TX Judge Forces Prison To Provide Sanitary Supplies In ‘Very Significant Win’ For Inmates

A prison guard in Iowa Park, Texas. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
A prison guard in Iowa Park, Texas. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
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A district judge ordered that a Texas prison holding geriatric inmates provide unfettered access to hand soap, as well as hand sanitizer and masks after finding the prison population to be at “high risk of serious illness or death from exposure to COVID-19.”

Judge Keith Ellison also mandated in his preliminary injunction that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice present a comprehensive plan for testing inmates, and forbade the intake of new inmates into the prison, called the Pack Unit, for the duration of the pandemic. 

Jeremy Desel, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s director of communications, told TPM that they are reviewing the decision, which was handed down in the Southern District of Texas’ Houston Division.

“It will be appealed,” he said.

For now at least, Michele Deitch, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s law school and school of public affairs, considers the decision a “significant win” for inmate rights.

“Though there are legal actions across the country right now, this is one of the very few focused on conditions rather than asking for release,” she told TPM. 

She conceded that what constitutes such an outstanding victory may seem like fairly “obvious” protective measures to those of us not behind bars. 

“What’s so stunning is that there are so many correctional agencies that are not doing this most basic of stuff,” she said. “I mean, you need a lawsuit to tell people they can wash their hands? That’s what we’ve come to in this country: you need to sue to protect your most basic of rights.”

The lawsuit was originally brought by Laddy Curtis Valentine and Richard Elvin King, two inmates in the Pack Unit aged 69 and 73, respectively.

“While it has always been a matter of when, not if, COVID-19 hits the state’s prisons, that time is now,” the lawsuit said. Emphasizing the advanced age of most of the Pack Unit’s prison population, the lawsuit cautioned that the inmates are the type of people “most at risk” for illness or death from COVID-19.

“An outbreak at the Pack Unit could easily spread to the surrounding communities, and vice versa,” it said. “Time is running out for proper protections to be put into place.”

At least one Pack Unit inmate, Leonard Clerkly, died from pneumonia that the preliminary autopsy found resulted from COVID-19 infection.

While Deitch sees the preliminary injunction as a critical step, she said that it’s not enough to effectively quash the spread of the disease. Nonviolent offenders, those who are no longer a threat to society due to their age or illness and those only in jail because they can’t afford their bail should be let out to reduce the prison population, she said. Sanitizing measures like those mandated in the injunction should then be applied to what inmates remain. 

“When you’re head-to-foot in a crowded room with people coughing, hand sanitizer is not gonna protect you,” she said. 

Read the preliminary injunction here:

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Notable Replies

  1. The fact that they’re going to appeal this decision is appalling.

    And wholly typical.

  2. Is this a state run prison or a for profit prison?

  3. Avatar for kovie kovie says:

    I simply don’t understand how government is failing at so many levels, and not just in the US. My dad’s in a nursing home in so-so health abroad and no one’s seen fit to supply him with masks, gloves or antiseptic. My mom’s been waiting 6 weeks for her SNAP benefits to be renewed for another year. I’ve been waiting on a tax refund for nearly a month. None of us can figure out what’s going on with these stimulus payments even though we’ve done everything we’re supposed to to get them. I see people congregating in parks and outdoors without masks in close proximity and after a token showing for a couple of days cops are nowhere to be found. Even those auto insurance discounts that were promised are slow in coming. And it’s still nearly impossible to find PPE and antiseptic in local stores.

    This is just our personal experience, and it’s nothing compared to what many are going through, the PPE that hospitals, health care workers and first responders still can’t get in sufficient quantities, along with ventilators and other essential equipment and supplies, the terrible conditions in prisons, nursing homes and public housing, the body bags overflowing in morgues and elsewhere, and so on. And instead of growing a spine and doing something about it, GOP leaders are whining about the economy and closures and how mean Dems and the media are to them, and threatening to reopen businesses. It’s like a nightmare scenario out of Bosch. Even Dems are mostly silent, probably afraid of being seen as exploiting the pandemic for political gain. WTF is going on?!?

    Are we seeing the collapse of the post-WII neoliberal/conservative world order and its exposure as a sham and a fraud that’s mostly intended to enrich and empower its leaders? If so, what replaces it, progressivism or fascism? It’s going to end up being one or the other.

  4. That guard’s belt is straining mighty hard to hold up the overburden.

  5. Avatar for pshah pshah says:

    “What’s so stunning is that there are so many correctional agencies that are not doing this most basic of stuff,” she said. “I mean, you need a lawsuit to tell people they can wash their hands? That’s what we’ve come to in this country: you need to sue to protect your most basic of rights.”

    This. It’s reprehensible it’s taken a deadly viral infection to highlight how poor and negligent the care is in institutions in this country, and not just prisons.

    It’s appalling people who ostensibly believe in the concept of forgiveness, somehow are never able to forgive inmates for their sins, especially if they’re persons of color. Let’s not pretend racism isn’t a big part of this.

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