As recounted by the local media (WSKG and WIVT) on December 2nd, Sheriff Harder and County Executive Harder have one response to volatile reports of COVID in the county jail from Citizen Action and other community groups: don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.
Don’t believe the county officials. Willingly or unwittingly, they’ve told us lies before, and are doing it again.
Despite the claims that less than a handful of persons in the jail have COVID, more and more reports come out from persons inside (and their families whom they speak to) regarding symptomatic and unknown cases. Who are we to believe? Neither the Sheriff nor the County Exec will reveal how many tests have been done of the thousands of persons who have been in the jail during this epidemic. In yesterday’s WSKG story Republican Sheriff Harder says only 2 incarcerated persons and maybe 2 or 3 (which is it?) Correctional Officers have COVID. According to Democrat County Executive Jason Garnar “the new cases are the first at the jail since July.”
We’ve heard this dissembling before, as in May when after multiple protests Garnar said there were no new cases—and then we got, after much waiting, data from a freedom of information act (FOIA) request that shows there were indeed cases.
This week is a repeat. Contrary to what Garnar states and WSKG and others pass on to us, another FOIA request submitted in mid-October finally came in showing three staff tested positive in the first two weeks of October alone. No new cases they tell us since July, really? Did Garnar not know? Here it is:
Of course if you don’t test, you won’t know. The state reports regularly how many persons have been tested in all its prisons with total negative and total positive results. In Elmira over 600 persons out of 1500 tested positive. But for Broome? How many Correctional Officers have been tested with what results? How many incarcerated persons have been tested with what results? We don’t know.
Here again the County has an explanation: they apparently don’t keep the information on tests. While everyone else reports positivity rates, including overall for the County, the County formally tells us in reasons to a request: “Please note the following from the Broome County Health Department, ‘Since we do not log details of negative test results, we cannot provide that information.’”
We hear multiple persons from multiple sections of pods of the jail have been symptomatic—and not just one pod as Harder alleges (and why did they test a whole pod? Was it because it was H pod which contains all the coerced workers who do all the cooking, cleaning and laundry? Meanwhile the Sheriff has issued a seemingly permanent solitary confinement order for almost everyone in the jail—an unprecedented punishment.
Meanwhile the jail fills up with yet more innocent persons awaiting hearings given the closed courts: of the over 370 persons inside, only 47 last month were reported by the state as sentenced. Meanwhile the County’s refusal to provide confidential telephone or video communications between lawyers and the incarcerated as is done elsewhere around the state.
In short: we don’t know how many persons have COVID, how many Correctional Officers move in and out of the jail with COVID, how many incarcerated persons have had and now have COVID, and how many persons come out of the jail and go home with COVID—with little or no provision for housing and food for those who need to isolate or quarantine.
In short: don’t believe the hype. The media should stop believing Harder, Garnar (and Trump), and demand some transparency and basic human treatment.
Just and Unity for the Southern Tier has a simple answer: the County needs to release technical parole violators, those with sentences less than a year, those medically compromised, those endlessly awaiting transfer to treatment facilities (at least). And then we need to support folks when they come out with housing, counseling and medical care, or they will end up homeless and with COVID as they are forced to wander across town as they seek food, medical attention, and safe place to sleep.
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