The D.C. Jail has confirmed its first case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. A 20-year-old man being held in the Correctional Treatment Facility tested positive for the virus on March 25, prompting his isolation in the jail infirmary, the Department of Corrections said in a statement Wednesday night.

Currently, 36 people are being held in quarantine in the jail as a result of confirmed or potential contact with the COVID patient, said Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Kevin Donahue at a press conference on Thursday.

An eventual positive case has long been considered a matter of course by advocates, who have argued for weeks now that the city’s jail is a dangerous potential hotbed for the coronavirus. In an attempt to lower the risk to inmates and staff, the D.C. government has instituted a number of measures, including granting the D.C. DOC the ability to release more inmates early and directing police to make fewer arrests.

“Our jail is almost half empty,” Donahue said on Thursday.

According to data from the DOC, there were a combined 1,638 people incarcerated at the facilities on the D.C. Jail campus as of Friday. In December 2019, there were 1,715.

But family members, advocates, and inmates themselves are still worried that it’s not enough to prevent a public health emergency behind bars—especially now that there’s a confirmed positive case.

“I’m feeling incredibly anxious and helpless, mostly,” says Alicia Kenworthy, a D.C. resident whose boyfriend is currently incarcerated at the D.C. Jail. “The inaction by the D.C. Department of Corrections is unbelievable, and it feels like they’re issuing a death sentence to people who are low-level offenders, many of whom are being held pretrial and are constitutionally innocent.”

In a statement on Wednesday, the department provided little detail about the confirmed coronavirus case. It said that “for the last five days, the resident [who tested positive] was housed in a single-occupancy cell.”

It isn’t clear why the inmate was transferred to a single-occupancy cell, where he was before that, when he started showing symptoms, or how much contact he had with other people in the jail recently. The DOC did not respond to follow up questions from DCist.

Kenworthy, however, believes the measures described in the statement are ultimately meaningless.

“My boyfriend is also held in a single-occupancy cell,” she says. “But during general recreation, he’s out with 100 other guys on his cell block. He’s calling me from those same phones. He’s playing chess with the other guys on the floor.”

Kenworthy’s concerns, and those of advocates, aren’t unfounded: in New York City, the rate in COVID infections in jails is seven times the rate of infection in the city as a whole.

D.C. Superior Court has been fielding a slew of briefs arguing for the release of inmates who are elderly, have underlying health conditions, or are incarcerated on low-level crimes.

In a brief arguing for the release of several inmates submitted to D.C. Superior Court on Wednesday night, Ronald Resetarits with the Public Defender Service described a number of alleged failings by DOC to protect the population of the jail from the potential spread of disease. On March 22, two public defenders spoke with an inmate who said he’d sought medical help days before for chest pains, a cough, chills, and a fever, the brief says. The inmate was not tested for COVID-19, according to the brief, and was sent back to his unit, where he remains sick.

The sick resident told his lawyers that there are no cleaning supplies currently available on his unit, as they’re waiting for a new shipment, per the brief. He is a cook in the D.C. Jail, and alleges that staff in the kitchen are not given masks to wear while preparing food, according to the filing.

The D.C. DOC also has not responded to follow up questions regarding any additional measures it is taking to protect inmates and staff amid the coronavirus outbreak, especially those housed in the same building as the confirmed COVID patient, CTF Building D.

Inmates aren’t the only ones that have been unhappy with the DOC response—the corrections officers’ union recently took a vote of “no confidence” in top DOC officials over their response to the coronavirus crisis in the jail. In a letter to DOC Director Quincy Booth, the union requested the removal of deputy director Wanda Patten, warden Lenard Johnson, and deputy warden Kathleenjo Landerkin.

After a U.S. Marshal at the Superior Court tested positive for the coronavirus last week, about 65 inmates were quarantined for potentially coming into contact with the marshal. According to the letter from the union, corrections officers requested full-body protective gear to move the quarantined patients, but were denied and given only gloves and masks. One inmate allegedly spit in an officer’s face during the move, per the letter.

In a phone call recording that Kenworthy shared with DCist, her boyfriend—who declined to be named in this story for fear of consequences as he attempts to be released—said that officers are continuously bringing new people into his cell block and they’re all packed “in here like sardines.”

The emergency legislation passed by the D.C. Council last week gives the DOC discretion to immediately release anyone sentenced on a misdemeanor charge. Kenworthy says she wants that discretion to be applied to as many people as possible, including her boyfriend, who is incarcerated on a series of misdemeanor charges.

On Thursday night, the Public Defender Service filed a motion asking a judge to order the release of all inmates sentenced on a misdemeanor charge. There are currently 94 people sentenced on a misdemeanor charge housed in the D.C. Jail facilities, per the filing.

The courts and DOC are not the only obstacle to getting more people out of the jail, according to defense attorney Rebecca Vogel, who works with the Criminal Justice Act panel. In fact, she says she has noticed that “the courts are really considering the public safety aspect in sending someone to jail pretrial.”

Her largest worry has been the U.S. Parole Commission, which she says has continued incarcerating people for technical parole violations like missing meetings with their parole officer.

As pressure has mounted on the commission during the pandemic, it has agreed to stop issuing warrants for technical parole violations, unless the person is “in loss of contact status” or has violated terms related to a sex offender charge, reports Washington City Paper. Vogel believes these guidelines do not go far enough, especially if someone can be considered “in loss of contact status” for missed meetings with their parole officer.

She says she knows of a 61-year-old man with chronic illnesses who was sentenced on Wednesday to 13 months in jail for missing several consecutive meetings with his parole officer.

The problem is exacerbated, Vogel says, by the fact that D.C. does not have control over its own parole board—it’s a federal body not accountable to any local authorities. “Every single person in D.C. could disapprove of how the parole commission is handling this and we would have no power at this point to change anything they’re doing,” she says.

Kenworthy’s boyfriend is scheduled for release in three months, she says, but she’s hoping that he’s released early. They’re both worried about him being in the jail, though he is relatively young—42—because he has asthma.

For working in the D.C. Jail kitchen, Kenworthy’s boyfriend has been given an increased number of “good time” days, or days cut off his sentence for good behavior, she says.

“He might be released 18 days earlier,” she says. “But the crisis is now.”