This story was updated at 9:25 p.m.
Corrections officials said Wednesday significantly more Vermont inmates held in a privately run Mississippi prison have tested positive for the coronavirus.
Three days after reporting 85 Vermont inmates had tested positive, officials now say the number has jumped to 147 after additional testing, or about two-thirds of the total 219 prisoners from the state held at the Mississippi prison.
That outbreak appears to be fraying the relationship between the state of Vermont and CoreCivic, the operator of the Mississippi prison, at a time when a two-year contract between the parties is nearing renewal.
Meanwhile, in Vermont, an inmate at the Northern State Correctional Center in Newport is in isolation following a positive result for Covid-19, as is an inmate at the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Center in Rutland.
“I consider this a full-fledged, serious emergency,” James Baker, interim corrections commissioner, said during a late Wednesday afternoon press conference where he revealed the latest number of Covid-19 inmates.
“As the commissioner of corrections I’m very concerned about the test results coming back from Mississippi,” Baker said, adding, “One of the questions obviously here is the size of the spread, trying to identify the course of how that spread occurred.”
Vermont corrections staff are traveling to Mississippi and are expected to be at the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Mississippi, on Thursday.
Vermont Defender General Matthew Valerio, whose department includes the state’s Prisoners’ Rights Office, said he wasn’t surprised by the results reported Wednesday given the number reported earlier in the week.
“Once you get an outbreak in a facility like that with people basically living on top of each other and a lack of testing protocols that are regular and consistent, when you get a breakout of 20 you pretty much get a breakout of everybody,” he said. “Effectively, that facility is contaminated.”
Growing discord
Baker said he was upset that CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison operators, allowed such a large outbreak to occur.
“I cannot overstate how frustrated I am,” he said, “that someone that runs a jail facility like that wasn’t aware of things that we were aware of in little old Vermont, that we were able to keep our facilities as clean as they are.”
Baker added, “You can’t have this kind of outbreak and were following the best practices that were out there.”
The state’s contract with CoreCivic expires in October, and, prior to the outbreak, Vermont corrections officials have said they were working on a renewal. Now, those talks appear to have been put on hold.
Last year, Baker said, Vermont paid CoreCivic about $6.8 million to house its inmates.
Some lawmakers, organizations, and others have long been critical of the state’s more than two-decade practice of sending inmates, as well the money it costs, out of state. The Scott administration over the years has pitched building a new, large facility in Vermont, but has gotten a chilly response from legislators.
Baker said Wednesday that the mass testing of Vermont inmates in Mississippi, as well as the ongoing medical care of prisoners testing positive for Covid-19, should not cost the state’s taxpayers a dime.
“Our contract with them is to provide facilities for inmates and to provide medical care,” he said.
As for how the state can enforce the provisions of its contract with CoreCivic, Baker replied, “I’m the one that authorizes the checks to be cut for them to be paid.”
CoreCivic officials couldn’t immediately be reached Wednesday for comment, but in past statements have repeatedly said the company has been following Centers for Disease and Control Prevention guidelines for addressing Covid-19 in prisons.
Valerio, the defender general, spoke Wednesday about a court case earlier this spring where it appears the corrections department had a different view of CoreCivic’s actions.
That action was brought by a Vermont inmate in the Mississippi prison seeking an injunction to enhance Covid-19 protections in that facility.
In its reply to that injunction request, the attorney for the corrections department described the Mississippi facility’s Covid-19 protocols as “comprehensive and robust.”
That filing also stated, “… the enacting of Vermont-specific, facility-wide policies at TCCF would be unworkable, as the Warden must also effectively manage five other inmate populations based on other government partners’ directives and mandates, and because its own policies and procedures have been created and implemented based on its own unique inmate population, safety and security concerns, physical plant, and staffing needs.”
The case eventually ended with certain increased Covid-19 precautions by CoreCivic, but the resolution didn’t specifically address testing.
Out-of-state inmates
None of the Vermont inmates who tested positive, in-state or out-of-state, are exhibiting conditions that are concerning, Baker said. “We will validate that by tomorrow afternoon when our medical director gets on the ground in Mississippi.”
The state houses 219 inmates at the Mississippi prison it doesn’t have the capacity to house in-state.
Mass testing of Vermont inmates at the Mississippi facility took place last week after six inmates returning to Vermont from Mississippi, as well as one who remains at that facility, all tested positive for Covid-19.
Vermont inmates who have tested positive at the Mississippi prison are being kept in a housing unit separate from other prisoners.
In addition to the 147 positive test results of Vermont inmates at the Mississippi facility, 62 inmates have tested negative, eight have refused testing, and two are still pending.
Those inmates who have tested negative in Mississippi will be retested in two days, according to Baker.
Vermont’s lax oversight
While Baker had sharp words Wednesday for CoreCivic, Vermont’s oversight of its prisoners in Mississippi as well as CoreCivic’s adherence to contract requirements has also come into question.
Focus has turned in recent days to the lack of action by the Department of Corrections to implement a provision of its contract with CoreCivic that allowed the state to call on the private prison operator to conduct regular mass testing of Vermont inmates in the Mississippi facility.
It wasn’t until late last week that corrections ordered CoreCivic to do that testing, despite the contract provision that out-of-state inmates in Mississippi would be treated under the same policies and procedures as prisoners in Vermont.
Vermont for the past several months has been conducting regular mass testing of inmates and staff at its six prisons to help prevent and contain the spread of the coronavirus, but did not include the out-of-state prisoners in Mississippi in that rotation.
Prior to last week, Vermont had 48 inmates across its in-state facilities test positive for the coronavirus, including 45 in one outbreak this spring at the St. Albans prison.
However, CoreCivic was only testing inmates who showed symptoms of Covid-19, which had been the procedure in Mississippi. Before last week, only two Vermont inmates there had been tested since the start of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year. Both those tests came back negative.
“In hindsight, as the commissioner of corrections on this particular issue, I should have been more inquisitive, and I should have been more aware of processes in Mississippi and asked more questions to clarify,” Baker said during the press conference Wednesday.
“Where we sit now with the number of positive tests,” he added, “something is wrong, and I don’t know what that is, but no matter what it is or how it is, Jim Baker is the commissioner of corrections and he’s responsible for it.”
The Vermont prison protocols for addressing Covid-19, including the regular mass testing of prisoners, was not occurring at the CoreCivic facility in Mississippi, he said. “I’m not happy about it and we need to figure out why that is,” Baker added.
To address the current situation, he said, all options are on the table and up for discussion. “That may or may not involve bringing folks back,” Baker said.
Earlier this week, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, speaking at one of his twice-weekly press conferences, said state officials should have seen the possibility of an outbreak coming at the Mississippi prison.
The rate of increase for new Covid-19 cases in Mississippi is near the highest in the country, and that rate in the county where the prison is located is among the top among counties in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Latest Vermont testing
In Vermont, the corrections department did mass testing of the 370 inmates and 140 staff at the Newport prison this week, with one positive result. That positive result, according to Baker, was an inmate who had tested positive during an April outbreak of Covid-19 at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.
Since that time, Baker said, that inmate has been tested over and over again, yielding both positive and negative results. Currently, that inmate is being treated by corrections as positive for Covid-19 and is in isolation at the Newport prison, he added.
“This is a very unusual set of circumstances,” Baker said.
The inmate who recently tested positive at the Rutland jail, Baker said, was a new intake into the facility and had been tested before ever joining the general population of that correctional center.
According to the Vermont Department of Health, the inmates from Vermont who tested positive out-of-state would be added to Mississippi’s total positive numbers while those prisoners in state who tested positive would be added to Vermont’s total numbers.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Number of Vermont inmates with Covid-19 in Mississippi prison surges to 147.