HJNO Jul/Aug 2020

PRISON HEALTH Inside the U.S.’s Largest Maximum-Security Prison, COVID-19 RAGED. Outside, Officials Called Their Fight a Success. by Anat Rubin, Tim Golden, and Richard A. Webster, ProPublica BYTHE TIME he persuaded the guards to let him call his family, Michael Williams could feel his life slipping away. His body ached, and he was struggling to breathe. For three days, he had been locked behind the heavy metal door of a cramped prison cell, terri- fied and alone. “They weren’t treating him,” his son, Kevin Cooks, recalled. “He kept telling me, ‘Son, I’m going to die in here.’” Williams, a 70-year- old diabetic, was serving a life sentence for a 1974 convenience store murder he had al- ways maintained he did not commit. It was the first time his son had ever heard him cry. Williams’ family and his lawyer called over and over to the Louisiana State Pen- itentiary in Angola, pleading with guards and nurses to have himmoved to a hospital. When they finally reached one of the senior guard officers, family members said, he told themWilliams didn’t have the virus. On May 7, a nurse assured one of Wil- liams’ sisters that he was improving. The also sharply limited its testing of prisoners during the first 10 weeks of the pandemic, screening at most a few hundred of the roughly 5,500 held there. The testing was so limited that a former medical director for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections said he believed officials there had sought to avoid confirming the existence of an outbreak they feared they could not control. “If you do that testing, how are you going to handle the results?”the former official, Dr. Raman Singh, asked. “If you find it is wide- spread, how do you handle that with your guards? Never ask a question if you aren’t going to like the answer.” A spokesman for the corrections depart- ment, Ken Pastorick, would not disclose the number of inmates who have been tested at Angola. Nor would he comment on alle- gations that the authorities had deliberately withheld tests from many prisoners who showed symptoms of the virus. next day, he was rushed to a regional hospi- tal in critical condition. The day after that, a doctor called to say Williams had gone into cardiac arrest. If they wanted to say good- bye, he said, they should hurry. While the novel coronavirus burned through Angola, as the country’s largest maximum-security prison is known, offi- cials insisted they were testing all inmates who showed symptoms, isolating those who got sick and transferring more serious cases to the hospital in Baton Rouge, about 60 miles to the south. But from inside Angola’s walls, inmates painted a very different picture — one of widespread illness, dysfunctional care and sometimes inexplicable neglect. They said at least four of the 12 prisoners who have died in the pandemic, including Williams, had been denied needed medical help for days because their symptoms were not consid- ered sufficiently serious. Despite having test kits available, Angola This story was originally published by ProPublica. 18 JUL / AUG 2020  I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS