In April of 2020, the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women hosted a hearing to document the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. I vividly remember one woman’s testimony as she described the pain of her mother’s lifetime sentence in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham. She feared for her mother’s safety as the center failed to take precautionary steps to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. There was a slight tremble in her voice as she explained the emotional distress of being unable to contact her mother and the generational trauma both she and her daughter have experienced as a result of her mother’s incarceration.
For decades, inmates have been subjected to inhumane treatment, and families have been torn apart as a result. This woman’s words are just one example of how COVID-19 has exacerbated long-held issues within prisons and jails.
The pandemic has presented a unique opportunity to accelerate long-awaited criminal justice reform, but across the United States, lawmakers have failed to protect people in prisons and jails from COVID-19. Decarceration, the process of removing inmates from carceral institutions, is a vital step in the public response to the pandemic. The step has not been executed effectively by lawmakers, and the effects of their inaction have been devastating.
The messy, dark history of mass incarceration, spanning decades, has sown the seeds for the catastrophic results of the pandemic. Today’s growing prison industry, increasingly privatized, has resulted in nearly 2.3 million people behind bars, which reflects a 700% increase in the incarcerated population since 1970. Studies from 2020 estimate that the United States accounts for nearly 20% of the global prison population. People of color comprise approximately 63% of the incarcerated population; they are criminalized at disproportionately higher rates than their White counterparts.
Medical journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association have advocated for rapid decarceration as a public health measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In these facilities, which are often overcrowded and unsanitary, many are not able to adhere to social distancing or quarantine guidelines. Consequently, prisons and jails have become sites of rapid infection. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the COVID Prison Project reports that at least 400,000 incarcerated people have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 2,500 have died as a result. The COVID-19 virus’ spread is 5.5 times higher in prisons than in the general U.S. population. There is also evidence that outbreaks in prisons and jails put the broader community at risk. For instance, an outbreak in Chicago’s Cook County Jail was later linked to nearly 16% of all statewide cases in Illinois.
Incarceration has longstanding ties to poor health outcomes. Both structural health determinants — such as poverty and racism — and experiencing incarceration itself have resulted in higher rates of HIV, mental illness, and chronic diseases. As a result, incarcerated people find themselves at significantly higher risk of contracting severe illnesses or death from the virus. Inadequate healthcare services, poor sanitation, and understaffed facilities only serve to heighten the threat of COVID-19 within prisons, where even the most basic necessities such as soap and hand sanitizer are often not provided.
To make matters worse, many short-term precautionary measures have been neglected in prisons and jails. For instance, during the fall of 2020, approximately half of all U.S. states failed to mandate the use of masks by facility staffers, when CDC guidelines had recommended the use of masks earlier in April of that year. Staffers, who move in, within, and out of prisons, are therefore likely transmitters of the virus. Additionally, less than one-third of states required incarcerated people to wear masks. Neglecting to enforce a safety measure as simple as wearing masks is evidence of how inadequate policymakers’ protection of prison and jail populations has been. Furthermore, despite national vaccine rollouts, the Bureau of Prisons and 17 state prison systems had vaccinated less than half of their prison populations by mid-May of 2021.
Decarceration was, and ought to remain, a priority to slow the spread of the virus. Upon release and re-entry into communities, effective decarceration would include social and medical support. The pandemic presents an opportunity to accelerate the process of divesting in prison systems and reinvesting in communities, guaranteeing rights such as affordable housing, education, and healthcare.
Some policymakers have made short-term progress by initiating large-scale releases. For instance, as of May 7th, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Prisons released more than 24,000 people over the course of the pandemic to serve the remainder of their sentences in home confinement. In October of 2020, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a bill that permitted early release of people with less than a year left in their sentences. This bill led to the release of over 2,000 people from New Jersey state prisons. In home confinement, some released inmates have found social and medical support they could not access in prison.
Although certain steps have been taken to reduce prison populations, these actions have been generally insufficient. Nationally, large-scale releases are the exception, not the norm. Studies showed that throughout 2020, decreases in prison populations could not be attributed to greater numbers of people being released, but rather to fewer admissions. At the end of 2020, 41 state prison systems were still operating at 75% or more of their capacity. Further, these releases are not reflecting long-term changes in carceral system operations — as the pandemic subsides, some released inmates are being forced back into prison.
Some may argue that releasing people from prisons and jails will lead to more crime. The notion that incarceration can be used to keep communities safe fails to acknowledge systemic injustices constitutive of the American criminal justice system. A comprehensive analysis done by the Open Philanthropy Project estimates that decarceration has zero net impact on crime.
Historically, large-scale release of prisoners has been common in the United States and internationally. In many cases, the releases led to a decrease, rather than an increase, in crime. For decades, the American criminal justice system has ripped families apart, punished marginalized voices, and wasted taxpayer dollars. Those being kept behind bars are not the threat; the carceral institutions responsible for sustaining structural violence are.
It is important to make note of the large number of people behind bars because of legal technicalities. For instance, nearly half a million people in the U.S. are currently being detained pre-trial, meaning they are legally presumed innocent but end up incarcerated because they can’t pay for cash bail. Further, the over-representation of people of color and women within prisons and jails highlights how little justice is present within the justice system. The pandemic provides an opportunity to remedy such injustices by redirecting money to address the medical and social needs of people in the form of community-based intervention.
Without steps towards enduring decarceration, lawmakers have failed to protect people in prisons and jails during the COVID-19 pandemic. This inaction has resulted in unnecessary infection and death while also further cementing a long, national legacy of marginalization. Despite these failures, the pandemic is far from over — now remains an opportune time to turn reimagination of the criminal justice system into concrete, long-term reform.
Image by Tingey Law is licensed under the Unsplash License.
