SEATTLE, Washington — A Washington jury has awarded $52 million to 23 plaintiffs who accused the state Department of Corrections of allowing an active tuberculosis outbreak to fester inside its prisons and spread to hundreds of people over nearly two years. The verdict, returned on Wednesday, October 28, is one of the largest jury awards against the state's prison system over medical care, and it follows years of official findings that the department failed to follow basic disease-safety rules during the outbreak. The plaintiffs' claims were allegations tested at trial; the jury's damages verdict is a finding in a civil case, not a criminal conviction, and the award can still be challenged through post-trial motions or an appeal.

Source: Law360, October 28, 2026

What the jury was asked to decide

According to Law360's report of the verdict, the 23 plaintiffs accused the Department of Corrections of allowing an active tuberculosis outbreak to fester and spread to hundreds of people at its prison facilities over nearly two years. The Seattle Times and The Spokesman-Review both carried the verdict on Wednesday under the same central facts: a $52 million award, 23 plaintiffs, and a tuberculosis outbreak inside Washington prisons. The initial reports did not include a response from the Department of Corrections to the verdict itself.

The outbreak: Stafford Creek and April 2022

The outbreak at the centre of the case began at Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen, on Washington's coast. In April 2022, the state Department of Health recorded the largest outbreak of the bacterial disease in Washington in 20 years, including cases at Stafford Creek, the Associated Press reported at the time. Tuberculosis is caused by a bacterium that often infects the lungs and is highly transmissible when a sickened person coughs or sneezes — a particular danger in crowded dormitories, gyms and housing units where people live in close quarters and cannot choose to leave.

Source: Associated Press via KNKX, September 2022

The Department of Corrections said at the time that it had identified 23 people in custody with active tuberculosis in 2022, and two further cases in people who were diagnosed after being released. That history matters for the wider public as well as for prisoners: staff go home to their families every night, and people who finish their sentences return to their communities, which is why health officials treat prison outbreaks as community outbreaks, not closed incidents.

Regulators had already fined the department

Long before the jury verdict, the state Department of Labor & Industries cited and fined the Department of Corrections more than $84,000 for reportedly failing to follow safety rules meant to stop the spread of disease at the Aberdeen prison. Inspectors who responded to complaints about the April outbreak found that Stafford Creek workers allegedly did not receive initial or annual fit testing for N-95 respirators; without those tests, respirators may not fit correctly and may not protect against infection. The fine was to go into a workers' compensation fund that helps injured workers and the families of workers who die.

In a statement at the time, the Corrections department said it was 'very concerned' with the citations and planned to work with Labor & Industries to address the violations. The agency said it had faced an unprecedented situation because of the tuberculosis outbreak arriving together with a surge of COVID-19 cases caused by the omicron variant. The plaintiffs' case, as reported, was that those difficulties did not excuse allowing the outbreak to keep spreading for nearly two years.

Why the verdict matters beyond the prison walls

Washington's prisons hold people from every county in the state, employ thousands of staff, and release people back into the same towns and neighbourhoods — including the Punjabi and South Asian communities of the Seattle-Tacoma area — where their families live. A verdict of this size lands on taxpayers, who fund the department, and it adds legal weight to a long public record of concern about medical care inside Washington prisons, from ombuds reports to earlier settlements. For families with a relative inside Stafford Creek or any other state facility, the jury's finding is the first time a court has put a nine-figure-scale price — $52 million — on the outbreak itself.

The tuberculosis outbreak was declared in the spring of 2022. Four years on, a Washington jury has now told the state, in the plainest terms a civil court can use, that what happened inside its prisons was worth $52 million in damages — and the legal fight over that number may still not be over.