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Detailing the continued public health catastrophe of COVID in incarceration nation

By Douglas Berman

Sadly, I have been blogging for the better part of a year now about the catastrophe of COVID in the United States for persons who are incarcerated persons, prison staff, their families, and the general public.  We have seen some political, legal and social responses, but this new Washington Post article, headlined “Prisons and jails have become a ‘public health threat’ during the pandemic, advocates say,” highlights how bad things have been and still are.  Here is the start of a lengthy piece worth reading in full:

Nobody knows how the ­novel coronavirus sneaked through the barbed wire and imposing gates of Ohio’s Pickaway Correctional Institution, where visitors and volunteers were barred from entering in March.  But the first case showed up April 4.  Within a week, 23 inmates and 17 staff members were found to be infected.  One inmate, Charles Viney Jr., a 66-year-old with a collapsed lung, died hours after testing positive.  Within a month, more than three-quarters of Pickaway’s roughly 2,000 inmates were confirmed positive.  By the end of May, 35 were dead.

Pickaway, where officials acknowledged that efforts to control viral spread were hectic and hindered by imperfect testing, exemplifies the broad challenges facing the nation’s jail and prison systems in the grip of the pandemic. Conditions long considered degrading — including overcrowded, unsanitary housing and inadequate inmate health care — have, in many places, become deadly.

“A prison is now a public health threat,” said Armen Henderson, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami.  He and other criminal justice reform advocates have called for massive reductions in incarceration because of the pandemic.  They argue that measures such as distributing masks or allowing access to hand sanitizer do little to stop the spread of the virus in facilities where people live so close together.

More than 173,000 inmates nationwide have contracted the coronavirus, and almost 1,300 have died, according to the UCLA Law Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project.  At least 37,000 corrections workers have tested positive and 78 have died.  A study prepared for the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice reports that the rate of coronavirus cases in federal and state prisons is more than four times the national rate.  When adjusted for age, sex and ethnicity, the mortality rate in federal prisons is twice that of the general population.

In at least 39 states and D.C., governors, local officials or ­sheriff’s departments have taken steps to reduce prison and jail populations since the beginning of the pandemic.  The measures varied widely, from releasing some nonviolent inmates or those who are medically vulnerable to accepting only the most-violent offenders.

Between March and May, prison populations dropped an average of 8 percent and jail populations decreased about 30 percent, according to data reviewed by Sharon Dolovich, a UCLA law professor who directs the Behind Bars Data Project.  The American Civil Liberties Union has filed more than 50 cases aimed at freeing people from prisons, jails and immigration detention facilities, with limited success largely because a 1996 law limits inmates’ ability to sue.

Now, advocates say, those gains are being eroded, leading to fears about additional outbreaks and mounting death tolls.  A recent overview by the Covid, Corrections, and Oversight Project at the University of Texas at Austin found that the death curve in Texas prisons remains “stubbornly high”; in one East Texas prison, the Duncan Unit, nearly 6 percent of inmates have died.  “The truth is, there is really only one way to meaningfully reduce the risk of spread, and that is to release enough people to make it possible for those who remain to socially distance,” Dolovich said.

UPDATE: Here are is just a smattering of additional depressing recent headlines in this space: