According to the state health department’s website, there are currently no positive COVID-19 cases in the Forsyth County Detention Center, but family members and loved ones of those incarcerated remain concerned. All inmates, workers, and visitors are still required to wear masks, and visits are by appointment only.
The American system of prisons and jails was not built to withstand a pandemic. Prisons and jails are centered around communal areas and people are constantly moving in and out, which makes the threat of COVID-19 transmission more likely, which led to an outbreak at the Forsyth County Detention Center in January.
Christina Howell, the PR team manager at the Forsyth County Sherriff’s office, listed all of the current precautions and procedures related to COVID-19 in the Forsyth County Detention Center. These precautions include working closely with the Department of Public Health, daily symptom monitoring for staff before they enter the jail, and testing inmates for COVID-19 before they enter the facility.
Howell explained that detention officers are all required to wear N95 or K95 masks while around those imprisoned, and new inmates are quarantined for ten days before entering the general jail population. In addition, all programs, religious and recreational, are still canceled and public visitation remains limited.
In January 2022, the Forsyth County Jail, located in downtown Winston-Salem, faced a COVID-19 outbreak of the Omicron Variant. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services released on January 26 that the jail had 229 infected inmates. At the time, the Forsyth County Jail reported the third-highest number of cases among the state’s 97 correctional facilities.
This outbreak was not the first in this facility. The first outbreak began in November 2020 and infected a total of 312 people, including 250 inmates and 62 staff members, according to the North Carolina Department of Health.
In December 2021, Shaketa Ford, wife of an incarcerated man in the Forsyth County Jail spoke to WXII 12 News about how the COVID-19 precautions in the jail were impacting her husband’s emotional and physical health. She claimed that the jail was taking some restrictions too far and not treating the prisoners as people. She said, “they had him locked up all day.” He was not allowed to do anything and Ford said that she could hear her husband’s spirit breaking over the phone.
In a statement on January 19, Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough Jr. said that “unfortunately, COVID-19 is rampant everywhere.” He continued by saying that the number of inmates infected with the virus was a reflection of what was happening across the entire country. According to United Nations News, in January 2022 the United States had over eight million positive COVID-19 cases reported.
At the beginning of the pandemic, there were new restrictions. “Only visitors are attorneys, all detention and contract staff are checked daily for symptoms and fever before they enter the center, intake questionnaire, separated for first 14 days, education materials available, the staff wears surgical masks, some additional policies available. Fewer residents out of their cells at one time” says the May 2020 information update.
Christina Howell is a public relations manager for the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office. Howell told the Winston-Salem Journal that at the height of the outbreak, all the jail officers and staff were monitored every day for symptoms and fever before they entered the jail, and inmates were tested for COVID-19 when they are initially booked into the jail. In addition, inmates are issued N95 masks and all detention officers wore either N95 or KN95 masks when around inmates.
According to The North Carolina Department of Public Safety, 57 incarcerated people have died from COVID-19 in North Carolina prisons.
Dr. Felicia Arriaga, an assistant sociology professor in the criminology department at Appalachian State University conducted research on jails in North Carolina. Arriaga found that the Forsyth County Jail’s average population pre-COVID-19 was 814 and it was reduced to 623 from April to July of 2020. It continued to decline from December 2020 to March 2021 and reached 559 people in the facility. This research also looked at the lockdown situation in the jail at the height of the COVID-19 outbreaks.
In a chapter in Incarceration during COVID-19 Shouldn’t be a Death Sentence, published in March 2021, Arriaga wrote, “Jails lack transparency, with few requirements to publicly report data, and those requirements differ by state. While some states, like Texas, have provided consistent public information about the spread of COVID-19 in jails, most have done nothing.”
Since jails had no statewide database of COVID-19-related information, Arriaga’s team “sent public records requests to all jails/sheriffs in North Carolina to better understand their approach to navigating the pandemic for those incarcerated. In the onset, some worked with other criminal-legal actors to release high-risk populations but we also found that important things like visitation and programming were suspended.”
The UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project gave the state of North Carolina an F for COVID-19-related data reporting. Their initiative has been made far more difficult by the lack of transparency from jails and prisons all over the country, and the Forsyth County Jail is no exception.
North Carolina Health News Reporter, Elizabeth Thompson, has written multiple articles on health oversights in North Carolina jails. Thompson points out how lockdowns forced incarcerated people to spend even more time in their cells, often for 23 hours a day. This is thought to have had an impact on the mental health of incarcerated people.
Thompson says that researchers argue that COVID-19-related experiences in jail are adding to trauma that already exists from spending time in incarceration including depression and anxiety.
One anonymous source who has a loved one in the jail said to the Triad Abolition Project that their incarcerated family member had an inmate who was infected with COVID-19 moved into his cell when he was healthy in August 2021.
The Triad Abolition Project, an activist group in Winston-Salem, and founding member, Brittany Battle, declined to speak about their opinions on the COVID-19 outbreak, but there is information on their social media accounts and website, including a statement made on behalf of Alisha Nelson. Nelson’s husband has been inside the Forsyth County Jail for three years awaiting trial.
In August 2021 Nelson said that “Even now, inmates are still currently testing positive to this date, and are still being put into the general population with other uninfected inmates, putting their lives at risk. What is occurring at the jail now is cruel and unusual punishment!”
