Eighty percent of the Vermont inmates held in a private prison in Tallahatchie, Miss. have tested positive for COVID-1, Department of Corrections officials said Monday.
Of the 176 inmates that have tested positive in the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility, run by CoreCivic, four are being closely monitored and one inmate has been hospitalized for COVID-19 complications, according to interim commissioner Jim Baker.
The maximum security facility currently houses 219 Vermont inmates, Baker said. The facility has a capacity to hold 2,800 prisoners.
Vermont’s contract with CoreCivic to house inmates in the facility expires this fall, but Baker said his expectations around care for the inmates and confidence that CoreCivic can deliver on Vermont’s requests is wavering. Whether the state will continue to partner with CoreCivic will be decided in the next 30 to 40 days.
“I will say that my level of confidence is greater now than it was two weeks ago, but it’s one thing to trust, it’s another thing to verify,” Baker said. “You can trust but you got to verify, and we’re doing the best we can to verify. And we are demanding and receiving very clear updates on medical reports on every inmate there.”
Earlier this month, the department of corrections announced that 85 Vermont inmates tested positive for COVID-19. In just days that number increased to 147 and has continued upwards and will continue to increase, Baker said.
“So, we have now 33 negative tests, waiting for the last testing, which was done last Thursday to come back,” Baker said. “We are anticipating that we could see more positives.”
Baker said of the inmates in Mississippi, most remain asymptomatic and approximately 119 are considered to be in “medical recovery,” based on Vermont Department of Health Guidelines, he said.
Those guidelines, from the Department of Health, say if a person is symptom-free for 10 days, they are in recovery from the virus, Baker said.
At the end of July, six inmates who were transferred from Tallahatchie to Rutland’s Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility did test positive for COVID-19.
Two Rutland guards have tested positive and are displaying symptoms while no other staff members or inmates have tested positive, Baker said.
“Unfortunately, two of our officers have been sick. They are not hospitalized, but they have had symptoms as a result of being exposed to the virus,” Baker said. “I’ve spoken to both officers, they are getting better, but they do remain with symptoms.”
But in Mississippi, the future of the state’s relationship with CoreCivic remains unknown, Baker said.
He declined to say if recent handlings of COVID-19 cases in the facility and the violent death of an inmate last week are motivating the state to change vendors, or drop private facilities entirely.
“Some of that trust that should have been there has been lost, but we’re slowly building it back up. We have been, for a period of time, talking about an extension [of the contract],” Baker said. The challenge we have is to up and move 219 inmates to another business relationship or bring them back here.”
The Mississippi facility announced this past Friday that another inmate, not from Vermont had died after he was attacked, Baker said. The attack happened in another part of the prison and no Vermont inmates were involved, Baker emphasized.
Read the story on VTDigger here: 80% of Vermont inmates in Mississippi test positive for COVID-19.