Texas Prison Personnel Deaths Rise As Covid-19 Measures Relaxed

A correctional officer was planning her wedding; another retired, then returned to work after age 60. The oldest was almost 80 years old.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (DCJ) reported that the coronavirus contributed to the deaths of at least 13 officers last month.

As the death rate fell across the stateSeptember was the deadliest month for prison staff since the pandemic began.

Overcrowding, dilapidated buildings, and poor social distancing have made prisons and penitentiaries across the country a hotbed of coronavirus infection.

Elsewhere, prisons have imposed strict prevention protocols to contain the contagion and have been much more assertive in requiring the use of mask and the vaccine now that the highly contagious delta variant has spread throughout the country.

But Texas has chosen to relax, or outright reject, many of those preventive measures.

In Texas, requiring the vaccine is prohibited, and the state no longer requires the mask in nearly a quarter of its jails and prisons.

These provisions have made public health and criminal policy experts fear that the increase in deaths among prison staff is revealing a trend that has no end in sight, one that the state recognizes but does little to stop.

Melissa Young believes that her boyfriend would have been saved if there were preventive measures.

After suffering from persistent pneumonia caused by the coronavirus that sent him to the hospital twice, Codie Whitley-Turner thought he was already recovering last month. He was eating, breathing most of the time on his own. She used to apologize for getting sick and had finally complied with Young’s requests for vaccinations before returning to her job in the kitchen at the Huntsville Unit in Walker County.

“He never had a chance to go home and get vaccinated,” Young told The Dallas Morning News.

On September 9, the man she had come to Texas for from Ohio, who loved video games, Halloween, and Texas, and whom she was planning to marry, died suddenly and unexpectedly overnight. He was 32 years old.

Two months before Whitley-Turner died, the Huntsville Unit had lifted his order to wear a mask.

The coronavirus has hit Texas jails hard.

In March and April 2020, when the pandemic struck, DCJ suspended visits and stopped receiving inmates from county jails.

The state of Texas introduced a strong clinical testing regime and imposed the use of masks in its around 100 jails and penitentiaries.

But the virus continued to spread, facilitated by factors that make an infectious disease dangerous in any prison: a captive population where it is difficult to maintain social distance and self-quarantine; limited access to health services, and old buildings without air conditioning and poor ventilation.

The contagion may have been exacerbated by the state’s resistance to releasing prisoners sooner, experts say.

By the summer of 2020, more than 15,000 state prisoners had contracted the virus and 100 had died.

Now at least 173 Inmates have died due to complications from Covid-19.

The deaths of others 93 are being investigated or are presumed to be related to the pathogen.

Prison personnel are also very vulnerable to the virus.

After registering increases in the death rate among staff in July, August and December 2020, the incidence of death fell after the introduction of the vaccine earlier this year.

In June the department did not announce that there were casualties among prison employees, but after the state relaxed prevention protocols in July – it lifted the order to wear a mask in some prisons and allowed visits again – the death rate among the staff fired again, reaching a total of 13 last month.

In total they have died 70 prison employees, four of them just this month. Three in five were correctional officers, half were people of color, and the average age was 55.

One of those men was Honorato Antones.

The 61-year-old Antones was proud of his work as a correctional officer at the James V. Allred Unit in far North Texas, said his son Robert.

He believed that prisoners could be rehabilitated and that it was important that they have an ally among the guards.

But Antones was hesitant to get the vaccine. He told Robert he was concerned about the long-term effects, but his son asked him to reconsider.

Antones ended up agreeing, and received his first dose in August.

“Within a few days he got covid,” Robert told The News.

Honorato Antones died on September 3.

“He was a good guy. He loved his family and he liked people, ”said Robert.

“Knowing that if he had been vaccinated a little earlier he would have been fully protected … he would still be here and I would still have my father.”

Robert hopes that telling his father’s case will help change the minds of prison employees like Antones.

“Just get vaccinated. It is not worth losing your life for that. “

Public health and prison policy experts say state mask wear and vaccination regulations have put inmates, prison staff and the communities where they live at greater risk.

Gov. Greg Abbott allowed jails and penitentiaries to be among the few entities that could require the mask, which the prisons department did for more than a year.

But the Republican president did not exempt state prisons from his ban on imposing the use of a mask.

This means that prison employees could refuse to be vaccinated, and many have done so.

In fact, they have been less receptive to the vaccine than prisoners, who may also choose not to get vaccinated.

At the end of September, the prison department confirmed that less than half of prison employees are fully vaccinated, while 57% of inmates are.

Both groups are below the vaccination rate for Texans 12 and older, which is 62%.

Since March 2020, more than 14,000 prison employees – about half the force – have contracted the virus. Currently almost 600 are infected.

Per prison policy, only staff assigned to hospitals are required to be vaccinated against diseases such as chickenpox, hepatitis B and influenza, said Robert Hurst, a DCJ spokesman.

Although administrators are not satisfied with the current COVID-19 vaccination rate among staff, they agree with Abbott that getting vaccinated should be a personal decision, he said.

“Unfortunately, we know that decision can have some deadly consequences,” Hurst said.

He added that the department is not aware of any employee or inmate who has been fully vaccinated and has died of covid-19.

The department will continue to encourage everyone to get vaccinated through posters, videos, brochures, vaccination drives and a consistent reward for time off, he said.

On July 1, as the delta variant swept through Texas, the jail department lifted its order to wear a mask in jail units that achieved an average vaccination rate of 70% among staff and inmates.

Visitors, who were welcomed back to state jails and penitentiaries, no longer had to wear a mask in units that reached that threshold.

Hurst said the department consulted its medical partners at the University of Texas Medical Branch and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center before making that decision.

“The factors considered were the level of infection within the system, which provides a certain degree of natural immunity; and an average vaccination rate that could lead to a certain degree of herd immunity, ”Hurst added.

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) They updated their protocols for COVID-19, even urging people who had been vaccinated to wear a mask in places “of substantial or strong transmission.”

Currently 22 state prisons and prisons no longer require a mask.

Experts said the state’s policy on masks and vaccines is unfair and dangerous.

Unvaccinated employees not only put themselves and their families at risk, but also expose inmates, whose lives are in their hands, they accuse.

Dr. Charles Lerner, a retired infectious disease physician, said the department’s decision not to require a mask at all its facilities increases the risk of transmission, and asked inmates to require a mask and vaccinations.

Anything less reveals that those provisions do not have the best of the health of officers and prisoners in mind, he said.

“It is pure politics. Science is not involved in this, ”Lerner said.

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