When they disappeared in the last days of January, the horizon of the country’s largest one-site criminal collided with a cold, limestone sky, its snad walls and watchtowers rose like fists, making it look like a forbidden college campus. Cook County Jail, Sheriff Tom Dart, compares it to a small town. There is one population: about 5,000 prisoners each day and 2400 employees. blocks on the southern outskirts of La Villita, surpassing the nearby wineries and bungalows. And then there are the services: the criminal has a medical center, a privatized food supplier, an economy, several study rooms and chapels, and a transport formula – buses and white block vans that roar every day on and off site.
But in all the decisive respects, it is not a city at all. Residents, of course, are held captive and held in limited neighborhoods. Some remain in the “bedrooms”, giant rooms full of rows of bunk beds. Others are covered in cells. 6 feet to 10 feet on two grounds that can house up to 48 prisoners each. Each terrain has only one non-unusual space: a medium-sized room with screw-down tables and a wall TV.
Although built to confine, cook County Jail remains, in general circumstances, a hotbed of activities, driven by a stable influx and influx of others. In 2019 alone, nearly 60,000 other people awaiting trial or bail have passed, accused of each of them. and from the break-in to the triple homicide. Newly stopped accumulate appearance by appearance in the basement, where 20, 30, 40 are grouped at a time into chain link spaces that are held as they are processed. lawyers, contractors and suppliers who come and go, as well as the other 500 to 1,500 people who stop at detainees every day.
All this, the captive population, the nearest neighborhoods, the coherence of others, makes the position a Petri plaque, as Cook County Council President Toni Preckwinkle called it, a position especially sensitive to the immediate spread of a contagious disease. From mid-March to April, COVID-19 “disturbed the criminal,” Dart says, which led to 1,000 cases between inmates and staff alone at the time. Ten other people, seven inmates and 3 correctional officers, would eventually die of the disease. The criminal would be declared “the most productive hot spot in the United States” through the New York Times. He would be beaten through a federal action of elegance on behalf of inmates who claims Dart has been unable to prevent a “immediate climbing public fitness disaster” and has asked him to do more. Protesters covered up outdoors to ask the offender to release all his prisoners.
Still, it may have been worse. In the end, the criminal would be praised through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for controlling contagion within its walls at a time when it continued to spread outwards. Dart would claim victory, proclaiming at a press convention that “not only do we bend our curve, we kill the curve. “
As there were no rules to follow, Dart’s efforts did not unfold smoothly. However, he was able to respond on the fly, adjusting his hastily created plan, which was rarely conducted through the courts, to mitigate the crisis, what the CDC report would call “one of the largest COVID-19 epidemics in a collective environment. “This is the inner story of what happened.
In the last days of January, when COVID-19 had landed in the United States after having already wrapped up central China, Dart had become concerned. He began looking for a plan on what to do in the event of an outbreak in the criminal. “I was dying, dying, for someone to give me a playbook, by someone who said, ‘Here, Tom, come on. All you have to do is exhaust it. ‘ He addressed giant villages with extensive incarceration systems and the Large Jail Network, a data exchange center for sheriffs and criminal administrators. But he discovered “nothing anywhere” to deal with such a serious contagion.
In early March, after Seattle became a hot spot, one of its workers contacted someone in the King County jail who had ties to Chicago to have a look. “They have no idea what they’re doing,” Dart recalls. They’re just looking to figure it out. ” At the time, Dart says, he learned that they “left us with our own devices to expand a plan. “
The criminal was fortunate in a sense: his annual war on the flu meant he had a set of protocols for dealing with a widespread disease. “We’ve just returned to those fundamental practices,” says dr. Connie Mennella, president of Cermak Correctional Health, who is guilty of the remedy of inmates in Cook County Jail. This meant re-emphasizing hand washing and disinfection of affected surfaces. It also meant remembering “officers who are alert to symptomatic inmates so that if they see someone coughing or sick, put a mask on them, isolate them,” he says.
As Dart and Mennella attempted to mobilize, the severity of the spread of the virus was dramatic in the outdoor world. On March 9, after Illinois showed its eleventh case, Governor JBPritzker issued a crisis statement throughout the state. day, the criminal began his edition of shelter on site, cutting rehabilitation systems for inmates and restricting movements on campus. Two days later, the NBA announced that it would postpone the rest of its season. For Dart, the truth struck head-on when he saw photographs of thunder and jazz players coming out of the box as the crowd watched in stunned silence. “I don’t mean that’s when I took it seriously for the first time. But when I saw the NBA, just before the game started, cancel like this, I thought, okay, what’s going on here?»
Dealing with the constant influx of new detainees, both as a vector imaginable, was paramount. “I had about two hundred new people going to criminality for both one and two days for bail hearings,” Dart says, “and we sticked to 60, 70 in line with one hundred of them. “He called for all new detainees as of March thirteen to carry out constant checks safely (the offender had been asking them screening questions about foreign travel and flu-like symptoms since last January). Any new inmates with symptoms of the disease were sent to residential treatment unit, where they gained a mask. Starting March 20, Dart ordered the remaining new detainees to remain in the past for 10 days before they were allowed into the general population. )
The visits were also delicate. The undeniable solution would have been simply to suspend them, but it would damage morale. For many inmates, some of whom were locked up for years awaiting trial, those visits were “the only thing that kept them mentally capable of dealing with them,” Dart says. “I knew that if I cut off the visits, tensions would increase. divisions. ” He had been tracking guest temperature since March thirteen and had limited the number of others on each prisoner’s guest list to two, however, he said this was not enough. “No, I have to avoid it. He did it on March 15. To mitigate the impact, he provided inmates with more free phone calls. “I also embarked on the video tour. It’s a very complicated thing to telegraph. But we did.
“We were preparing for impact,” says dr. Connie Mennella, head of the prison’s medical services. “I don’t think we knew at the time how complicated it would be. “
Dart has also worked to reduce the day-to-day life of inmates between hearings and trials. He knew that each and every bus ride from the criminal to the courts in the suburbs of Markham, Bridgeview, Maywood, Rolling Meadows and Skokie, with the prisoners sitting side by side. , put each and every stakeholder at risk. “Guys, we can’t keep doing this, ” said Dart to the judges. “There’s no explanation for why we can’t do this through teleconference, zoom or whatever. “The courts eventually established an online formula in which the defendants, along with their lawyers, can be brought to justice and participate in the hearings, but getting the club “required a little tension in my component because the courts were not in full closing mode. again. “
Even with those efforts, Dart and Mennella learned that they would not be able to remove the virus at all. “Once COVID hit the city, we knew it was only a matter of time before he entered prison,” Mennella says. ready for impact. I don’t think we knew at the time how complicated it would be. “
This had an effect that began on March 18. An inmate reported shortness of breath and fever. When his influenza control came back negative, the criminal drove him away and informed the Chicago Department of Public Health of a possible coronavirus infection. Cermak’s staff sought him for prompt review to detect COVID-19, but because he had not traveled abroad and had no known exposure, he did not meet the CDC’s criteria at the time (widespread review of symptomatic prisoners would not begin until March 25) The effects of the check came 10 days later , confirming what the staff already assumed: COVID-19 had officially arrived on the 26th and Cal.
The scenario is now more urgent, more complicated decisions are needed. One happened on March 23, when Dart completely discontinued the systems for prisoners. Another question was how to reduce the criminal population to just under 5,600. In Dart’s 14 years as sheriff, the once notoriously overcrowded criminal had halved his population, but he was still very congested.
Defense teams were no longer easy to quickly free medically vulnerable detainees, if not all, but Dart did not have that authority. “It’s not like I can shake a magic wand and let everyone go. I’m the one holding everyone, yet I’m the one who has the least ability to do anything. “However, the desire to reduce the population was undeniable. Art has worked with Cook County’s law offices and public defenders, removing lists of parole candidates, nonviolent active offenders, and DUIs. In other cases, such efforts would reduce the criminal population to approximately 4,900.
But that alone wouldn’t be enough. Dart knew he also needed to locate more homes to better distribute to inmates (he began turning cells into a singles occupation on March 26) and to isolate inflamed people. By inventorying the facility, Dart knew that several unused floors and buildings would become homes.
In 3 days, the offender controlled to convert a building organization previously used for an education camp program for early offenders into housing for inmates in poor health.
Even before the virus attacked, the offender had controlled in just 3 days to reuse a fair-outdoor building organization of the main campus. These 4 amenities, 3 of which can accommodate up to 80 other people, had already been used for an educational program presented to number one offenders as a means to avoid parole or a criminal sentence. No one had lived there for several years. ” I used it to treat the mentally ill,” Dart says. “I like it, we’re going to turn this into the bedrooms” and use it to put other people who tested positive for COVID-19 but had lighter cases. “I saw how it was going and that I needed a position to locate other people in poor health where they could be monitored somewhere away from the criminal.
The preparation of buildings that had been on suspense for years in such a short time proved to be a primary logistics company. We have a new roof. Completely new paint and deep disinfection. Heating and cooling systems had to be repaired. And to create even more space, Dart has installed 4 giant military-style canvas huts on site.
On March 16, the changed educational field was in a position to be used (although the first inmates would not be placed there until March 30). In total, Dart now had 500 more beds at its disposal, which would ease some of the tension. residential remedy unit and medical center. Critical cases, such as those requiring fans, will continue to be sent to Stroger Hospital, San Antonio and other nearby establishments.
Dart preparing for the worst and until the end of March, the number of infections among inmates began to increase. On March 24, there were 20 new cases. The next day, 65 years were served, when Cermak’s staff began testing asymptomatic inmates, starting with the highest medically vulnerable, in the sets where there was exposure. At the end of March, 199 cases of detainees would be confirmed. The number of staff also increased, reaching 34 at the end of the month.
As the stage has become increasingly dreadful, Dart flew blindly. “We were just grinding,” he admits. ” Just make it up. ” He was sufficiently involved in contracting the illness he sent his wife and children to his mother’s summer home in Indiana because of the concern to infect them. “I literally didn’t see them for three weeks,” he says. I spent Easter at home just having frozen food. “
As the numbers increased, Lenzie, an inmate who asked to be appointed only by his middle name, felt a sense of unease that scratched in developing panic in himself and among his fellow inmates. A year earlier, he was arrested after police discovered a firearm in a pickup truck in which he was a passenger. He insisted that the weapon belonged to the driving force and intended to argue it in his trial. He now hoped not to be sentenced to death by the pandemic that plagued the prison. “Everyone [in the country] panicked, but we were more afraid than anyone else because we couldn’t get anywhere,” he says.
With the media reporting alarming advances every day, Lenzie says, crowds were unfolding around prison TVs: “You’d usually have maybe 10 guys in the dining room watching TV. When the news [of COVID-19] arrives, I have between 48 and 49 boys. Once they started explaining more and then they finished the activities [in prison], we knew it was serious.
If Dart and Mennella did everything they could, Lenzie says, he couldn’t see the evidence. “There were still two of us in line with the cell. And they weren’t cleaning up the way they deserve it: mold in the shower, mold on the wall, it’s just disgusting, you know?”(Dart’s workplace says inmates are guilty of cleaning their own cells and, at most, other parts of the prison, it is the role of correctional officers to inspect those places. )
Last March, before Dart ordered guards or inmates to wear masks, Lenzie and other inmates improvised, he said, “We started doing ours. Different types of fabrics: T-shirts. You’re going to have to be a user with some kind of mind eye in prison, you know?But almost as soon as the homemade mask appeared, Lenzie says, they were confiscated. When I asked, the sheriff’s workplace denied this was the case. “We are not aware of the occasions when staff have confiscated a mask made through detainees to protect themselves from COVID-19,” he said in a statement.
On April 2, Dart nevertheless ordered his staff to wear surgical masks, however, it would take 11 days for all inmates to unload them. One of the reasons for the delay, Dart says, was the contradictory messages he won. CDC, which recently began recommending that the public wear masks until April 3. It took longer, he said, to buy enough masks so inmates and staff could get new ones every day, according to CDC recommendations.
Lenzie, who was released under electronic surveillance on March 26, is not the only prisoner concerned. On April 3, the law firm Loevy
“Cook County Jail is overrun by COVID-19,” said Stephen Weil of Loevy
The trial also alleged that Dart’s claims about the movements he was taking were little more than public relations. “We had a lot of facts about what was going on on the floor that contradicted the sheriff’s story,” says Alexa Van Brunt, MacArthur’s lawyer. Justice Center: This evidence was obtained from affidavits filed on behalf of 69 existing and newly released inmates.
An inmate, for example, Sean Alexander, told her friend that she was still sharing a cell phone and that after an inmate on her ground tested positive and was deported, criminal staff put that man’s cell phone partner with someone else. “This user is now coughing and it’s criminal The staff told him not to touch the remotes and stay on his mobile phone,” the friend said in her April 2 statement. He also said Alexander had told her that he and his phone partner had to buy cleaning products. Dart refuted this, noting that he made wonderful efforts to make sure the inmates had enough bleach and disinfectant. He says he has renounced a long-standing rule that opposes the use of hand sanitizers, instituted because some prisoners had used them for soft fires.
The Times’ account has caused panic in inmates: “We can hear them talk to their circle of relatives and literally say, “I’m going to die here,” Dart recalls.
Lather up some other problem. Several inmates stated in their affidavits that they did not get enough and that the bars they had won were the size of a tiny hotel. Dart says there’s a clever explanation why the criminal stopped offering bigger bars: some inmates filled them with socks and used them as weapons. In one case, one inmate used a fortune scourk to kill another. That’s what he said, “they have soap,” Dart says, and we know they have soap. “
Two days after the federal complaint was filed, while Dart’s lawyers were preparing a response, the criminal recorded his first COVID-19-related death. Jeffrey Pendleton, a 59-year-old inmate with a series of gun and drug charges and a 1997 inmate convicted of rape, died after a six-day war with the virus. Pendleton had a number of underlying conditions, as well as pulmonary center disease, high blood pressure and several previous cases of pneumonia. Soon, Pendleton’s brothers filed a lawsuit alleging dart kept his brother chained to his hospital bed while connected to a fan, causing him unbearable pain and violating his constitutional rights.
Both trials attracted media attention, but an April 8 article in the New York Times online edition, in which the headline proclaimed cook County Jail to be the “best hot spot in the United States” for the virus, created a public relations nightmare. The criminal, the story said, “the largest known source of coronavirus infections in the country Array . . . with more cases shown than the United States. Theodore Roosevelt, a retirement home in Kirkland, Washington, or the cluster centered in New Rochelle, New York. The article came to light at a time when the number of COVID-19 cases in the penalty peaked. In the five-day area, april 6-10, the offender saw 227 cases shown, more than part of which were guards a day after the publication of the Times account, a momentary inmate, Leslie Pieroni, died of COVID-19 headaches.
The story not only made Dart the highlights and prison, but also plunged the prisoners into widespread panic. “We were listening to his phone calls,” Dart recalls. ” We may just hear them talking to their circle of relatives, members, literally saying, “I’m going to die. I hear it as the most productive hot spot. I’m going to die here. “Inmates posted homemade symptoms on the windows: “We import 2. “
Dart livid by acting. Yes, the criminal figures were relatively high, he says, but that’s because at the time, criminal was one of the few establishments he checked and made public the effects. “Here I check to manage this and paintings 24 hours a day with my staff — no one sleeps, ” remember. “I was furious because he obviously distorted what was going on. The fact that we still have disorder with that, not because we were disapproved. We tried everything. I thought, if you have a bigger concept than we can do, let us know and we’ll check it out. “
The article, he said, was “devastating” to staff morale. And in the days that followed, Mennella’s medical team had to pass on to the protesters accumulated outdoors to the criminal shouting, “Murderers!”They were so upset, ” said Mennella to Dart about her staff, according to the sheriff. “I had to calm them down, they just had to forget about that. “
The day after the story was published, the federal prosecutor’s office issued a ruling on granting a transitional restraining order that he gave Dart until the following Monday to put into effect evidence of all symptomatic prisoners and eliminate the use of “bullpens”: giant cages. where other people who have been arrested are assigned pending their bail hearings or remedying their admission to prison. The sentencing also ordered Dart to ensure that inmates had enough soap and cleaning products and that he made a mask. all symptomatic prisoners.
To date, Dart expresses frustration at having to divert time and resources from the criminal to attend court hearings on programs he believes he is already facing. For example, he had already opened several new residential neighborhoods and placed as many inmates as he could. in their own cells. His staff was getting masks and they were already running to locate enough mask for the inmates. “So we went through everything we didn’t want to do to be ordered to do everything we’re already doing,” Dart says.
By mid-April, the effort seemed to be paying off. The numbers began to pass, Dart and Mennella hoped to succeed in a milestone, but then there was another wave: 160 in a week from April 19 to 25. On April 19, 3 people, adding the first prison officer, died of COVID-19-related cases. The next day, another inmate died, which raised the total number of deaths at that time to seven.
Dart bewildered. ” We were hunting everything we could just to avoid this. We went back and looked at everything, hunting models, like, is there anything in common here?Is there anything we’re missing?
On April 27, the federal trial fee approval ruling said Dart needed to do more about social esttching. Specifically, it ordered that, with some exceptions (such as sets in which all persons living there are treated by COVID) 19), prisoners may no longer be housed in combination on a mobile phone and that Dart had to ensure that all prisoners had a normal mask and replacements. At the time, Dart said he had largely finished both. had not yet reduced, as the approval sentence also ordered, the number of inmates housed in each bedroom by 50%.
It turned out that the most important thing, perhaps most importantly in the criminal to, however, control the epidemic, had been that Cermak had received approval from Abbott Laboratories to be one of the first places to use an immediate new control of the pharmaceutical giant Developed. Thanks to it, the effects were to occur in a few hours rather than days, making it easier to separate inflamed people. Previously, because of the delay, it made little sense to review asymptomatic inmates more broadly.
The Cdc’s July report presented cook County Jail as a case on how to handle such an epidemic, posing “complex and resource-resource-making interventions. “
After Cermak began fully implementing the new check on April 20, new instances temporarily declined dramatically. May 5 was the last day the criminal recorded positive double-digit checks. in early April to less than a hundred on May 21 to less than 20 at the end of June. Meanwhile, the infection rate, i. e. the percentage of checks that tested positive, fell from more than 90% at the end of March to around 1% in mid-June, a rate that has remained strong to date, even when the criminal population has returned to their pre-COVID-19 grades of more than five thousand.
This immediate reversal shows how an “immediate reaction can decrease the number of cases and save you morbidity and mortality in prisons or detention,” read in the CDC report, which is also ready in county and city offices and was published in July. Cook County Jail as a case examines how to handle such an epidemic, posing “complex and resource-intensive interventions,” all being “critical and timely. “For Dart, the report is a justification.
Mennella says she appreciates the praise, especially given the harsh criticism, but emphasizes that the fight isn’t over. “We’ll have to stay alert. ” Even now, with a lot of masks and cleaning products, and infection rates well below those of the general public, it helps keep a close eye on inmates who are being treated to make sure they are doing their part. “I was in an apartment the other day, ” he said. I saw a mask hanging from my chin, so I had to say kindly, ‘Guys, we have to protect them, but you have to do those things,’ reminding them of social distance, washing their hands and dressing properly with the mask. in the community, when complacency is installed, you may have problems. We need to make sure we’re on high alert. “
In mid-June, Matt Walberg, spokesman for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, and Salomon Martinez, superintendent of one of the criminals’ residential buildings, gave me a tour of the facility, a guided tour through FaceTime (Walberg had submitted a visit to the person, but as a precaution we opted for a virtual version). At the time, the criminal’s scenario had progressed so far that Dart restored the visits, keeping them outdoors, as long as visitors were willing to wear a mask and control their temperature.
The corridors the two men walked through, usually filled with rows of inmates heading to meals, programs, court appearances, were as empty as a college campus during spring break. Walberg showed up to show me all the spaces he wanted.
At one point, Martinez paused when I asked him about the inmates’ claims that they had no cleaning items. Like Dart, he vehemently denied the accusations and said the facility was so bleached that it “started to smell like a pool. “In one case, he said, the painting was literally rubbed against a wall. He pointed out that giant jugs of hand sanitist were filled in each and every shift. “We use six gallons every other day. “
I also showed a ‘day room’, an open area surrounded by two floors of cells. On a wall, a TV blinked, looked through a few men at tables bolted to the floor, where every few meters more or less a marker indicating the appropriate social distances. “We used to allow 48 prisoners to leave at once,” Martinez said, looking for the prisoners through a window. “He’s 12 now. “
I can see that not all men had a mask and that some were probably sitting too close to each other. Martinez says the criminal tries to monitor those who are dressed in the mask as much as possible, but as well as on the outside. In the world of doors, some other people simply refuse to comply. The only lever you can give the staff, he says, is to get benefits like your phone or waste time navigating the shared spaces.
Walberg completed the scale by appearing around the commuted education camp. All quietly. The grounds, as well as all the buildings and cabins, were mostly, if not completely, empty, a ghost of the city compared to the prison’s main campus.
There’s not much to see. Walberg pointed his phone’s camera at one of the four buildings, which was filled with bunk beds. Then I showed them the cabins, all equipped with beds, the kind you can see in the army barracks. The structures had air conditioning, but the TVs never turned on.
In the end, despite all the efforts to supply more beds, less than two hundred of the 500 have never been used in this location.
I highlighted the fact that despite the fact that they were largely unused, the buildings were silent because of the seriousness of the setting and the fact that other people were not, and still are, from where and when everything will disappear. However, I thought it was a huge job for nothing. That’s right, says Walberg, but no one, of course, complains.
In less than 12 weeks, seven inmates and 3 prison officials died from COVID-19 or similar complications.