San Quentin's Incarcerated Workers Tasked With Jobs That Increase COVID-19 Risk

The symptoms for COVID-19 hit Larry Williams pretty fast. He got sweaty, disoriented. His blood pressure dropped.

“They told me that they feared that I was going to have a heart attack or heart failure,” Williams said by phone from San Quentin State Prison, where he is incarcerated. “They thought I was going to crash.”

Williams, who has underlying health conditions that put him at risk for dying from COVID-19, tested positive for the virus on June 11, a day after a correctional officer asked him to help move hundreds of boxes from the bottom floor of a prison unit to a higher tier. After taking a couple loads, he asked whose belongings they were moving. He said the officer shrugged and told him the property belonged to 121 inmates who had transferred there at the end of May from the California Institution for Men in Chino.

Twenty-five of those men subsequently tested positive for the virus, and were believed to be the source of what’s become the largest COVID-19 outbreak in a California prison, infecting more than 1,600 men incarcerated at San Quentin and killing seven.

While most inmates at the prison in Marin County are being restricted to dorms or cells to prevent further spread of the virus, some routinely left those cells to provide essential work.

Dorm porters like Williams clean group living spaces, including inmate’s toilets and showers.

Most prison jobs pay between $.09 to $1.40 an hour, but Williams said he was not financially compensated for his work.

“Our pay was being able to come out [of our cells], stay out a little extra, being able to use the phone,” he said. “We moved the boxes because we were afraid of losing our privileges.”

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Dana Simas responded to the allegations in a July 8 email.

"Our top priority is the health and safety of all those who live and work in our state prisons, including the incarcerated population that fulfill critical work assignments," Simas wrote. "We are taking every precaution possible to protect the critical worker population."

Those precautions include providing surgical masks during critical workers’ shifts, personal protective equipment if warranted and training on infection control, she said.

But an essential worker at San Quentin who cleaned the rooms of COVID-19 patients recently told a filmmaker such protections were not in place for them.

“[The worker] told me that his initial COVID training didn't require them to use masks when they were cleaning areas where people who had been infected had been,” said Adamu Chan on a phone call from San Quentin last week. “Some of his coworkers had become infected.”

Chan, who makes films about life at the prison through the nonprofit program First Watch, recently interviewed a member of a team that cleaned COVID-19 treatment rooms. That worker said he felt the team had been coerced into going into dangerous sections of the prison without proper protection.

“Some of his coworkers had just stopped going to work because they didn't feel like it was safe,” Chan said.

California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA), a civilian-led program inside California prisons that employed more than 7,000 inmates statewide in 2019, confirmed that some of their workers at San Quentin clean medical treatment rooms.

“Though these workers have been deemed ‘critical,' none are being forced to report to work,” said spokeswoman Stephanie Eres in a July 8 email, which also laid out precautions the program is taking to protect inmates, including providing them with masks, protective eyewear and hand sanitizer.

Depending on the type of work assignment, CALPIA said they provided additional protection through Tyvek suits or smocks and N95 masks.

The program directors also encouraged physical distance, Eres wrote, and when working in areas where that was not possible, “CALPIA has utilized barriers between each work area or has reorganized areas to ensure staff and offenders can maintain the six-feet-apart distancing.”

Eres said CALPIA closed programs at San Quentin on June 22 and has shut down 43 other programs at various prisons throughout the state due to COVID-19.

KQED has also reported on allegations that incarcerated workers at the California Institution for Women in Riverside also contracted the virus while working.

At San Quentin, Larry Williams has nearly recovered from COVID-19, and continues to speak out about conditions in the prison.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that the state aims to release thousands of inmates with lower-level offenses soon from San Quentin and other state prisons.

Williams, a father of four who is serving time in San Quentin for a parole violation, hopes to be one of them. He has nearly recovered from COVID-19, but thinks more should be done to control the outbreak at the prison.

"People like me that have underlying health conditions, we should be looked at and possibly allowed to go home on an ankle monitor,” he said. “Or they need to provide a better facility that they can keep us COVID-free, because right now, I'm one of the lucky ones.”