MSU Law Civil Rights Clinic Files Federal Lawsuit Against MDOC for COVID-19 Response

Professor Daniel Manville of Michigan State University College of Law Civil Rights Clinic and the Law Firm of Ernst, Charata & Lovell, PLC, filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday, April 30th against numerous Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) officials seeking an injunction to require the MDOC to follow the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Guidelines for prisons to ensure social distancing for:

  • Prisoners confined in two-person cells;
  • Prisoners confined in pole barns which contain up to 160 prisoners per side;
  • Prisoners confined in dayrooms, gyms and classrooms; and
  • Prisoners who have tested positive to remove them from the general population setting and confine them in a health care setting.

Numerous prisons are not providing social distancing in the chow hall or in the yard.

Until this past week, MDOC was testing few inmates. As a result of not testing in the past, some of the prisons now have positive test rates of over 60% of their respective prison population. MDOC’s prison population is over 37,000 prisoners. As of April 27, 2020, MDOC had only tested 2,420 prisoners; 1,364 have tested positive, and 38 have died. It is very likely that the level of prisoners with COVID-19 is significantly higher than reported.

Health and prison experts all agree that any competent physician in the field of infectious disease would recognize both 1) the serious deficiencies in MDOC’s policies and practices with respect to protecting inmates from the virus, and 2) the serious health risks posed by the virus, particularly to a crowded population with underlying health conditions.

Health in prisons and correctional facilities impacts community health. Protecting the health of individuals who are detained and work in these facilities is vital. Infectious disease experts have stated that “the MDOC’s COVID-19 policies and actions, or lack thereof, to be egregiously deficient in comparison with the CDC standard in a number of respects, and posing substantial risk that inmates will face an outbreak of the novel coronavirus and resulting COVID-19 disease, further entailing grave risks to the health of inmates, including the risk of death.”