A majority of New Jersey prison employees may not meet a state-imposed deadline for getting vaccinated against COVID-19 despite a state Supreme Court ruling upholding the mandate, state data shows.
At last count, just under 43 % of state Department of Corrections more than 7,000 employees were vaccinated despite an order from Gov. Phil Murphy, according to state data.
Compare that to nearly 74% among New Jersey residents and 62 percent of prisoners.
The New Jersey Supreme Court on Monday denied an appeal by a group of law enforcement unions seeking to block Murphy’s vaccine mandate for public employees in “high-risk congregant settings.” William Sullivan, the head of PBA local 105, the state’s largest union of corrections officers, said Thursday they were considering an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but acknowledged such a challenge would be an “uphill battle.”
New Jersey’s prisons were a hotbed of COVID contagion and deaths in the early days of the pandemic and remain a weak point in the state’s fight to tamp down infection. Just last month, officials in Cumberland County blamed a spike in cases on the five state prisons that sit within that county’s borders.
Liz Velez, a corrections department spokeswoman, said Thursday that the deadline for getting a first or second dose of a vaccine was Feb. 16 and the deadline for receiving a second or booster shot is March 30.
But Sullivan said he expected about 1,600 requests from his members to get an exemptions for religious or health reasons and questioned why the state was not offering other options.
“With the transmission rate so low and all the peeling back of restrictions,” Sullivan said, referring to, among other things, Murphy lifting masking mandates for school children, “I don’t know why the test-and-mask option isn’t something we can still do.”
On Wednesday, Murphy said simply testing workers was no longer on the table.
“There is a much higher risk of contagion and potential sickness and potentially severe sickness, or God forbid, death,” the governor said during his most recent coronavirus briefing.
Sullivan also noted that while the state mandated vaccines for prison workers, officials have not mandated the shots for prisoners themselves, instead offering a series of incentives such as better food or as much as 10 days removed from their sentence if they get vaccinated.
Legal experts told NJ Advance Media there’s a reason for that: While state workers can be required to do something like take a vaccine as a condition of their employment, authorities are limited in what they can force state prisoners to do.
“Imposing a vaccine mandate on people who are incarcerated — who do not have the option to simply walk out of the prison if they choose not to get vaccinated — would raise serious and complicated constitutional issues,” said Michael Noveck, an assistant state public defender who has been focusing on Covid issues for his office’s clients.
Still, inmates are opting into vaccines at a higher rate than prison staff.
Bonnie Kerness, director for the nonprofit American Friends Service Committee’s prison program, said she has fielded complaints from the outset of the pandemic that corrections officers weren’t following protocol.
“The reports I get constantly are not only are (corrections officers) not vaccinated, but they refuse to wear masks, or wear them and pull them down as soon as somebody walks by,” she said.
Asked Wednesday, Murphy said he didn’t think the vaccine mandate would lead to a work shortage in state prisons.
“Do we have enough workers? We believe the answer’s yes, and we wouldn’t have taken this step unless we felt we had a responsible plan to make sure we could continue to man these communities,” he said.
Sullivan, the union head, wasn’t so sure. He said any worker the state seeks to sideline for refusing a vaccine will be entitled to a full hearing process, which could take weeks or months — especially if a lot of state workers seek medical or religious exemptions.
NJ Advance Media staff writer Brent Johnson contributed to this report.
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S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter.