CARSON CITY, Mich. ― In early April, Michigan corrections officer Richard Keck and his wife completed the process of adopting five siblings.
But Keck has spent little time with his newly adopted children or his three other children. With the coronavirus burning through Michigan’s prison system, Keck has been sleeping in a camper in his backyard in Carson City, a rural town in central Michigan. His wife leaves him meals on the patio, and he only goes inside to shower, after which he carefully cleans the bathroom.
It’s “stressful,” said Keck, but he will keep living in his backyard until the Michigan Department of Corrections can quell the COVID-19 outbreaks that have ravaged prison systems in his state and across the country.
“I miss my kids. I miss my wife,” he said in a written statement. “And I’m right outside in the backyard.”
Corrections officers like Keck are also facing uncertainty and fear as the virus sickens prisoners and MDOC staff. As of Monday, 334 officers have been confirmed positive, though the true figure is thought to be much higher because the department has conducted limited testing.
Inadequate testing is only one of a litany of concerns MDOC officers shared with HuffPost. Among other issues, they say MDOC is failing to manage sick inmates in a safe way and isn’t providing enough personal protective equipment. Officials have also failed to address staffing shortages, forcing fatigued officers to work up to 25 hours of overtime weekly. When prison staff gets sick, they are using paid time off ― and if they run out, they don’t get paid.
It’s not just officers facing the consequences of working in a high-risk environment. They can carry the disease from hot spot prisons to their families and what are often rural, working-class communities ill-equipped to handle a local outbreak. Meanwhile, the situation has created a deadly loop in which inmates and officers contract the virus from one another.
Frustrated officers and their union are calling on the MDOC and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration to take meaningful action, but they say there’s been little help. Michigan Corrections Officers union President Byron Osborn said officers are being forgotten.
“In our line of work, we know what’s expected, and it doesn’t matter what’s going on at the facility — sickness, disturbance — that’s our job because we’re the ones keeping citizens of Michigan safe,” he said. “But we need support from the department, and we need support from the governor’s office. ”
Corrections officers across the country are contracting COVID-19 at much higher rates than the rest of the population, and as more officers get sick, those remaining on the job are feeling the strain of working multiple 16-hour shifts each week or even shifts as long as 24 hours in some places.
Though facilities are highly complex environments, the failure to protect prison staff typically results from some combination of poor leadership and a lack of resources, said Martin Horn, a retired distinguished lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
He ran New York City’s jails during 2009’s H1N1 epidemic and said departments should be doing all they can to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines and test every officer and inmate.
“If they are not, then I think it is shortsightedness, a failure of leadership or impetuousness,” he said. “There’s also no question that around the country corrections agencies are grossly underfunded and understaffed. They all went into this with no money and teetering on the edge to begin with.”
Turning To The Courts
In some cases, unions representing corrections officers are turning to the court system to force change, creating a de facto alliance between inmates and officers against administrations.
The officers union for the Washington, D.C., Department of Corrections joined a federal lawsuit inmates brought after about a quarter of the staff got sick in the first five weeks of the pandemic. Positive test rates among the officers was about six times that of the general population. A judge in April ordered the department to provide more protective gear and implement other safety measures.
A federal lawsuit filed in Michigan on behalf of inmates against the MDOC asks a judge to order the department to test all its corrections officers and provide them with adequate personal protective equipment (PPE). The MDOC did not respond to a request for comment. The department announced this week that it would provide voluntary testing for officers.
