F or weeks last month, as the novel coronavirus was making worrisome headlines from mostly China and other Asian countries, the disease was silently spreading at the Kirkland Life Care Centre, in Washington State.

At about the same time that Donald Trump was telling the nation that “it’s going to be fine,” a critical misunderstanding among staff and state officials about who was responsible for testing meant that the care centre’s vulnerable elderly population was headed towards becoming the poster child of what would become a pandemic. At least 34 of the 110 residents died, and 81 tested positive.

The situation in the Seattle suburb has grown into a country-wide concern, with the United States now leading the world with the most cases of the virus. But, as cities like New York have all but shut down to try and halt the spread as much as possible, officials and advocates say that American crowded prisons and jails are particularly vulnerable — and, they have all the ingredients for an outbreak that is much more devastating and deadly than even that nursing home in the Pacific Northwest was.

“If you think of a nursing home and you make it a place where there’s not enough soap and water and the people who live inside the nursing home aren’t able to use hand sanitiser because the alcohol is prohibited … if you take the nursing home and make it much less sanitary, and double the crowding, and add that the people who work there can’t just stay home because there’s this real perceived public safety risk — that’s basically the threat that jails and prisons have right now,” Rob Smith, the executive director at the Justice Collaborative, told The Independent.

In just the last two weeks, that looming crisis in America’s penal system has shown signs of life.

Across the country, an official tally says at least 10 inmates in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system have tested positive for the virus, alongside eight staff. But, according to staff and officials, that is likely undercounting the true number by a considerable degree in the nation’s 6,000 prisons and jails.

“You see medical staff running across the yard with these hazmat suits on and … they’re running with a gurney cart across the yard. One after the other this was happening,” said Corey Trammel, an officer at FCI Oakdale in Louisiana, a low security prison with 980 prisoners. “It looked like a war zone, with people falling out and you just can’t see this enemy and it’s there and it’s very much real.”

Mr Trammel, who said his prison has sent at least 13 prisoners to a local hospital for treatment and testing, continued: “Right now what I’m living and what I’m seeing, this is something that’s not explainable. We have contingency plans for pandemic flu, this is nothing like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

The infections have already spurred confusion in facilities across the country, with 23 inmates reportedly escaping from their detention in two states after at least one inmate in two different locations tested positive for the virus. At least a dozen remained at large as of Wednesday.

In response to this threat, attorney general William Barr said on Thursday that the Federal Bureau of Prisons — which is within the Department of Justice — may begin sending home some of the nation’s oldest and most at-risk inmates in order to combat the threat. Meanwhile, judges across the country have likewise been ordering at-risk and older inmates be sent home to alleviate pressures.

"There are particular concerns in this institutional setting. We want to make sure our institutions don't become petri dishes and it doesn't spread rapidly through an institution — but we have protocols that are designed to stop that and we are using all the tools we have," Mr Barr said.

In response to a request for comment on these issues, the Federal Bureau of Prisons provided a statement indicating that no federal prisoners have escaped, and that safety measures — including inventorying sanitation supplies and other measures — have been put in place.

"In response to COVID-19, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has instituted a comprehensive management approach that includes screening, testing, appropriate treatment, prevention, education, and infection control measures that apply to all BOP institutions. The BOP implemented its approved Pandemic Influenza contingency plan. The BOP has been coordinating its COVID-19 efforts, since January 2020, using subject-matter experts both internal and external to the agency, including guidance and directives from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Office of the Vice President.," the statement read, in part.

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But officials closer to the action have raised concerns about the efficacy of those tools, and have charged that protocol in some cases are simply being dismissed.

Jose Rojas, the southeast regional vice president of the Council of Prisons Locals, told The Independent that dozens of inmates had been transferred within the prison system over the past two weeks in spite of a federal memo barring most transfers unless absolutely necessary. In many of those cases, Mr Rojas said that prison staff were not warned beforehand about potential infection — and not given adequate personal protective equipment.

“They’re not following the guidelines they themselves sent out,” Mr Rojas said. And “we don’t know where they’ve been.”

He said the current state of things is having a significant toll on the staff on the frontlines, many of whom are worried that the lack of available personal protective equipment means they are particularly vulnerable to catching the virus at work, and bringing it home “You can tell there’s a lot of frustration. A lot of bullsh**. It’s just been bad. It’s been chaos.”

That staff may become sick themselves is already a reality, too, with cases popping up across the country alongside those of inmates. In some instances, it appears as though prison staff in facilities are learning about the cases through informal communications networks, instead of from their employers themselves.

Pamela Millwood, who works at SCI Jessup in Southern Georgia, said that even basic means of ensuring staff and inmate safety — temperature checks of workers as they arrive for their shifts — have been undermined by faulty thermometers that have at times returned temperature readings of 89 Fahrenheit, which is far below even the body temperature observed among hypothermia patients.

After expressing her concerns about the testing to prison management, Ms Millwood was told in a message that the “thermometer is taking a surface temperature of the skin. It is possible to register a low temperature depending upon the circumstances such as being outside in the cool air or exiting your vehicle after being in the air conditioning. If someone registers a high temperature, they will need to retake the temperature orally to ensure its accuracy.”

“So they just let five people in to work who are Mount Everest-level frozen dead,” Ms Millwood said, recalling her thoughts after seeing the response.

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Mr Smith, the executive director at the Justice Collaborative, said that as the pandemic spreads in the United States, “we’re going to find out that these jails are some of the biggest public safety problems as time goes on.”

But, he noted that Donald Trump — not to mention state governors — could act quickly to release older and non-violent prisoners, and alleviate at least some of the pressures that are putting officers and prisoners at risk. They could also clear out local jails — including the crowded and dirty cells in New York City — by foregoing cash bail and arrests for minor infractions.

And, if those governors like Andrew Cuomo in New York or Gavin Newsom in California don’t wield their clemency power, Mr Smith said he could see coronavirus amounting to a serious flub that could follow them throughout their careers in much the same way the racist stop-and-frisk policies enacted by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg haunted his failed presidential campaign earlier this year.