COVID-19 cases are walking in and out of Sedgwick County jail every day, sheriff says
The Sedgwick County Jail has been the site of nearly 750 total positive cases of coronavirus, but those who think it’s OK because they’re in a confined setting, think again.
Inmates walk in with COVID-19 — or catch it in the jail — and walk out into the general community on a daily basis, county officials said at a staff meeting Tuesday.
While COVID clusters in nursing homes have gotten a lot of attention, “those cluster cases are less concerning than the jail cluster cases because the jail is so transitory,” County Manager Tom Stolz said.
When an inmate has tested positive, they still leave when their sentence says so or when they make bail, officials said. And that can spread the coronavirus to the community.
“I have no choice,” Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter said. “It’s illegal for me to hold somebody after the judge says let them go. So they’re not being held.”
Most inmates who test positive feel fine and show no symptoms of the disease, Easter said.
“When you go to a doctor and get tested, what does the doctor tell you? ‘Go home, quarantine, stay put,’ ” Easter said. “Do I think that some of these (inmate) folks are going to do that? No. I don’t think so at all.”
They don’t even try to protect themselves when they’re in jail, he said.
“The fact of the matter is 10% of our inmates are even wearing the masks that we issue them,” Easter said. “I went into a pod the other day, there’s 55 inmates in there, two were wearing them. We’re sanitizing, we’re cleaning, we’re providing them with the masks — they’re choosing not to wear them.”
And when an inmate refuses to mask up, the guards don’t have any good way to make them.
“Then, that’s a use-of-force issue that we have to start facing,” Easter said. “Then the inmates will say how we’re beating them up and stuff.”
Complicating matters is that there are certain types of inmates that have to be held in special units, including women, sex offenders and murder suspects awaiting trial. While those areas of the jail may have excess bed space, it can’t be used for ordinary inmates, Easter said.
At the start of the pandemic, efforts were made to release low-level offenders to relieve jail crowding and clear space for COVID-infected inmates.
That helped, but those people are largely gone and recent increases in violent crime have made it more difficult to clear cells, Easter said.
For many years, Sedgwick County has farmed excess inmates out to neighboring counties with excess jail space, but that’s not an option right now, he said.
“The other counties, they’re not taking any of our inmates right now because of the COVID issue we have,” he said.
There have been 742 positive tests recorded at the jail so far. About 300 to 400 have passed the quarantine period and are considered recovered and no longer contagious.
The high numbers are largely due to universal testing of inmates who enter jail housing units.
“One lesson that we’ve learned out of this by testing everybody: If you took the same amount of tests out in the community and tested you know, everybody, our (community-wide) numbers would be outrageous, because there’s folks in there . . . who have no signs, no symptoms, don’t feel bad,” he said.
The jail holds about 1,500 inmates and “at one point half the population . . . coming through the jail was infected with it,” Easter said.
“This is a sample of if you tested everybody, that’s what you would see.”
This story was originally published August 25, 2020 at 5:08 PM.
