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The new death penalty: The Marshall Project reporting COVID prisoner deaths exceed 1000

By Douglas Berman

In this post back in May, I started what became a series of posts in which I noted what might be called a new kind of death penalty for prison and jail inmates in the United States: by killing many hundreds of incarcerated persons, COVID-19 has turned all sorts of other sentences into functional death sentences.  In prior postings, I have often flagged the death data from the UCLA Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project, but today I see that The Marshall Project has updated data here showing that prisoner deaths have hit another grim milestone:

Deaths

The first known COVID-19 death of a prisoner was in Georgia when Anthony Cheek died on March 26. Cheek, who was 49 years old, had been held in Lee State Prison near Albany, a hotspot for the disease.  Since then, at least 1,016 other prisoners have died of coronavirus-related causes.  By Sept. 8, the total number of deaths had risen by 5 percent in a week.

There have been at least 1,017 deaths from coronavirus reported among prisoners.

Of course, 1000 is just a round number and every single COVID death is individually sad and disconcerting.  I continue to hope that, somehow, we might be getting past the worst of this pandemic that has (predictably) already been so lethal for persons in and around prisons and jails. 

A few of many prior related posts: