By Gabriel Monte
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
LUBBOCK COUNTY, Texas — At the Montford Prison Unit’s trustee camp, 61-year-old Calip Joseph Farmer is serving a 37-year sentence for an enhanced attempted burglary conviction.
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the Montford Unit has 13 active cases of the virus, 10 inmates and three employees. Four patients — two inmates and two employees — are listed as recovered. No deaths have been reported at the prison.
Farmer, who wrote to the Avalanche-Journal in April, is among the many Texas prison inmates who have reached out to the media with concerns about how prison officials are handling inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Farmer, who suffers from high blood pressure and hepatitis, sent a note in April with concerns about how prison officials were handling the virus.
“This unit has inmates working like everything is normal in the laundry,” wrote Farmer, who was assigned laundry duty. “That all the dirty sheets, towels and clothing with blood on them and, yes, the coronavirus in the clothing.”
He wrote that at least one prison officer wasn’t wearing a mask as she handed them to inmates.
“We have masks made in this same laundry but they do not have a seal and no real level of protection,” he wrote, citing television personality, Dr. Oz.
Farmer said social distancing guidelines were being followed in some aspects of prison, such as the recreation area where only 10 people could go in at a time. They can watch television, but “no board games like checkers because of touching the same item by another and one building cannot rec with another.”
In the dining area, inmates stand 6 feet apart, he wrote. However, in other areas, he said those practices aren’t followed.
“We all sleep in areas that are not 6 feet apart.” he said. "... When it comes to work, inmates are in large numbers from every dorm working side by side. Laundry is small and when you first walk in you can smell the stink in the air. With COVID-19 this is a serious risk to inmates like me over 60 with health issues. “
Within the walls of the Wynne Unit in Huntsville, which has the most reported coronavirus deaths, the men locked inside are telling a drastically different story than the state about how inmates are being handled during the pandemic.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has emphasized that healthy inmates are kept separated from sick inmates and those exposed to the sick to limit the spread of the illness that has exploded within state lockups — with more than 7,400 inmates known to have had the virus as of Wednesday.
The agency, which began mass testing in mid-May at dozens of its more than 100 lockups across the state, has also said prisoners in facilities that have COVID-19 infections are only taken out of cells to shower in small groups, while inmates with symptoms are tested and isolated.
Inmates at Huntsville’s Wynne Unit, however, say the prison didn’t test feverish inmates in April, after the virus had taken hold in the cellblocks, and continues to routinely place sick or exposed inmates in cells or other close quarters with the healthy. They say men who otherwise have been separated from one another are still often taken to the showers in large groups.
“To say that the Wynne Unit is taking proper measures and procedures would be a joke,” Dustin Hawkins, a 32-year-old serving a 10-year sentence out of Harris County, wrote in a letter to The Texas Tribune last month. He said he was denied testing in April while sick with a high fever and chills and had lost his sense of taste — common symptoms of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.
“Since the pandemic has started there has been multitudes of sick offenders going untested,” Hawkins said.
Over the last two months, 20 Wynne prisoners — on lockdown largely without phone access — have written letters to their loved ones and the Tribune, detailing the conditions in which the coronavirus has rapidly spread. They all share similar stories, describing their environment as unsanitary, disorganized and exceptionally dangerous.
“To me (and I’m just an inmate) but you don’t spread people around [the] unit not knowing if they are positive or negative ... all this random movement is not safe,” Rod, who asked that his last name not be used for fear of retaliation, wrote in a letter to the Tribune in late May. “In here it seems they are trying to get us sick.”
TDCJ officials have stressed to the public and federal courts the measures they are taking system-wide to protect those in their custody from the illness.
On March 13, when Gov. Greg Abbott declared a statewide public health disaster due to the pandemic, he called for inmate visitation to be canceled at state prison facilities. In mid-April, after nearly 200 TDCJ inmates had been confirmed positive for the virus, the department stopped accepting new inmates from county jails, several of which had recorded COVID-19 cases. Later that month, TDCJ reported that it had issued cloth masks to all inmates and staff, with more protective equipment worn by staff in areas confirmed or suspected to have infections.
Prison officials also have said they isolate all sick inmates, conduct extensive contact tracing, educate inmates on protecting themselves from the virus and regularly check them for symptoms.
“Since the novel coronavirus began to spread across the United States in March, TDCJ has acted swiftly and decisively, in accordance with federal guidelines and medical experts’ recommendations, to protect prison staff and inmates from infection,” Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins said in a May federal court filing in a lawsuit involving another prison.
Still, the number of inmates and employees known to have the virus continues to skyrocket, with infection reported in more than half of the state’s more than 100 lockups. Since the department began to test all inmates — regardless of symptoms — at dozens of prisons in May, the number of inmates testing positive has jumped by nearly 4,400 in the last two weeks, from about 2,500 to 6,900 as of June 6, according to agency reports. More than 1,000 employees also have tested positive.
Those numbers include people who have since recovered from the virus, and TDCJ has noted that the rapidly increasing number represents more information from mass testing, not a surge in infection. TDCJ spokesperson Jeremy Desel said Thursday that since mass testing began, the majority of new positive cases have been in asymptomatic inmates, and the number positive results coming from symptomatic inmates has been declining.
The virus is presumed to have killed at least 42 Texas prisoners and seven employees as of June 6, TDCJ has reported. The agency does not confirm the cause of death based on initial autopsy reports. Thirty-one more inmate deaths are still being investigated.
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©2020 the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal (Lubbock, Texas)