On August 13, thirty-one-year-old single mother Rebekah Brown kissed her fiancé, Anthony Clemons, and hurried out of the prison visiting room at Washington Corrections Center in the small town of Shelton. Their scheduled visit had ended, but she would see him again soon—it would be ninety minutes before their next visit began, or so she thought. Rebekah spent the time between visits driving through Shelton, daydreaming of the afternoon to come and taking in the scenery. When she arrived back at the prison, she waited in line with the other families of prisoners.
What she did not know was that she would be turned away and later removed from Clemons’ visiting list. She had committed a crime of affection: a kiss—a violation of COVID-19 protocol. If the Washington Department of Corrections (WDOC) had its way, this kiss would be their last.
“I couldn’t help but start crying,” Brown remembers. “They never even gave us a warning.”
As in prisons across the country, Washington Corrections Center (WCC) prisoners and their loved ones continue to feel the impact of COVID policies implemented by officials. Visits, which had been suspended for nearly a year and a half, now oscillate between permitted and suspended as state facilities continue to struggle with outbreaks of COVID-19. Since the beginning of the pandemic, prisoners have suffered undue exposure to the virus, loss of rehabilitative programs, and limited recreation. But the isolation—especially from loved ones—has been crushing.
As prisoners work to maintain healthy relationships paramount to their reentry to society, WDOC continues to impose restrictions from peak-pandemic levels that severely harm those relationships. As society continues to move away from restrictions, WDOC is weaponizing protection measures against prisoners who “violate”—sometimes unknowingly—draconian protocols.
Disparities in COVID restriction enforcement reinforces the marginalization of prisoners. While sports stadiums across America are once again filled with maskless faces, and awkward “kiss cams” capture happy couples sharing a peck, in prison visiting rooms, kissing is a crime and masks are enforced with punitive ferocity. The prison guards who enforce these policies go home and freely kiss, hug, and breathe the same air as their loved ones. These same guards share a physical space with prisoners daily, are tested for COVID only periodically, and themselves regularly flout protocols such as mask wearing.
When Brown left the prison, Clemons was escorted to a designated quarantine unit at WCC, known as R5, which is structured and run under conditions similar to solitary confinement. Apparently fearful that Clemons had contracted COVID-19 from the kiss, a WDOC spokesperson confirms in an email to The Progressive that it placed him in three different units throughout a ten-day isolation period—a fact that undermines the logic of isolating him to begin with.
“They put me at risk,” Clemons tells The Progressive. “They put me in a unit with COVID-positive prisoners.”
Though he was ostensibly placed there to limit potential COVID spread, fail-safes in the visitor intake process make the probability of transmission through visits minimal: all visitors are rapid- tested on site prior to entry, including Rebekah Brown on the morning in question. If Clemons was going to catch COVID-19, it would more likely be due to his placement in R5, not a kiss in the visiting room.
“They put me at risk. They put me in a unit with COVID-positive prisoners.”
Perhaps recognizing its error, WDOC administration moved Clemons to the Intensive Management Unit (IMU)—the most restrictive housing within WDOC usually reserved for hard disciplinary cases and long-term solitary placements. IMUs across the nation are go-to housing for prison officials to enforce quarantine, a practice that has come with much national controversy, and one that WDOC recently moved away from at WCC. With this move, Clemons’ ordeal was starting to look and feel to him more like retribution over his audacity to kiss his fiancée and less about his potential to spread COVID.
Clemons sat in solitary for two days, worrying about Brown. Since the kiss, they had not been allowed to communicate, neither knowing the fate of the other. When he finally got access to a phone, he found her crying at work. Brown had just received an email from the WDOC stating that their visiting privileges were suspended for ninety days.
“I felt blindsided,” Brown recalls. “Visits are so important to us, for our relationship. It is the only time we can sit and really talk.” This additional separation makes an often impossible situation even harder.
Brown wrote an email appeal to WDOC, pointing out that she was new to prison visits and had not been warned of COVID protocols. One month later WDOC responded, refusing to end the 90-day suspension, citing that “violations of policy, guidelines, and/or expectations do not require a warning.” In its email to The Progressive, WDOC points to a 40-page Washington State Corrections COVID policy report as the available guidance for rules on visitation at the time of Brown’s visit.
On August 16, WDOC counselor Sarah Melton, who was tasked with assessing IMU placements, acknowledged that Clemons should not have been put there because the unit is not designated for COVID quarantine, Clemons tells me. The WDOC confirms Meltonrecommended Clemons’ transfer to one of the prison intake units that same day.
Clemons’ status was truly unclear. If he were being quarantined, he would have stayed in R5, the designated quarantine unit for the facility. If he were being disciplined, he would have stayed in IMU. Instead, he found himself in R3, a prison intake unit with open bars currently under “outbreak” status, a fact Clemons found troubling upon his arrival.
“They put me at risk again!” he recalls. At this point, WDOC had moved a prisoner who was unlikely to have caught the virus and put him in two different units where other prisoners were positive, and a third disciplinary unit. Washington Corrections Center was helping to spread the virus, rather than curbing it.
On August 21, Clemons came across Sergeant Christina Meadors, who had escorted him to IMU from R5. Remembering Clemons, and herself confused over his treatment, Meadors tells me she sent emails on Clemons’ behalf to administrators responsible for his placement. Thanks to her efforts, Clemons was eventually notified he would return to his living unit ten days after his fateful kiss with Brown. He says he was never tested for COVID-19 prior to his return to general population.
WDOC will tell the public that their concern is to stop the spread of COVID within these institutions. Yet, Anthony Clemons was never tested for the virus, and—according to the WDOC itself—was taken in and out of a quarantine unit and placed in two other units within one week, potentially putting other prisoners and himself at risk. Meanwhile guards—the most likely vector of transmission—remain loosely regulated and often conduct pat searches on prisoners maskless. Whatever safety these policies are meant to provide is overshadowed by their use as mechanisms of oppression and control.
In the beginning of the pandemic, prisoners, like others in society, feared for their health and safety. Since then, we have come to know a new fear: that of everlasting COVID restrictions. These restrictions—their efficacy questionable at best—are now regularly weaponized, used as a cudgel to divorce prisoners from meaningful access to recreation, rehabilitative programs, and the community. People released from prisons under this paradigm are inevitably less prepared to reenter society, a fact that has its own far-reaching implications for public safety.
WDOC, and prisons generally, should be more concerned with giving prisoners access to the rehabilitative programming that helps reduce the crime cycle, and less focused on dividing us from our support networks by criminalizing affection between consenting adults.