Covid Fatigue and Leadership

When Covid-19 burst onto the scene three months ago, the jail administrators and the medical teams in my jails initiated several common sense practices to reduce the possibility of Covid infiltrating the jails.  These included screening and quarantining new inmates before allowing them into the dorms, screening jail employees daily, doing lots of Covid tests and, perhaps most importantly, having deputies wear masks at work.   The good news is that, so far, there have been no cases of Covid-19 in any of my jails (knock on wood here).

However, there seems to be growing evidence of “Covid Fatigue” in my community.  When I go out in public, I am one of the very few still wearing a mask.  And this is unfortunately spilling over to the correctional facilities.  I did a clinic at one of my smaller jails this week and was surprised and dismayed to see that the deputies were no longer wearing masks.  In the meantime, Community Covid cases are climbing, so the risk of transmitting Covid to the jail is actually greater than it was, say, a month ago.

Continue reading

Keep Covid Out of the Jail!

“We’ve got another one,” My nurse told me on the phone. “He says he was exposed to Covid.”

Ever since Covid-19 came to my town, many people being arrested have begun to say that they have Covid or have been exposed; the thought being that “If I have Covid, they can’t put me in jail.”   Of course, it doesn’t work that way.  They go to jail anyway. 

Continue reading

You Need a Plan for Corona virus in your Facility

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have been hearing about the threat of a Corona virus pandemic. Every day, the evening news anchor breathlessly gives an update of the number of new cases, the number of new countries affected and the number of new deaths.  You probably already know that this disease was originally found in China.  What you may not know (but you should if you work in corrections) is that Chinese prisons were especially hard hit.  This disease spreads most rapidly where people are enclosed together, like nursing homes, cruise ships and prisons.  If this disease gets a foothold in the United States, correctional institutions are likely to suffer. 

Continue reading