New York City was hit by the nation’s largest coronavirus jail outbreak to date this week, with at least 38 people testing positive at the notorious Rikers Island complex and nearby facilities — more than half of them incarcerated men, the board that oversees the city’s jail system said Saturday. Another inmate, meanwhile, became the first in the country to test positive in a federal jail. In a letter to New York’s criminal justice leaders, Board of Correction interim chairwoman Jacqueline Sherman described a jail system in crisis. She said in the last week, board members learned that 12 Department of Correction employees, five Correctional Health Services employees, and 21 people in custody at Rikers and city jails had tested positive for the coronavirus. And at least another 58 were being monitored in the prison’s contagious disease and quarantine units, she said. “It is likely these people have been in hundreds of housing areas and common areas over recent weeks and have been in close contact with many other people in custody and staff,” said Sherman, warning that cases could skyrocket. “The best path forward to protecting the community of people housed and working in the jails is to rapidly decrease the number of people housed and working in them.” New York officials have consistently downplayed the number of infections in it’s prisons and jails, The Associated Press has found in conversations with current and former inmates. The city’s jail agency and its city-run healthcare provider did not respond to messages seeking comment on the letter. On Friday, the city’s Department of Corrections said just one inmate had been diagnosed with coronavirus, along with seven jail staff members. Late Saturday, the department acknowledged 19 inmates had tested positive — two fewer than in the board’s letter — and 12 staff members. Earlier this week, Juan Giron was transferred to Rikers Island from an upstate facility after his sentence was vacated because the judge had failed to consider him for youthful offender treatment. After going through intake, where he underwent health screening, he was taken to a dormitory that housed more than two dozen men, their beds lined up next to one another, spaced a few feet apart. “This is like a shelter. So everybody is out and about. You’re talking to people, mingling” Giron said. “Last night, a guy is brought in at around 6 p.m., and a few hours later, two police officers come in with masks and gloves on and try to give the guy a mask. They looked scared, didn’t even want to touch him. They told him to pack up, so he packed up and they took him out. “It was crazy,” “We asked one of the officers and they said, ‘that’s the process we are doing now for guys who have the virus’,” Giron said, adding that others who had had contact with the man have not been questioned or notified about his status. More than 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States — more than anywhere in the world — and there are growing fears that an outbreak could spread rapidly through a vast network of federal and state prisons, county jails and detention centers. It’s a tightly packed, fluid population that is already grappling with high rates of health problems and, […]