Across the state prison system, all inmates and staff have been tested for COVID-19, according to Arkansas officials.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced that all inmates and staff within the Division of Corrections and Division of Community Correction have been tested. In total, 19,378 individuals have been tested since officials launched its effort to test the state prison population with 14,650 inmates and 4,728 staff members tested.
Hutchinson said there have been 5,120 positive cases among inmates, amounting to a roughly 35 percent positivity rate. There have been 378 positives among staff members.
“That completes that effort, although this will need to be ongoing from time to time in the prison population to keep a handle on it in the future,” he said.
Arkansas Department of Corrections Secretary Solomon Graves said the positivity rate among inmates has decreased in recent weeks, falling to 4.3 percent. According to Graves, there have been 8,080 total tests performed in recent weeks and the department has received results for 6,699 tests. Of that total, 6,406 have been negative and 293 have been positive.
“[This] is reflective of the mitigation efforts that we continue to implement within both the Division of Corrections and the Division of Community Corrections,” Graves said.
Graves attributed the falling positivity rates to decreased numbers of inmates. However, he noted the difficulty of socially distancing inmates within the prison system. One of the ways the state has addressed this issue is through early release efforts.
“Over these last months during the pandemic, we have, with the Governor’s assistance, been able to reduce our population within the Division of Correction by 10 percent,” he said. “That is due in part to the slowing of new commitments from the local courts, but it is also due to the fact that we were able to implement a modified emergency…release plan at the end of April, which generated 843 early releases from the Division of Corrections.”
More than 480 inmates are set to be released soon through another early release program. Graves told reporters during a Friday press conference that the state Parole Board had moved up the release of 481 inmates – most of whom were previously set to be transitioned back into the general public. This early release, Graves said, will help create additional capacity and space.
While the statewide prison system has been fully tested, officials are reportedly working to develop plans for future testing. Hutchinson said that there are plans to regularly test the population and there should be protocols set up for this effort.
“We will be working on the next phase on that as to exactly how to consistently have some testing protocols in the prison. Obviously, we’ll be doing it if there are any sympomatics or if there’s one positive case. We do have our protocols in that we go in and test all that might have close contact with them,” he said.
Despite the falling positivity rate, there are currently no plans to resume in-person visitation in the prison system. Resuming visitation, according to Hutchinson, is “not a possibility now” due to the potential of bringing infection into the prison facilities.
“You can see that it’s still a very sensitive environment. While we’ve gone through and we’ve tested everybody, that could go awry – the progress we’ve made if we have something that comes in from the outside that leads to infection,” Hutchinson said.
To compensate for the lack of in-person visitation privileges, the Department of Corrections has increased inmates’ access to other forms of communications.
“We have made video visitation and telephone calls as cheap as possible for the inmates to utilize. We have also increased the amount of time that that equipment is available to inmates in their barracks to make up for the increased demand on those systems,” Graves said.
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