Coronavirus crisis intensifies inside billion-dollar private prison firm's Queens lockup
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AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
By David Brand
The coronavirus crisis just keeps getting worse inside the wide-open dormitories of New York City’s lone privately run jail, where roughly one of every nine inmates has tested positive for COVID-19.
In total, 25 inmates — up from two a week ago — and 10 staff members at the 222-bed Queens Detention Facility have tested positive for the illness, according to a court-ordered report issued Tuesday by GEO Group. The private prison corporation generated $2.48 billion in revenue last year and runs the jail under contract with U.S. Marshals Service.
But those numbers tell only a partial story, say six inmates, the wives of two others and three defense attorneys. The inmates and their loved ones have contacted the Eagle over the past three weeks to describe the worsening conditions , the swift spread of the coronavirus and an extreme staff shortage at the jail, which is located in a Springfield Gardens warehouse near JFK Airport.
“This is the worst I’ve ever felt in my life,” said an inmate who has tested positive for Covid-19 Tuesday. He is incarcerated in a nearly full 30-bed open dormitory unit where half the inmates are sick, he added. “It’s ten times more than the flu.”
The inmate said he has felt dizzy with a high fever for more than a week. “I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t taste or smell anything,” he said. “I’m nauseous, cold sweat at nighttime, vomiting.”
Like nearly everyone in the jail, he sleeps in a bunk bed, making social distancing all but impossible.
His bunkmate is “actually complaining to his lawyer and prosecutor that me being his bunkie, he could test the same symptoms,” said the inmate, who asked to remain anonymous because he is a cooperating witness for the prosecution in a federal court case.
Nearly all the inmates in the Queens Detention Facility — including its most famous recent detainee, Bushwick rapper Tekashi 69 — are cooperating witnesses in federal court.
“They’re not giving us the proper care that I think they should be giving us,” the inmate said. “There are people in here who are asking for inhalers, and I’m one of them, but since our conditions aren’t very, very bad they don’t want to give us the inhalers.”
The sickest inmates in the jail have been isolated in the jail’s eight-cell restrictive housing unit, known as the “SHU,” inmates and attorneys say. The rest sleep in open dormitories in seven housing units.
Three inmates and another inmate’s wife told the Eagle that the jail has been experiencing a major staff shortage, as guards and other employees get sick or otherwise refuse to report to work. Just one correction officer was patrolling two units in recent days, and a single person has been staffing the medical unit, the inmates said.
“They leave us by ourselves for an hour or so because there’s not enough officers to relieve another officer,” an inmate said. “Nobody’s watching.”
“It makes it unsafe,” he continued. “If we were to get into a fight in here, nobody could stop it, nobody would press the alarm button to call for back up.”
So far, however, inmate relations have remained peaceful, he said.
“We all take care of each other some way, some how,” he added.
A spokesperson for GEO Group, the second-largest private prison contractor in the United States, said the corporation is “working closely with government officials and local health officials to focus our efforts fully on the health of inmates and staff.”
“We are all in this together,” he said, before referencing a previous court-ordered report on COVID-19 in the jail.
“We are placing high emphasis on good hygienic practices, intensifying cleaning, and disinfection of the facility,” he added. “We have implemented strong internal controls screening new inmates, staff and visitors and have deployed personal protective equipment to both staff and inmates at the facility.”
