“Special Report: ‘Death Sentence’ — the hidden coronavirus toll in U.S. jails and prisons”

The title of this report is the headline of this lengthy new Reuters article that I recommend in full.  Here are just a few excerpts:

COVID-19 has spread rapidly behind bars in Detroit and across the nation, according to an analysis of data gathered by Reuters from 20 county jail systems, 10 state prison systems and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which runs federal penitentiaries.

But scant testing and inconsistent reporting from state and local authorities have frustrated efforts to track or contain its spread, particularly in local jails.  And figures compiled by the U.S. government appear to undercount the number of infections dramatically in correctional settings, Reuters found.

In a May 6 report, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed 54 state and territorial health departments for data on confirmed COVID-19 infections in all correctional facilities — local jails, state prisons and federal prisons and detention centers.  Thirty-seven of those agencies provided data between April 22-28, reporting just under 5,000 inmate cases.

Reuters documented well over three times the CDC’s tally of COVID-19 infections — about 17,300 — in its far more modest survey of local, state and federal corrections facilities conducted about two weeks later.  The Reuters survey encompassed jails and prisons holding only 13% of the more than 2 million people behind bars nationwide.  Among state prisons doing mass testing of all inmates, Reuters found, some are seeing infection rates up to 65%.

The CDC tally “is dramatically low,” said Aaron Littman, a teaching fellow specializing in prison law and policy at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles. “We don’t have a particularly good handle” on COVID-19 infections in many correctional and detention facilities, “and in some places we have no handle at all.”…

In many jails and prisons, the toll of COVID-19 on corrections officers and other staff approaches that of inmates — and here, too, the numbers reported to the CDC by state and local authorities appear to be a vast undercount.

The CDC report documented nearly 2,800 COVID-19 cases among staff across all U.S. correctional facilities.  But Reuters found more than 80% of that number — upwards of 2,300 infected jail and prison workers — in its far less comprehensive survey of just the federal prison system, a few dozen state prisons and the 20 counties with the biggest local jails.