New York must immediately begin to offer Covid vaccines to all incarcerated people in the states prisons and jails, a judge ruled on Monday, making the state one of few in the nation to provide doses to such a broad population behind bars.
The order, the first involving any of the countrys largest correctional systems,comes as the coronavirus continues to roar through facilities in New York. At least 1,100 people living behind prison walls have tested positive for the virus since the start of last month, and five have died.
But even as corrections staff and many other groups, including some who live in close-contact settings like group homes and homeless shelters, have gained access to the vaccines in recent weeks, most incarcerated people in New York have remained ineligible to receive doses.
Justice Alison Y. Tuittof State Supreme Court in the Bronx wrote in her ruling on Monday afternoon that people in prisons and jails had been arbitrarily left out of the rollout and that doing so was unfair and unjust and an abuse of discretion.
State officials, she said, irrationally distinguished between incarcerated people and people living in every other type of adult congregate facility, at great risk to incarcerated peoples lives during this pandemic.
She added: There is no acceptable excuse for this deliberate exclusion.
Representatives from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in New York and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos office did not immediately return requests for comment on the judges ruling, and it was unclear whether the state planned to appeal.
Epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists widely agreed, even in the earliest stages of vaccination efforts when supply was more limited, that the roughly 50,000 people in correctional facilities across the state should be made eligible because of their uniquely high risk for contracting and spreading the virus. A disproportionate number of them are also Black and Latino, groups that have been hit hard by the pandemic.
But vaccinating incarcerated people has proved politically fraught across the country as states grappling with the same ethical, logistical and legal questions have drawn up drastically different timelines for offering doses. In New York, most of those behind bars had been left out, though other high-risk groups like restaurant workers, public-facing government employees and essential building service workers recently became eligible.
Florida has not yet made people in state prisons eligible, while Texas and Arkansas announced last week that they would start providing doses to some of those behind bars. Some other states, including New Jersey, began inoculating incarcerated people late last year, just as the first vaccine doses were being made available. And in Massachusetts, the roughly 6,400 people in prison have all already been offered a vaccine.
In a similar suit last month in Oregon, a federal court judge ordered the state prison system, which has a population of around 12,000, to offer doses to all incarcerated people. It was the first successful legal battle of its kind nationwide.
Hours after the lawsuit in State Supreme Court in the Bronx was filed early last month, state corrections officials announced that incarcerated people ages 65 and older, who make up roughly 3 percent of the prison population, would be offered the vaccine.