Opinion: California jails are slow to share COVID-19 data

Komarla is founder and director of the Covid In-Custody Project. She lives in the Bay Area.

Though California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation maintains a central repository for COVID-19 data on its prisons, the state Department of Public Health has explicitly stated that it does not have any central source of county jail data either for infections or vaccinations. As a result, there is a significant knowledge gap about COVID-19 data in California’s 58 county jail systems — one that the Covid In-Custody Project is trying to fill.

By submitting California Public Records Act requests to every county’s Sheriff’s Departments, we have identified at least 42,000 COVID-19 cases among those incarcerated in county jails and another 18,000 cases among employees of sheriff’s departments, a subset of whom work inside these jails. Unfortunately, so far, these totals only include positive cases among incarcerated people in 31 counties, and employees in 23 counties. Here is what we learned from the data and our data collection efforts.

A bulk of the COVID-19 positive cases and deaths are from facilities in Southern California — San Diego, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties have collectively reported over 22,000 cases and 40 deaths in their jails. Los Angeles County has reported 23 in-custody COVID-19 deaths, the most. San Diego County has reported the second-most deaths, with six. San Bernardino County has reported eight “suspected” but not confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

Other counties, such as Kern, Ventura, Imperial and San Luis Obispo, have each reported smaller numbers, with anywhere from 200 to 400 positive cases each.

Infections among correctional staff are also reason for concern, with at least 15,000 employees at sheriff’s departments in the aforementioned nine counties testing positive at some point in the pandemic. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department has reported 3,100 positive cases so far.

Access to vaccination data has proven to be challenging in spite of public health orders that would require sheriff’s departments to document employees’ vaccination statuses as a part of the implementation process. None of the Sheriff’s Departments in Southern California, except for San Diego and Orange counties, have provided their vaccination rates, citing a variety of reasons.

In response to our request for the vaccination rate of custodial employees, the Sheriff’s Department in Riverside County stated that it does not track employees’ vaccination statuses in a central database, and would have to review all employee files to locate, extract and compile the data, which it is not required to do under the Public Records Act. In Kern County, the Sheriff’s Department similarly stated that a review of hundreds of employee files is unduly burdensome and therefore not required by law.

The Sheriff’s Department in Ventura County offered to provide the vaccination rate but with a hefty price tag to compensate for the staff time needed to gather the information.

We were able to uncover that 70 percent and 90 percent of Sheriff’s Department custodial employees in San Diego and Orange counties, respectively, are fully vaccinated (with or without a booster dose). Only 35 percent in Orange County have received a booster dose.

To prevent transmission from correctional staff to incarcerated populations, one of the primary modes of transmission in jails and prisons, the Department of Public Health mandated surveillance testing for unvaccinated jail staff over a year ago. But no Sheriff’s Department, except the one in Alameda County, has provided a week-by-week record of the count of unvaccinated employees, the percent who complied with the mandate and those who did not.

The state health officer also mandated vaccines for medical and non-medical staff working in medical areas of jails. But oftentimes sheriff’s departments stated that they do not document the vaccination rates of medical workers and redirected us to the contractor that provides health care services in custody — typically Wellpath. Our access to this data is consequently restricted since private agencies may not be subject to the California Public Records Act.

As has been previously reported, one state agency in California, the Board of State and Community Corrections, has attempted to improve data transparency for jails by requesting sheriffs to voluntarily share COVID-19 statistics with it. But the agency does not collect vaccination rates or the total positive cases for staff and incarcerated people, limiting the usability of the data set. Several counties also do not participate in the effort since the agency only requests data sharing and does not mandate it.

Thus far, roughly 70 percent of sheriff’s departments in the state have provided at least one data point on COVID-19 cases, testing or vaccinations in response to our requests. This data would not have been known if not for the state Public Records Act, which provides the public with a powerful gateway to access government records.

But while our efforts have filled some knowledge gaps, there is still a lot of missing information.

The Covid In-Custody Project is continuing to push for more data transparency, with the goal of helping researchers and public health leaders learn how to better respond to current and future public health crises behind bars.