The nearly 20,000 staff members and incarcerated people
form a population greater than 43 percent of counties in Mississippi. Yet they
are being left out of the state’s testing push, which Governor Tate Reeves has
touted as “aggressive” in recent press briefings.
“Testing is critical to manage this disaster,” he said on
April 6, “and that’s one thing that we in Mississippi are very fortunate of, is
we became very aggressive very early on testing.”
During a May 6 briefing, The Appeal asked Reeves about the
low testing rate inside prisons. He responded, “We haven’t had large numbers of
individuals in our prison system that have had symptoms.” The DOC has
succeeded in avoiding “major, catastrophic spreading” because of early
interventions, he said.
“Much like President Trump was very, very early by cutting
off travel to China, in Mississippi we were very early in cutting off visitation
in the Department of Corrections,” Reeves said at the same briefing. As of
Monday, the DOC reported that 10 incarcerated people and seven employees had
tested positive for COVID-19.
He added that temporarily banning prisoners from doing road
work across the state has helped taper the spread, too.
Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center in
Mississippi, said that low rates of testing are not indicative of low disease
rates. “The surest way to have zero confirmed cases in your facility is to
conduct zero tests,” he said.
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