Please see my newest at DigBoston. The title is MA CORRECTIONS OFFICERS’ ANTI-VAXX LAWSUIT FAILS. The pull quote is “The plaintiffs ignore the harm that their requested injunction would cause incarcerated people.”
Tag Archives: COVID-19
WHY ARE HALF OF MASS CORRECTION OFFICERS REFUSING THE COVID VACCINE?
See my newest article at DIGBoston which begins
“The DOC has failed to control the virus.”
Prisoners’ Legal Services attorney Bonnie Tenneriello made that argument on Feb. 9, in the continuing PLS Superior Court case against the Department of Correction and the Mass Parole Board. An emergency motion was filed in October ordering the DOC to establish a home confinement program for sentenced prisoners, but there has been no significant decarceration since March, claims PLS, and they are still litigating the case.
Tenneriello lambasted the DOC in her opening for their multiple failures: they have not created a home confinement program; they have failed to reasonably release people who are sick and dying; and they are not following a new decarceration law approved by the legislature in December. As she built to her claim that both the DOC and the Parole Board are guilty of deliberate indifference, Tenneriello charged that since March, ‘Twenty-one people have died and over 2,800 people have been sickened by COVID.’
Another failure also was spotlighted in this hearing before Judge Robert Ullmann, who is trying the case: per Tenneriello, while COVID has been “raging,” 53% of DOC staff and correctional officers (COs) have “refused the vaccine.” MORE
THE DYSFUNCTIONAL MASS PAROLE BOARD’S INEVITABLE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS
Please read and share my newest article on DIGBoston which begins:
“With coronavirus spreading throughout Commonwealth prisons, lawsuits filed last week denounced the Massachusetts Parole Board, calling it both “deliberately indifferent” and part of the mechanism currently violating the rights of prisoners.
The third week of April was a milestone in many ways for those concerned with the state’s lack of response in its prisons and jails. As of April 20, 319 prisoners and staff had tested positive for COVID-19, while five prisoners had died.”