Lawmakers are joining prisoners’ advocates who are alarmed by the government’s response to the growing coronavirus crisis behind bars.
Michael Fleming never got to say goodbye to his father. He didn’t know his dad was fading away on a ventilator, diagnosed with coronavirus at the FCI Terminal Island federal prison in Los Angeles, where he was serving time for a drug charge.
His father, also named Michael, died April 19. At least half the population there has tested positive, the largest known hot spot in the federal prison system. But the first word the family received of the father’s illness was the day he died, from a prison chaplain asking if the body should be cremated and where the ashes should be sent.
“They just left us all in the dark,” Fleming said. “We had to find out from the news what the actual cause of death was. It was kind of screwed up.”
The response from the federal Bureau of Prisons to the growing coronavirus crisis in prisons has raised alarm among advocates and lawmakers about whether the agency is doing enough to ensure the safety of the nearly 150,000 inmates serving time in federal facilities…
To read the entire article from The Los Angeles Times, click https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-04-30/over-70-of-tested-inmates-in-federal-prisons-have-covid-19
