COVID and Prisons - Oregon Inmates File Class Action Suit

As of July 2022, there have been over 601,000 incarcerated persons infected with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, and 2,900 persons have died as a result of those infections. Alongside incarcerated persons, over 215,000 corrections staff contracted COVID-19, leading to 278 deaths. Due to the nature of the environment and what we know about COVID-19, people who live and work in correctional settings are at high-risk of exposure to COVID-19. With the United States in the midst of yet another COVID wave of rising rates of transmission at the hands of the BA.5 variant, the efforts continue to vaccinate the prison population and correctional staff.

At the beginning of the pandemic, preventative release policies under the federal CARES Act saw prison populations fall as those convicted of lesser offenses served sentences under home confinement. As the pandemic drags on however, many of those preventative polices have been dropped and the Federal Bureau of Prisons is falling short of following through on the CARES Act and implementing the First Step Act, unnecessarily leaving many people in prison and vulnerable to increased COVID exposure.

Advocates for incarerated persons are taking note of this and responding.

In Oregon, a federal lawsuit involving current or former Oregon inmates infected with COVID, including one who died, is moving forward with notification of nearly half of the state’s prison population of their inclusion in the class-action suit. The US District Court in Eugene has certified the class-action status of the suit in April, and since then, a court administrator is reaching out to class action members, including around 5,000 incarcerated persons in Oregon infected with COVID since the start of the pandemic in February 2020 through May of this year. The members of the class action represents 40% of Oregon's 12,000+ incarcerated persons.

The case, brought by seven current and former inmates, accuses state officials of violating their Eighth Amendment rights, which guarantees protection from cruel and unusual punishment. The suit also claims the state was negligent in protecting them from becoming infected and preventing inmate death, knowing that masking and social distancing is effective in preventing COVID transmission. The lawsuit maintains that the state acted with deliberate indifference to inmate rights by not separating infected corrections offers and being slow to vaccinate prisoners. Additionally, the complaint said that continuing communal dining inside prisons compared in stark contrast with statewide closures of restaurants and other eateries.

Juan Chavez, an attorney for the plaintiffs and director of the civil rights project at the Oregon Justice Resource Center;

"I think the stories that stick with me are the ones where people watched their cellmates die in front of them because of this disease when it could’ve been prevented. That’s a particularly scary, dangerous and hopeless space to find yourself … where you have a system that’s allegedly built to keep the public safe, but also the people inside of these prisons safe, and this was just going to keep happening that so many people were going to die or get injured.”

For updated news and statistics about COVID-19 in prisons, you can visit the COVID Prison Project, a group of interdisciplinary, public health scientists maintaining a public-facing database that provides recent data on the state of COVID-19 within the United States correctional facilities.