At around 2 a.m. on March 13, Atif Rafay was startled awake inside his prison cell to find a printed out piece of paper dropped on his bed. A prison employee, the memo said, had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and had potentially exposed prisoners in two units to it.

The employee, who last came to work at Monroe Correctional Complex in Washington state on March 8, took the test two days later and received the results on March 12. That evening, about 50 prisoners crowded into a room for movie night. They watched Harriet, unaware that they had potentially been exposed to the coronavirus.

The men were not taking precautions at all, said Rafay, who was a subject of The Confession Tapes, a Netflix documentary series about possible false confessions. At that point, he continued, we werent worried about it.

The state Department of Corrections didnt receive the information about the employee who tested positive until late on March 12, the departments communications director Janelle Guthrie wrote in an email.

By the next morning, the A and B units of the prison were placed in precautionary quarantine with restricted movement for the next nine days. Some days, two prisoners said, they were only allowed to leave their cells in groups of 20 for about 30 minutes a day, enough time to either shower or use the phone.