The Double Standard of Covid Restrictions in New Mexico
The most basic currency that a democracy has is trust.
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In 2020, New Mexico prisons suffered alarming infection rates of COVID-19 even though visitation had ceased the previous year. Obviously, at that time there were no vaccines and outside of temperature checks and face masks there was little known and even less that could be done to paralyze the inevitable. Masks were issued but rarely enforced and the result was that over seventy percent of the inmate population became infected.
Staff members were testing positive one after the other, but security needs trumped the inmates’ health needs and the virus continued to spread. And as someone who lived this reality from within, I have to admit that it was a surreal experience that bordered on the frightful.
At the time I was part of the essential worker crew as a diet cook in the kitchen. I was ordered to work 15-hour shifts seven days a week for months, altogether working 450 hours a month to keep inmates with special dietary needs and allergies well fed during the pandemic.
What was frightening wasn't the work load or the long shifts, it was seeing the security staff pass through the kitchen with great regularity almost never wearing masks.
When an administrator would walk through their masks would go up, just like the inmates, but the risk from them was obviously much greater since only they alone could infect us. And, as I said, the result of this type of carelessness led to thousands of infected inmates throughout the state.
Ever since late 2019, visitation privileges in New Mexico prisons were suspended due to concerns about COVID-19 transmission. This was undoubtably a major setback for prisoners, but one that we understood as we watched in horror as the infection rates surged across the country and around the globe.
It was obvious that our lives were at risk, and for the time being just like everyone else we were going to have to adapt. In early 2020, the Department afforded us one twenty-minute video visit through Google Meet once a month with an approved visitor.
A step in the right direction, “better than nothing,” murmered many, “but not enough,” said others. The problem was simple, inmates in every major county jail in the state were being afforded tablets with constant access to their loved ones via phone, video call, and email – for a fee, of course – along with other entertainment needs, and the state prisons were operating as though it were still 1980.
If ever there was a time for secure communications to be expanded between inmates and their families, now was that time, but secretary Alisha Tafoya-Lucero refused.
We simply accepted the standard response that we hear to most requests, “we're looking into it,” with a grain of salt and kept our eyes fixed on the prize: an end to the pandemic and a return to normal visitation.
A hope that manifested itself on June 10, 2021, when visitation at state facilities was reinstated. Well, almost reinstated. I say almost because visitors were allowed into the facility with proof of vaccination and a negative COVID-19 test.
Likewise, we also had to be fully vaccinated to be eligible for visitation. So imagine our surprise when we finally got to the visiting room to learn that visitations were non-contact.
We were still being told to visit behind the glass as though we were segregation inmates being sanctioned for disciplinary reasons. So why all the precautions and vaccination requirements if no actual contact was to be permitted? Good question. An even better question, however, was why the double standard?
Because despite all the precautions being taken imagine our surprise and befuddlement to learn that staff wasn't required to vaccinate before entering the very same facilities.
Yes, vaccination is “mandated” by the governor, But Michelle Lujan- Grisham defines mandated to mean strongly suggested which, literally speaking, means that there is no mandate. State employees who choose not to be vaccinated must submit to a bi-weekly COVID-19 test and face disciplinary action if they fail to wear a mask at work.
Not an enforceable threat in a prison when the only people who can viably report them for not wearing a mask is a fellow corrections employee – about as likely to happen as Jeff Bezos inviting us all to experience space travel free of charge.
Perhaps the only way to understand this double standard and blatant disregard for human life is to acknowledge that a politician’s decisions will only ever be based on three things: Politics. Politics. Politics.
The unfortunate truth regarding corrections in New Mexico is that employees are not politically or ideologically diversified. Prisons are located in rural communities where Trump supporters make up more than ninety percent of the populace.
They don't believe in vaccination, like many Republicans who have chosen rhetoric over science, and when they felt that they might be forced to do so under executive order they levied a collective ultimatum through their union representatives. As more than one correctional officer has bragged, “we told the governor that if we're forced to vaccinate we’ll resign!”
What governor Lujan-Grisham failed to see was the emptiness of the threat. It lacked teeth since it was highly unlikely that an employee base made up of non-college or technical school grads would so readily walk away from the best pay and benefits that many have ever had in their entire lives.
Most were recruited away from minimum wage jobs in the service industry that didn't offer benefits. And the notion that any were eager to return to that substandard existence just to make a political point was unlikely. Kind of like an obese person threatening a hunger strike – yes, it's possible but it sure as hell isn't probable! The distance between the spoken threat and the deed, an abyss.
What's ironic here is that Michelle Lujan-Grisham is a Democrat and she's not winning votes from correctional officers anyways. Nevertheless she's made the political decision to placate correctional staff at the expense of the lives they are charged with rehabilitating.
None of us were sentenced to be executed, and keeping us in confined spaces with potentially infected and unvaccinated staff members feels like Russian roulette.
Now there is talk amongst staff that due to new infection rates in the facilities – one hundred percent caused by staff to inmate contact – that we will soon be returning to the Covid restrictions of limited movement and tier time rotation. Which means that we rotate from spending a third to two-thirds of the day locked in our cells, instead of engaged in meaningful rehabilitative programming.
In a previous post, A Plea to New Mexicans, I explained how it is that taxpayers aren't receiving what they're paying for, as far as correctional rehabilitation for inmates is concerned.
This is even less so with Covid restrictions centered around a double standard that puts political expression above the sanctity of human life, where masks are simply not the solution.
The staff only wears their masks when administration members do their rounds a few times a week. The graveyard shift almost never wears them. And as far as the inmates are concerned, almost ninety percent have been vaccinated and fail to see the point in wearing them.
There are sixty to a pod, we share tables, showers, microwaves and the recirculated air we breathe. If the very people who can infect us don't wear a mask, the mask on our end will do very little for us. And most inmates have had the same masks for over a year, and when we ask for new ones the facility now expects us to pay for them. Not likely.
To those of you in the regular free world Covid restrictions mean wearing a mask in public, or maybe not being able to visit your favorite restaurants. It means potentially not going to your preferred venue for art and entertainment. It means that public travel is more harried and restrictive. It may mean another season lost to the confines of your residence.
Seclusion. Quarantine. Unemployment. If you're a student, then it means another semester lost to the anonymity of virtual learning, where again you’re not getting the full benefit of what you're paying for. But for the inmate it means being locked in a cell while waiting for a badged-sadist to bring Covid with the cold slop for chow.
But, who is to blame?
If we pay heed to the conspiracy theorists then the Delta variant was again manufactured in a lab in Wuhan so as to continue weeding out the weak links of humanity.
I've even heard that it's all part of secret deliberations among G7 nations to address the challenges of rising populations, the depletion of natural resources, and global warming.
Do I trust any government enough to rule out the possibility that this isn't happening? No. But without evidence I'm not about to cling to the pessimism either. Because long ago I learned there is no upside to seeing the glass as half empty.
We could also blame naysayers, the pundits, and politicians who tried to convince us that COVID-19 was nothing more than the flu. Then there are the people who refuse to wear masks or vaccinate, despite the research and medical evidence before their eyes.
But pointing the finger never solves the problem. What we need now is leadership. We need governors to not follow the example of Michelle Lujan-Grisham and make the tough decisions despite political blowback. Because a leader swayed by threats doesn't deserve the office she holds.
The most basic currency that a democracy has is trust, and judging by the double standards and indicators before us we seem to be running low on that.
Yes it is clear that to many of you in the free world there is a general malaise or indifference when it comes to the living conditions of inmates. We are seen as a scourge on society, rather than the remainder or product of the unbalanced equation that we are.
But the Constitution still defends us; we still have rights; and most of us will be released into society one day. We were sentenced to a correctional department be corrected, not to be subjugated to corporal punishment to the death.
And a correctional officer union should not have the power to dictate political whims over the health and well-being of our lives.
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