The rapid spread of coronavirus behind the walls of the federal Bureau of Prison's 122 facilities has mirrored the outside world

Coronavirus has swept through the federal prison system in the past three weeks, leaving more than 300 confirmed cases among inmates, at least nine prisoners dead, and raising concerns about the government's handling of the crisis.

Inside some facilities, inmates have said they are locked in crammed and cramped cells without face masks and enough soap, and guards have grown concerned that they could be spreading the disease to their families. At a prison in Butner, North Carolina, the number of cases jumped by dozens -- nearly 400% -- earlier this week. And in Oakdale, Louisiana, where six inmates have died in recent days, armed corrections officers had to quell a small uprising with pepper spray on Wednesday, an official at the prison said.

While the reported number of sickened inmates represents less than half a percent of the total federal prison system, the rapid spread of the virus behind the walls of the Bureau of Prison's 122 facilities has mirrored the outside world, and new clusters of the pandemic have emerged at prisons across the country with alarming speed. Inmates, officers and civil liberties advocates say it paints a picture of a system that moved too slowly and continues to leave people behind bars in unhygienic conditions without enough protective equipment.

In his first interview since the pandemic began, Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal defended the steps his agency has taken amid what he described as the most challenging situation the federal prison system has been confronted with in decades.

"I don't think anybody was ready for this Covid, so we're dealing with it just as well as anybody else and I'd be proud to say we're doing pretty good," said Carvajal, who was named director in late February during the pandemic.

The Bureau of Prisons has taken a wide range of steps since the virus was first detected — shutting down visitations, instituting quarantines for all new inmates, and, last week, moving all of the country's 150,000 federal inmates into near-isolation.

Over the past week, prison officials have also begun to release certain vulnerable inmates early, and handing out face coverings to every inmate and correctional officer that remained.

"It's easy to critique those hot spots, but we don't control that," said Carvajal. "We can only control the people inside of our institutions, and we put things in place to do that."

The Bureau of Prisons began preparing for the potential spread of the virus in January, when early reports of the deadly illness were emerging from China. A task force was established with the system's medical leaders, and prisons were instructed to review pre-existing influenza pandemic plans and begin adjusting them for the budding outbreak. Soon after, said Dr. Jeffrey Allen, the bureau's medical director, they began screening all incoming prisoners and certain staff for symptoms of the illness.

On February 25, Attorney General William Barr, who oversees the federal prison system, moved Carvajal, the 28-year Bureau of Prisons veteran who started off as a prison guard in Texas, into the top job. Two days later, he received his first briefing on the virus.

"It was quite overwhelming, a week or two into this job, knowing that we were going to have to deal with something like this," he said.

On March 13, just after the World Health Organization classified the coronavirus a pandemic, and as President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, the Bureau of Prisons took its most aggressive step, banning all social visitors and most lawyers from all facilities across the country. Carvajal said it is the most serious response since 1995 when the entire federal prison went on a complete lockdown after a series of riots. Prison officials were told to cut down on the transfers of inmates between facilities, and an automatic two-week quarantine was soon after implemented for all new inmates entering a facility.

'I don't know if anybody fully appreciated the scope of what needed to be done'

At the Oakdale, Louisiana, prison, the epicenter of the outbreak in the federal system, the virus may have started to spread as prison workers made routine rounds through different facilities, said Ronald Morris, a longtime maintenance foreman and a local union president.

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