The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of the Prison

Abstract

Since the discovery of the "jail disease," probably typhus, in the 18 th Century, health experts have recognized that the prison is a near perfect incubator of contagious disease. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, therefore, public health authorities and human rights groups advocated immediate and sustained decarceration of overcrowded prisons to save lives and stop the spread of the virus. Yet, decarceration efforts globally were uneven and largely failed to live up to expectations. Instead, prison systems typically sought to control the spread of Covid-19 by imposing strict "lockdowns" on prisoner movement that bordered on long-term solitary confinement in many jurisdictions. The consequences of these severe conditions on prisoners' mental and physical health are only just emerging. The ramifications for future prison reform efforts may be more profound. If a deadly pandemic is not enough to instigate a reimagining of the role of prison in society, it is unclear what could. * * * *Disease has played a central role in shaping episodes of public controversy about the humanity of punishment. Disease has a distinctive power to strip away the general invisibility of life that takes place behind the walls of prison, and narrow the gulf that normally separates the fate of prisoners from the imagination of the free. These moments have been particularly consequential because of their potential to motivate legal elites ... to "see" the existing penal regime anew and actively to reimagine the American prison. (Simon 2013, p. 223) In his sweeping history of the "medical model" in prison, Jonathan Simon argues that disease has been the primary catalyst of change in prison policy and practice since the origins of the institution. Beginning with what the English reformer John Howard described as the "jail disease" (presumably typhus) that spread through prisons in the late 1700s, Simon argues that the correctional enterprise has been "repeatedly reshaped by moments of heightened concern about disease, prisons, and the general health of the public" (p. 218). New diseases and new discoveries in medicine and public health, he argues, led to "periodic transformations [in] … correctional philosophy and ultimately constitutional understandings of the prison" (p. 218). Labelled the worst public health crisis for a generation (Maycock and Dickson 2021; Maycock 2022), the Covid-19 pandemic appears to be a perfect example of history repeating itself. From its onset, the pandemic has highlighted the extreme vulnerability of incarcerated populations. By February 29, 2020, half of reported Wuhan Covid-19 cases were within the city's penal institutions, and an outbreak at a prison 450 miles away was traced to Wuhan officials who had visited and possibly infected seven prison guards and 200 prisoners (Barnert, Ahalt, and Williams 2020). The first Covid-19 diagnosis in a US prison was announced in March 2020 (Pitts and Inkpen 2020) and the first death was only weeks later, on March 26, 2020. Within eight months, the number of prisoner death...

Prisons and pandemic preparedness

“…Correctional services typically introduced measures to reduce the movement of prisoners, including long term “lockdowns” and stopping in-person visits 910. The mortality and morbidity associated with these measures remains unknown for most countries.…”

Devaluing Incarcerated Populations: Deprioritizing Incarcerated Populations for COVID-19 Vaccination

“…COVID-19 was often managed in correctional facilities by placing incarcerated persons in lockdowns or medical isolation, which often resembled solitary confinement. 22,23 In addition, correctional facilities enacted major changes in visitation policies, including suspending in-person visitations and decreasing incarcerated persons’ access to their families. 24 Despite these efforts, correctional facilities saw massive outbreaks of COVID-19, with case rates 5.5 times higher than the general US population.…”

Women in Prisons

“…This is not true universally however, or over longer periods. In the United Kingdom, for example, men's incarceration rates increased more rapidly than women's over 100 years (Ministry of Justice 2020).4 Numbers for both men and women have declined in some jurisdictions since the COVID-19 pandemic began(Maruna, McNaull, and O'Neill 2022). For example, the number of women sentenced and convicted in criminal courts in the United States fell by 30 percent from 2019 to 2020, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…”