, isolation of cases, and quarantine of contacts.”

“The state should have been doing this for months, and further delay will have terrible consequences,” Dr. Cohen said, adding that New York has enough testing capability and prison staff to implement a testing regime. “I am of course particularly concerned about Adirondack, where infections are likely to result in death.”

The threat of contracting coronavirus in crowded prisons has brought increased demands from family members and advocates that the governor take steps to decrease the prison population, including by issuing commutations to those who are at greater risk if they contract the virus—the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions.

At an April press briefing, Cuomo dismissed the idea of meaningfully decreasing the state’s prison population. "But reducing the prison population—we don't have any way to do that right now."

One week earlier, he had ordered the release of low-level parole violators in the city’s jails, allowing the release of 791 people. Still, at least one person got coronavirus and died while detained on Rikers for a parole violation. Two months after Cuomo’s order, 240 parole violators still languished at Rikers.

In June, Cuomo issued just three commutations; two allowed a 58-year-old and a 61-year-old to be immediately released. The third allows 30-year-old Teara Fatico to appear before the parole board in 2021, two years earlier than her original sentence permits.

As prisons reopen to new arrivals, the population could once again rise. Cuomo’s office did not return requests for comment.

Anne and other advocates say that to truly address the threat of the pandemic in state prisons, legislators and the governor should pass reform legislation that would further reduce the vulnerable population. There are currently 5,334 people ages 55 and over in the state’s prisons, according to data compiled by RAPP. (Of those, 149 are women and therefore not eligible to be transferred to Adirondack.)

The Elder Parole bill, which would require an immediate parole interview for people ages 55 and older who had served at least 15 years of their sentence, and the Fair and Timely Parole Act, which requires parole commissioners to consider an applicant's rehabilitative efforts, not solely the nature of their crime.

Saldana notes that neither bill guarantees that a person will receive parole. But, he adds, “they provide hope,” something that has been dwindling among those behind bars who are now unable to see their loved ones and live with the risk of being transferred even further away.

Both bills are currently in committee in the legislature; it is unclear whether they will be voted upon before the emergency legislative session ends at the end of next week. “Under the urgency of these circumstances, [lawmakers should] make these bills COVID-related and pass them,” said Saldana.

“If Elder Parole passed, Morris would be eligible to go before the parole board now,” Theresa said. “With the Free and Timely Act, we’re asking the parole board to judge them not on their past crime, but on who they are today.”

The Fair and Timely Parole Act would help Anne’s loved one who was convicted of murder nearly three decades ago. Since then, he has participated in dozens of prison programs, including alternatives to violence, alternatives to domestic violence, religious and educational programs. He has support letters written by staff from every prison in which he was incarcerated as well as family members, but none of these made a difference to the parole board, which denied him based on the nature of his crime.

“Who in their lives is the same in their seventies as they are in their thirties?” she asked. “Most of our elderly have served past their [minimum] sentences. I’m hoping that they wake up and let these guys go.”

During a recent call, Anne’s loved one told her that one of the men who had tested positive for COVID returned to his housing unit. He does not know whether the man had been tested again before being released from quarantine. (DOCCS confirmed that the man had been released after being asymptomatic for 14 days; officials did not state whether the man had been tested a second time.)

“He is expecting to get it,” Anne said. When they talk, he tells her, “I haven’t gotten it yet.” He recently wrote her a letter telling her, for the first time in his three decades behind bars, he expected to die while in prison. “He never talked like that before,” she said.