The COVID-19 Shutdown of ERDCC

With last week's COVID-19 testing out of the way, a total of thirty-odd prisoners and employees show positive for the novel coronavirus. The warden and the Department of Corrections alike assure us that these people have been removed from the general population, with staff quarantining at home and the prisoners isolated in two specially designated units.

And what of the people who might've had contact with the infected in the week and a half that passed before all the test results came in? The administration has a solution to that, too. Every wing that housed someone who tested positive is now under quarantine. As I write this, two wings of 1-House, three wings of 3- and 4-House, and all of 2-, 5-, and 6-House are confined to those locations. The rest of us are beginning out third month on daily five-cell rotations — only ten people out at a time, for a half hour or less.

Staff are required to wear masks and gloves anytime they walk into a wing on quarantine status. In my house, they wear their gloves but usually don't change them after leaving a quarantine wing, such as when they hand out our mail or search our cells. As with so many other standard operating procedures here, I have to wonder, What's the point? The administration's ideas might look good on paper, but in practice they're fouled up beyond sense.

Like most prisons throughout history, this facility relies heavily on the labor of the people confined to it. The mass moves forced on ERDCC's population, consolidating specific types of laborers in specific wings, thereby putting all of the institution's eggs in one basket, have now come back to bite the administration in the ass. Naturally, no prisoner was afforded a voice at the meeting where they ratified that terrible decision, so I can't really say "I told you so," but I did predict that moving all canteen workers, laundry workers, and factory workers into a single wing would cause problems sooner than later. Now, here we are.

With the population of just a few wings able to move around the institution, the slack has to be taken up by volunteers. Line servers in the dining halls are working extra shifts, as are cooks and dishwashers. This week's canteen orders have been packed and delivered to the quarantined units by an all-volunteer crew. Laundry is being done by an interim group of interim workers. A caseworker came through my wing, door to door, asking for assistance on behalf of the overtaxed kitchen.

The facility is as close to a standstill as possible without actually imposing a full lockdown. Meanwhile, as the number of cases continues to rise, the State of Missouri's opening up. If life at ERDCC is this restrictive now, what's going to happen when the virus really hits here?