‘I just feel scared for my life.’ At a Raleigh prison, one in three inmates has COVID

Over 100 inmates at a North Carolina prison in Raleigh have tested positive for COVID-19, as the facility faces one of the worst prison outbreaks in the state.

Wake Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison for men, reported 119 active cases of the virus on Tuesday, according to N.C. Department of Public Safety data. As of that day, nearly 35% of inmate tests were returning positive, and 11 staff members were out due to a positive result.

Across the state’s prison system, DPS reported a total of 555 active cases, and an overall 1.9% positive rate.

It’s Wake Correctional Center’s first outbreak, according to the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services. The department said the outbreak was first reported on Friday.

But Jonathan Brooks, a 33-year-old inmate there, said he was experiencing symptoms as early as Tuesday of last week — and that despite repeated requests, it took the prison until Friday to test him.

A DPS spokesperson said the department could not comment on the testing timeline of any individual, but said its testing is widespread and frequent, and that decisions are made at the direction of medical staff.

Brooks says his results came back positive Monday, along with many others in his cell block. Those who didn’t test positive, he added, were moved to other dorms where there were no active cases — a move that he worries could spread the virus to other housing groups across the prison.

In an email, DPS spokesman Brad Deen told The News & Observer that its protocols are “based on medical and epidemiological best practices,” stressing that it “would not knowingly expose staff or offenders to COVID-19.”

“The N.C. Department of Public Safety and the Division of Adult Correction/Juvenile Justice take seriously the health and safety of our staff, the people in our custody and the public at large,” Deen said. “We have worked diligently to keep COVID-19 out of our facilities, to monitor for the virus and, when there is a positive test result, to keep anyone who has been exposed from exposing others.”

Though Wake Correctional Center is ordinarily a “work” unit — with 80% of inmates leaving the prison each day on work release — DPS said it suspended the program in March as a precaution against potential inmate exposure to the virus. A small subset of prison jobs do take inmates to DPS warehouses outside the facility, the department said, but they added that those operations were halted Jan. 22, when the first case was detected.

In Dormitory-style housing, COVID-19 difficult to contain

Inmates at the Raleigh prison are mostly housed in large dormitory rooms, where dozens of inmates sleep in bunk beds near one another. Brooks describes it as “shoulder to shoulder.”

“I’ve talked to so many people that say they can lie in their bed, and reach out their hand and touch the person in the bed beside them,” Whitley Carpenter, an attorney at Forward Justice, said of her advocacy work at prisons across the state. “It’s not possible to social distance in that type of environment at all.”

DPS has tried to “maximize social distancing by minimizing to the extent possible the number of offenders inside each cohorted unit,” Deen said. But the facility does not have enough single cells to allow for individual isolation — particularly when over a third of the population has tested positive. The department said around 350 inmates are currently housed at Wake Correctional Center.

Carpenter, who spoke to The N&O about prison outbreaks prior to the cases at Wake CC, said when the virus enters a prison system, many inmates feel “hopeless.”

“I’ve heard people say it’s just feeling like you have absolutely no autonomy over your own life, no autonomy to protect yourself,” she said. “It’s almost as if you’re walking into the fire, and you have no other option but to do so.”

Brooks says he and other inmates at Wake CC have tried their best to take precautionary measures, but added he believes the prison did not act quickly enough to contain the spread of the virus.

“Their negligence has allowed us to be infected,” he said. “They make me feel like my life means nothing to them.”

Brooks says he has had heart murmurs since childhood, and is afraid of how the virus will affect him.

“I just feel scared for my life,” he said.

Health experts and advocacy groups, including Forward Justice, have pushed for early release programs and other strategies to reduce the spread of the virus and increase social distancing capabilities.

The state’s prison population has been reduced by roughly 5,000 inmates since the pandemic began in March, dropping to 29,343 in February, according to DPS data. Of those inmates, the department reports 425 are completing their sentences at home or in transitional housing.

Still, prisons have continued to be the site of outbreaks across the state. In the past year, 42 inmates in state prisons have died from the virus.

Beverly Brooks, a 63-year-old former Kinston resident and the mother of Jonathan Brooks, said she called the prison nearly every day last week — asking them over and over to help her son.

She has been in Georgia since 2018, where she oversees a prison reform group of the Covenant Fellowship of Churches International. But for the moment, she’s turning her attention back to North Carolina. In August, she says she lost her sister to the virus, and now she fears she could lose her son too.

“I don’t know whether or not to believe in prayer, but I was really doing some praying,” she said. “Because I don’t want to lose him.”

This story was originally published February 3, 2021 at 9:02 AM with the headline "‘I just feel scared for my life.’ At a Raleigh prison, one in three inmates has COVID."