Two inmates say the staff at the Rock County Jail aren’t taking enough precaution to reduce the risk of a COVID-19 outbreak in the facility.
They wrote letters to WCLO sharing concerns over their risk of exposure and limited access to personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies.
The inmates said workers who clean the jail cells and serve their food don’t always wear masks or gloves, and they claimed to have difficulty getting disinfectant to clean their own areas.
Assistant Jail Administrator Kim Litsheim refuted those claims in an interview Tuesday afternoon.
She said they issued N95 masks to all correctional staff, and they provide inmates with access to cleaning supplies twice a day.
“They’ll have a mop and mop water,” Litsheim said. “Nothing with bleach in it because that’s where you run into it being a hazardous material, but we have inmate-safe cleaning stuff they use for their own areas.”
She said her staff cleans the day rooms and common areas with a bleach solution three times a day.
They’re also careful not to “cross-contaminate” inmates by exposing them to other prisoners who live in different areas of the jail.
New inmates are kept in a separate living area for their first 14 days before joining other populations to make sure they don’t show any COVID-19 symptoms, and all employees have their temperatures checked daily.
Litsheim said the staff has previously isolated and monitored a few inmates who showed symptoms, but none of them tested positive for the disease.
They worked with the parole and probation office to release more detainees on GPS monitoring bracelets to lower the jail population down to 218, less than 50 percent capacity.
