Illness spreads with little scrutiny in Queens’ private jail
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A staff member closes a gate at a GEO Group jail. The private prison contractor runs New York City’s only private jail, the Queens Detention Facility, in Springfield Gardens. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
By David Brand
By dinner time Saturday night, a few dozen inmates who share an open dormitory inside the Queens Detention Facility, New York City’s only private jail, were ready to take a stand. Inmates and their families are fed up with how the jail has handled the COVID-19 outbreak, according to two detainees who contacted the Eagle to describe the spread of the illness later that evening.
When a pair of correction officers delivered their meal trays, the unit banded together and rejected the food, the two inmates told the Eagle.
“We’re not taking no food that comes in this unit because of the situation,” said one inmate, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared retaliation. “We have our own commissary and whoever’s not fortunate enough to have commissary, we’re going to share with them.”
The meal rejection was “a message,” he added. “Just showing that we’re upset [because] no one is telling us nothing, they’re not issuing any gloves, not issuing us any masks.”
Several inmates are sick with symptoms of COVID-19 at the 222-bed Queens Detention Facility — a federal jail operated by the corporation GEO Group in a warehouse near JFK Airport, three detainees, their family members and three defense attorneys have told the Eagle. Social distancing is all but impossible in the jail’s seven wide-open dormitories, where people sleep in bunk beds, the inmates and advocates say.
GEO Group reported Thursday that at least three staff members and one inmate had tested positive for COVID-19. But despite the spread of the coronavirus in jails and prisons in New York, staff were not required to wear personal protective equipment until Friday, according to an email to defense attorneys reviewed by the Eagle.
The inmates who typically staff the kitchen have been under quarantine for several days, according to the inmates and attorneys who have spoken with the Eagle. Now a major staff shortage has forced correction officers to handle the food, said the two inmates Saturday.
After the dinnertime food strike, the warden and the chief correction officer visited the unit to diffuse tensions, the two inmates said. Both men said the warden, William Zerrilo, told inmates on the unit that they could not get tested for COVID-19 and had to “let the virus take its course.”
GEO Group, which contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service, did not provide a response to a list of questions about conditions in the jail and instead shared a statement that the company provided for a previous Eagle story. Zerrilo told the Eagle April 1 that he would not answer questions from the media.
The number of people with COVID-19 has surged in jails and prisons in New York and around the world, but the private Queens Detention Facility has avoided much scrutiny. “They largely operate out of sight, out of mind,” said Councilmember Donovan Richards, who represents the industrial swath of Springfield Gardens where the jail is located.
That opacity has changed a bit in recent days. A Brooklyn federal judge ruled April 2 that the Queens Detention Facility and two other federal jails must begin reporting the number of inmates and staff with COVID-19 twice a week.
Nevertheless, the two inmates who talked to the Eagle Saturday said they are scared about the lack of urgency to stop the spread of the illness in the jail, which made news last week following the release of its most famous inmate, Brooklyn rapper Tekashi 69.
The GEO Group has refused to provide personal protective equipment to detainees and the jail’s eight-cell restrictive housing unit, or RHU, is being used to separate the very sickest individuals from their peers, according to inmates and attorneys.
There are far more than eight sick people, however, one inmate said Saturday.
The inmate said it hurts when he coughs, he has a headache and he is short of breath when he climbs up to his bed on the top bunk.
“You guys out there, you don’t know what we’re going through,” he said. “I feel like crying.”
The two men in the neighboring bunk are also sick, he added. One has a fever and chills and the guy in the neighboring bunk, “all he do is workout every day and he’s been in bed for 3 days,” he said.
“Everybody is next to each other, everybody is coughing,” he added. “It’s really, really, really bad. I’m not trying to maximize it, but I’m not trying to minimize it either. This is not cool right now.”
The Queens Detention Facility has seven open dormitories without cells, which makes the spread of contagious illnesses particularly challenging to contain, said a third inmate who spoke with the Eagle Thursday.
“It’s, like, really a disaster,” he said. “I feel scared for my life. It’s not like a home where I can have my own sanctuary and sanitize the facility. I’m living in a pigsty f------ jail where whatever is happening is happening.”
The jail is located within zip code 11413, where 460 people so far have tested positive for COVID-19, according to city data mapped by ProPublica.
In addition to seven dormitory-style units and the RHU, the two-story Queens Detention Facility has a 24/7 triage clinic, according to a September 2018 federal Prison Rape Elimination Act audit. Inmates who need hospitalization are taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center or Elmhurst Hospital, according to the audit. The two sites are severely burdened by the COVID-19 outbreak.
Just one person is staffing the jail’s medical unit, however, two inmates told the Eagle. The head of the medical unit, who typically works in the clinic, is now walking around the units to distribute medications, they said.
Criminal justice policy consultant Judy Greene, co-founder of Justice Strategies, said private jail and prisons are not equipped to handle public health crises because their business models demand that they maximize profits by providing minimal services.
The Queens Detention Facility is particularly ill-suited to stem the outbreak of a contagious virus because of its open-dorm format, Green added.
“I shake in my boots when I think of the conditions people are being held in in that prison,” she said. “Just physically it’s not manageable. Social distancing is not possible.”
