Prison diaries: How COVID-19 is spreading in one Michigan prison
Efrén Paredes, Jr.
Efrén Paredes, Jr. is a blogger, thought leader, and social justice changemaker. He has been featured in various TV news, radio, and podcast interviews to discuss the COVID-19 crisis in Michigan prisons. He was convicted of murder and robbery committed when he was 15 years old, and maintains he is innocent. In 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled life sentences without parole for minors were unconstitutional, and Efrén has been awaiting a re sentencing since then. His interviews and ongoing series about the crisis can be read here.
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Before the first incarcerated person tested positive for COVID-19 in a Michigan prison, I warned of the devastation that would be caused if the government did not take aggressive measures to mitigate and contain the spread of the virus.
I’m incarcerated at the Lake Correctional Facility in Michigan for a murder I didn’t commit 30 years ago. I was 15 then and wrongly accused. I’m still fighting for my innocence in court, but meanwhile, I’m trying to stay healthy while the virus spreads through the prison. People here were being told to sit at small three-foot square tables less than two feet apart to eat their meals. Several incarcerated people working in the dining hall tested positive for COVID-19, as did staff members who work here. Some of the people who tested positive were handing people their meal trays.
Over 1,300 people passed through the dining hall three times a day during normal meal times from every housing unit, except one which is a long-term care unit. People who work in the dining hall also live in various housing units. It is the one space where every person entered at least twice a day.
All this activity in a single space made it a petri dish for propagation of COVID-19. Just one month after the first incarcerated person in the Michigan Department of Corrections was diagnosed with COVID-19, the number of incarcerated people testing positive has surged to 1,363 cases as of April 27 at 9:30 a.m. Sadly, 33 of the people have also died from the disease.
Lakeland has the largest number of people who have been infected with COVID-19 in the state and those who have died. To date nearly 800 of the 1,400 people housed at the prison have tested positive and 12 people have died.
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Of the total number of COVID-19 tests administered at Lakeland, an astonishing 57 percent of people tested positive. The prison represents 58 percent of all COVID-19 cases and 36 percent of the deaths of the entire Michigan prison system. These numbers are the result of robust testing that occurred at the prison last week. However, these results are deeply flawed.
During the past month I have sent multiple messages to government officials as well as spoken to a number of progressive groups and members of the TV, radio, and print media to raise awareness about this issue.
The housing units where the least number of people tested positive were from the barracks-style pole barn housing units (i.e., E and F Units). These are the housing units I wrote about for weeks where people had complained that they had been very sick with COVID-19 symptoms, and being repeatedly denied COVID-19 tests, and medical care.
Antibody testing may reveal that many of the people who tested negative in those housing units were already infected and recovered. That’s good news. However, it means many people were allowed to suffer who could have received treatment.
One of the suggestions I made was to immediately suspend the practice of feeding people in crowded dining halls because people cannot practice social distancing in that space. As an alternative I recommended that prisons provide people packaged meals to eat in their housing unit until the COVID-19 crisis ends.
It wasn’t until 200 people became infected at the prison and nine deaths later that officials decided to finally suspend the practice of feeding people in the dining hall on April 23, and began delivering packaged meals to housing units for people to safely consume.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the danger of densely overcrowded prison housing units not only as a human rights crisis, but also as being public health dangers because people are unable to practice social distancing or extricate themselves from the situation.
When incarcerated people contract COVID-19, prison staff members contract it as well, so do their family members and the communities they live in. The spillover effect is enormous. Members of the public who believe they don’t have to worry about what happens inside prisons are wrong.
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This distorted thinking is part of the reason the COVID-19 crisis inside prisons was ignored for so long while the virus violently spread like a raging fire across vast fields of dry grass.
I am advocating for lawmakers to end all double-bunking in prison housing units and ensure that beds are separated by six feet in every Michigan prison to conform with Center for Disease Control’s social distancing guidelines, which would considerably help mitigate the spread of deadly infectious diseases like COVID-19.
There will continue to be COVID-19 outbreaks throughout Michigan prisons all over the state for months until a vaccine is created in 12 to 18 months. Scientists are already predicting a COVID-19 resurgence in the fall as well that will be more lethal than the current wave of attack.
The health of incarcerated people who survived the disease this time around has been seriously compromised. Many have suffered irreversible lung, heart, and kidney damage, and their bodies may not be resilient enough to survive a second wave of infection.
The other thing to remember is that deaths lag behind the number of people identified to have COVID-19. For weeks to come, we will continue hearing about incarcerated people succumbing to the virus in Michigan prisons. We still have a long way to go.
This crisis inside our prisons deserves serious public attention to ensure we aggressively work to prevent its recurrence.
I will continue using my platform and advocacy to shine a spotlight on this issue and raise awareness about the danger of stuffing human bodies into crowded cages that can become COVID-19 death chambers.
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