Lincoln – Nebraska’s corrections department has taken aggressive, early steps to prevent the spread of the coronavirus inside the state’s prisons, and so far the efforts appear to be working, the state corrections director said last Friday amid growing safety concerns being raised by prisoner advocates.

Director Scott Frakes said his agency has done an “exceptional job” of keeping inmates and staff members healthy. He said one staff member had tested positive for the coronavirus as of last Friday afternoon, and no other cases have shown up among the department’s 2,100 employees and 5,500 inmates. The staff member who tested positive has stayed isolated at home for 15 days.

“We have done an exceptional job of keeping COVID-19 out of our prisons,” Frakes said at Gov. Pete Ricketts’ daily coronavirus news conference at the Capitol.

His comments came as a coalition of prisoner advocacy groups filed an emergency motion in a pending lawsuit seeking to force the agency to release its pandemic prevention plan, which it has kept secret.

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2017, argues Nebraska’s prison overcrowding and staffing shortages are effectively depriving inmates of critical medical care.

Nebraska’s prisons have faced years of scrutiny from lawmakers, and the department has struggled to recruit and retain employees.

“COVID-19 presents a grave threat to people in Nebraska’s prisons, where extreme overcrowding and chronic under-staffing had already put the health and safety of everyone in these facilities at risk,” said David Fathi, a leader attorney on the case and director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

ACLU of Nebraska Legal Director Adam Sipple said the department’s refusal to provide its pandemic plan raises concerns about what exactly prison officials are doing.

“The Department of Correctional Services needs to demonstrate they are following the advice of public health officials,” Sipple said.

At the news conference, Frakes said he doesn’t plan to release the department’s pandemic plan because doing so could anger inmates and reveal security information that would threaten safety in the prisons.

Frakes said that the prisons suspended in-person visits to inmates and imposed tough new safety restrictions on all workers while taking steps to keep inmates separated when possible.

He acknowledged that it’s difficult in some barracks-style areas for low-risk inmates, but he said each inmate has been given a mask to wear when they’re not lying or sitting on their beds.

Prison officials began planning for the pandemic in early March, he said, and quickly restricted visitors’ access to the facilities.

Frakes acknowledged that prison officials are only testing inmates who show symptoms of the virus, and employees who think they may have it are told to consult their own doctors.

The department has changed the way it trains new hires to minimize physical contact among them, he said. The department has seen an uptick in job applications, largely due to a surge in layoffs from private businesses that cut back because of the outbreak.