In the grainy cell phone video, the prison block is dim and the shouting muffled—but the sight of wafting, gray smoke is unmistakable.

“It’s a nonviolent protest going on right now because the officers, in the middle of the coronavirus, have refused us electricity for several hours, no showers or anything,” a man says in the recording, apparently made last week. The smoke, he explains, is from fires set by Texas prisoners desperately hoping to attract attention from higher-ups because they couldn’t turn on their cell fans or clean themselves during the pandemic. The Marshall Project is not publishing the video or naming the prison out of concern for the man’s safety.

Afterward, a prison spokesman said he had no record of the incident or its resolution. But some worry this sort of unrest could escalate in lock-ups across the country, especially as restrictions tighten. The federal Bureau of Prisons, for example, announced Tuesday a 14-day lockdown at all its facilities to slow down the virus. Prisoners and guards nationwide are fretting, and some say fears will skyrocket as more people inside begin testing positive.

 

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“Word of that is going to spread like wildfire and that’s when you’re going to have the panic and the problems,” said Frank AuBuchon, a criminal justice consultant and former Texas prison official. “This is truly unprecedented, having to lockdown a prison for an absolutely unknown amount of time due to a medical emergency.”

Across the U.S., prison and jail officials have shut down visits and programs as the pandemic grows, leaving those inside with severely limited access to their families, attorneys and educational opportunities—all the things that might help ease tensions in an already anxious time.

Authorities say they are seeking to limit the risk of an outbreak inside their facilities, for the benefit of both staff and those they guard. In some areas, they are allowing those detained more calls to family. Some locations have released hundreds of people.

Similar heightened restrictions led to riots and mass escapes in countries like Italy, Colombia and Thailand.

There have not been widespread outbursts of violence in the U.S., though signs of stress are beginning to show. In Washington state, a dozen people escaped from a county jail last week over fears of coronavirus, and in South Dakota the Rapid City Journal reported that a prison warden resigned after nine incarcerated women fled a unit where another woman tested positive for the virus. The head of the prison oversight authority in Nebraska said there was an uptick in illicit drinking and drug use last weekend in the state’s largest prison. Meanwhile, in Alabama, widely-shared cell phone footage showed two ICE detainees in the Etowah County jail apparently threatening to jump off a second-tier walkway and hang themselves with makeshift nooses, allegedly because they believed three newly booked people had the virus.

Source: Coronavirus Restrictions Stoke Tensions in Lock-ups Across U.S.