'So Profoundly Stupid': Rep. Jared Huffman on San Quentin COVID-19 Outbreak

A crowd of more than 50 local elected officials and prison reform advocates gathered Thursday outside the main gates of San Quentin State Prison demanding Gov. Gavin Newsom immediately reduce the prison's population, which has been rocked by a devastating outbreak of COVID-19.

Organized by a coalition of local social justice and prisoner rights groups, the press event featured emotional testimony from relatives of those inside the Marin County prison, as well as formerly incarcerated people and youth activists, who urged the governor to release those who pose little threat to public safety.

"When you create a condition when you're just packing people into your prisons, that's bad. Period," said state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who was joined by other local leaders including Assemblymembers Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, and Rob Bonta, D-Oakland. "But it's especially bad when you have a contagion that's killing people. It's not surprising that when you have overcrowded prisons, you're going to have a problem with COVID-19."

He added, "This is a humanitarian disaster that is compounding another humanitarian disaster called mass incarceration."

As of Thursday, more than 1,600 of the some 3,500 inmates at San Quentin have tested positive for the coronavirus, which exploded inside the prison after officials transferred 121 inmates from the heavily impacted California Institution for Men in Chino on May 30 without properly testing them for infections. Until then, San Quentin had been virus-free. At least seven prisoners infected with the virus have died.

Newsom, who met Wednesday with a federal judge to discuss releases, said his goal is to reduce the number of inmates at the prison by at least 400 in the next several weeks.

"It's been incredibly frustrating that we had someone make the decision to transfer a few patients from one prison — Chino — into San Quentin," Newsom said during his Thursday press briefing. "And that decision created the chain of events that we are now addressing and dealing with. I'm not here to sugarcoat that. I'm not here to scapegoat that. All of us are now accountable to addressing this issue and doing so in a forthright manner, and that's precisely what we're doing."

On Thursday, KQED's Tara Siler spoke to U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-North Bay, about the unfolding crisis at the prison located in his district. Below are some highlights from their conversation.

KQED: How would you grade the state's response to the situation at San Quentin?

JH: The initial response obviously gets an F. I mean, there never should have been a transfer of those inmates from Chino without a test immediately preceding that transfer, and they were slow to step-up and address the mess that they created. More recently, though, and especially since my state legislative colleagues Marc Levine and Mike McGuire have gotten involved and Cal OES (Office of Emergency Services) has opened an incident command on site, I give them high marks. The problem is, by that time, we were trying to undo a terrible tragedy that had been inflicted on San Quentin and the broader Bay Area community.

KQED: And who do you think is responsible for this crisis?

JH: You know, I can't say exactly who, but obviously the prison health care officials who allowed this transfer to happen. There may be some other accountability within the system. You know that I think there needs to be a very comprehensive look at that. How did this system allow something so profoundly stupid in the middle of this deadly pandemic to actually happen?

KQED: Is that something the federal government should or would look at in terms of a review of, you know, how this unfolded?

JH: Certainly, if this were a federal prison, the answer would be yes. Since San Quentin is entirely a state facility with state authorities, my guess is that that's probably the primary point of accountability. There's a federal receiver, of course, because of litigation. But that does not bring any federal agencies into play. That's simply a federal court who has ordered this receiver due to some longstanding litigation.

KQED: You know, academics, public health experts, advocates and some elected officials have been calling for the state to drastically reduce the number of people incarcerated there, through early release, probation, parole and such. Do you agree that that needs to happen?

JH: I think their hand is being forced. You know, whether that needs to happen or not, it's going to happen. There's no other way to address the crisis. So, I think they're approaching it in a sensible way. At San Quentin and other facilities, they're looking at inmates who pose the least threat of some kind of violent crime, recidivism, are near the end of their sentences, are older, might be eligible for humanitarian release. And, you know, we can we can reduce the population pretty significantly using those factors.

KQED: I guess what I was getting at is that, you know, the governor is doing some reductions of the population there, wants to get it down to below 100% capacity. But, you know, the advocates and these folks that are calling for more drastic, you know, more aggressive action, I guess. Do you think it needs to be more aggressive than what the governor is doing?

JH: I'm not ready to second guess the governor in this regard. These are very tough decisions. I mean, it's a balancing in every respect. And it's not as simple as just terminating sentences, especially in situations where people may be going to communities that aren't ready to receive them. We may not have the programs and the capacity to do a good job helping them re-enter society. So, in the middle of a pandemic, that becomes even more complicated. I'm just not ready to second guess the governor, I think, on that point.

KQED: What are you hearing from your constituents about this crisis? I mean, have they been reaching out to your office at all?

JH: Oh, yeah. I mean, when the numbers started to become known, there was an immediate sense of alarm, especially in Marin County, because, you know, our numbers are going up even without San Quentin. We have the highest per capita coronavirus spread in the Bay Area.

And so to think about this encroaching on our hospital capacity, our ICU capacity, our ambulance capacity, and there was a lot of alarm and it looked like it was on track to do that. So I'm very grateful that Cal OES. and others have really taken a bold response in the last few days to make sure that that doesn't happen.

KQED: Following up on that. Marin has made a concerted effort to distance itself from the case numbers in the prison. Do you think what's happening inside San Quentin should be considered a county issue or county problem?

JH: It's a state problem. There's no doubt about it. I mean, Marin public health authorities have limited ability to either prevent or to resolve a crisis like this is taking place inside a prison like San Quentin. So, you know, I think they've been working closely together. I know that our Marin County public health director has been onsite at San Quentin, like, almost every day for the last week or more. And that's appropriate. But no, this really needs to be a state issue resolved by state authorities. And you can't put the whole burden of a fix on this on Marin County.

KQED: Given this crisis at San Quentin and big outbreaks in other prisons as well, do you think this could galvanize major prison reform throughout the state?

JH: I think prison reform had a lot of momentum even before this. So I know at the federal level we've been tackling sentencing and other aspects of prison reform. The Black Lives Matter movement, I think, has helped create even more energy behind some of the systemic inequities in our system, including criminal justice. So there's a strong interest in doing more on criminal justice reform.

KQED: But do you think that this crisis at San Quentin and the other prisons, particularly, could aid that?

JH: Well, potentially, in the sense that it may force us to accelerate consideration of some of these early release alternatives that are probably going to be forced on us anyway as one of the only ways to deal with the pandemic within these facilities.

This report contains additional reporting from The Associated Press