Jails and prisons are exceptionally susceptible to viral outbreaks, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The USA has extremely high rates of incarceration and COVID-19 is causing an urgent health crisis in correctional facilities and detention centres. Epidemics happening in prisons are compounding the elevated risks that COVID-19 poses to people of colour, older people, and those with comorbidities. Intersectoral community re-entry efforts in the USA and other countries have shown that releasing people from correctional facilities as a pandemic-era public health intervention is safe and can support both public safety and community rebuilding. Therefore, substantial decarceration in the USA should be initiated. A point of focus for such efforts is that many people in prison are serving excessively long sentences and pose acceptable safety risks for release. Properly managed, correctional depopulation will prevent considerable COVID-19 morbidity and mortality and reduce prevailing socioeconomic and health inequities.

Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State. By Christian Joppke. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. By Mae Ngai. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America. By Daniel Tichenor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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A growing literature emphasizes that U.S. correctional systems have remained committed to rehabilitative goals despite their turn toward incapacitation and punishment. Although past research has documented this commitment in prisons and parole supervision agencies, less is understood about how it is manifested in the discretionary parole release process. This article explores whether and how parole boards encourage people serving parole-eligible life sentences (“lifers”) to maintain ties to friends and family outside of prison, and the results of such encouragement. Interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and parole-hearing transcripts reveal that California’s parole board encourages such rehabilitative ties through comments at parole hearings and through its parole-eligibility criteria. But to sustain these relationships, some lifers engage in misconduct to bypass restrictive prison policies by using contraband cell phones or engaging in physical contact with visitors that is deemed “excessive.” When detected, these disciplinary infractions become a stated cause of parole denials.

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