Supreme Court declined to reinstate a District Court order requiring Texas prison officials to enact basic safety precautions for the coronavirus

On November 16, 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a geriatric prison in southeast Texas will not be required to enact basic safety measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among its inmates. This lawsuit was filed on March 30, 2020, brought by the inmates at the Wallace Pack Unit in Navasota, Texas. In their complaint, the inmates alleged that the prison violated the Eighth Amendment, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Rehabilitation Act by failing to enact even simple safety measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. As a result, over 500 prisoners—more than forty percent of the inmates in the prison—contracted COVID-19, resulting in at least 20 deaths.

The Wallace Pack Unit is a geriatric prison where most inmates are over the age of sixty-five. Many of them suffer from medical conditions that put them in the high-risk category for contracting COVID-19. The prisoners’ demands included measures such as requiring the prison staff to wear masks, cleaning the shower between uses, and allowing prisoners to socially distance themselves from one another. The prisoners also requested that they be provided with items such as masks, items needed to disinfect their cells, and unrestricted access to hand soap.

At trial, the District Court entered a permanent injunction requiring the prison to establish basic measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, noting the prison officials’ “consistent non-compliance with basic public health protocols.” The order, however, was stayed pending appeal, citing procedural deficiencies in the prisoner’s court filings as a justification. When it reached the Supreme Court, the application to vacate that stay was denied.

Specifically, the appellate court argued that the inmates failed to seek relief through the prison’s internal grievance process before filing suit, which is required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (“PRLA”). The prisoners unsuccessfully argued that this grievance process was “ineffective” and “operated too slowly” to adequately address the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak within the prison, leaving prisoners to die while waiting for the grievance process to be completed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Elena Kagan. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor argued that the delay in imposing an injunction would force the prisoners to wait for relief “until it may be too late.” Sotomayor writes, “The people incarcerated in the Pack Unit are some of our most vulnerable citizens. They face severe risks of serious illness and death from COVID–19, but are unable to take even the most basic precautions against the virus on their own. If the prison fails to enforce social distancing and mask wearing, perform regular testing, and take other essential steps, the inmates can do nothing but wait for the virus to take its toll. Twenty lives have been lost already. I fear the stay will lead to further, needless suffering.”

According to The Marshall Project, Texas prisons have the highest number of COVID-19 cases among all other state prison populations in the United States. More than 25,000 prisoners have contracted COVID-19 in Texas state prisons alone, which averages out to approximately 21% of the entire Texas prison population. California state prisons have the second-highest number of COVID-19 patients, with over 18,000 cases.

Prisoners in the United States are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Many of them are forced to share cramped cells where social distancing is impossible. They are also unable to obtain masks and supplies needed for disinfecting their cells and belongings without being provided those items by the prison, which often does not happen. More than 1,300 prisoners have died from COVID-19 in the United States. According to Insider.com, this number is higher than the total number of executions performed in this country in the last twenty years combined.

“As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, state and federal judges have been increasingly asked to use their authority to release people from jails and prisons and to order improvements to conditions for those who remain,” writes UCLA Law. At least 570 such requests have been filed in the United States since the pandemic began. However, these attempts to protect the prison population have been frustrated by the current presidential administration.

In early April, Prison officials indicated that those who had served less than half their time would still be considered for early release due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the Trump administration reversed course shortly after. Prisoners who had been quarantining for two weeks prior to their release were suddenly told that the policy had changed and that they would not be released after all. Since that time, the Trump administration has intervened in a number of cases to prevent the release of prisoners and dispute any requests for safety protocols in the prisons relating to COVID-19 protections.

Even attempts to obtain information about the spread of COVID-19 within the prison population have met with resistance from the government. In October, the ACLU and others filed suit to obtain information relating to the spread of COVID-19 in prisons, claiming that this information was “improperly withheld” from them. “It is grotesque enough that our federal government has failed to protect people in jails and prisons from COVID-19 — people with lives, families, and constitutional rights. But they have also hidden that failed response from the public while claiming there’s nothing to see here,” said Somil Trivedi, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project.