Stateville prison reopens F-House to hold COVID-19 inmates

CHICAGO (AP) — After Juan Rodriguez tested positive for COVID-19 last week at Stateville Correctional Center, he told his wife that guards moved him to a cell inside Stateville’s notorious F-House, which officials closed in 2016 citing health and safety concerns.

Yellow-brown water ran from the cell’s sink faucet, he said. And since authorities didn’t give Juan Rodriguez cleaning supplies, he cleaned mold off the walls with a bar of soap he had purchased at the prison commissary, according to his wife, Dominika Rodriguez.

“COVID-19 is an upper respiratory illness, but they’re moving sick people to a cell house with mold?” she said in an interview with Injustice Watch. “No human should be in there.”

The Illinois Department of Corrections reopened the controversial housing unit, known as the “roundhouse,” on May 5 and is now quarantining about 70 men at F-House who have either tested positive for COVID-19, are awaiting test results, or who work in the facility, according to a department spokeswoman.

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The nonprofit news outlet Injustice Watch provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.

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Stateville is both the agency’s most crowded prison and the epicenter of its COVID-19 crisis. The department reported that 150 inmates and 75 staff had tested positive for the virus as of Monday, more than at any other Illinois prison.

Twelve incarcerated people at Stateville have died from the virus, according to WBEZ.

The department spokeswoman said that officials reopened F-House temporarily “to ensure men incarcerated at the facility are safely quarantined or isolated” and mitigate COVID-19’s spread. She added that “necessary repairs were made to the housing unit” and that the...