This introduction discusses the global impact of Covid-19 on corrections.
Introduction
By many standards, the United States has more individuals under some form of correctional supervision – but especially in jails and prisons – than any other high income countries. On any given day, there are 2.3 million people behind bars (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020) and another 4.5 million under community supervision (Jones, 2018). Each year in the US, over 600,000 incarcerated people are released from American prisons (Bronson & Carson, 2019). Nearly 11 million filter in and out of local jails (Zeng, 2020); that amount of individuals is roughly the size of the daily New York City population or the entire state of Ohio. There are over 400,000 people employed as correctional officers and jailers (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020); this does not include administrative, medical, and service staff and other vendors. The U.S. spends billions of dollars a year locking people up. In just 45 states in 2015, the state prison systems collectively spent 43 USD billion (Mai & Subramanian, 2017), a number that does not include local county jails, or federal prisons and detention centers. The U.S. comprises about 4% of the world population, but 25% of the world’s incarcerated population, and 25% of the world’s COVID-19 cases. These intertwining epidemics are not surprising given that the US has among the highest levels of inequality (OECD Center for Opportunity and Equality, n.d.) and lowest levels of life expectancy (Ho & Hendi, 2018) compared to other high-income countries, as well as high levels of racial inequality, which are also apparent in the prison (The Sentencing Project, 2018) and COVID-19 epidemics (Wortham et al., 2020).
Prisons and jails are meant to detain people who have been convicted and sentenced to an incarceration term and/or are awaiting further justice system processing. In some cases, these facilities provide rehabilitation and other types of services, including mental health and substance abuse treatment, as well as reentry planning. However, prisons and jails are designed for security not public health and health care delivery. In recent years, this tension has come to the forefront as correctional facilities have become the largest mental health care providers in the U.S. (Al-Rousan et al., 2017; Torrey, 1995), and prisons have had to respond to an aging population by developing guidelines for assisted living and end of life care (McKillop & Boucher, 2018) – especially given the many long-term and mandatory sentences previously imposed.
Historically, global infectious disease outbreaks of influenza (Besney et al., 2017; Maruschak et al., 2009; Robinson et al., 2012; Young et al., 2005) tuberculosis (TB; Centers for Disease Control Prevention, 2006; Lambert et al., 2016) and H1N1 “swine flu” (Chao et al., 2017; Turner & Levy, 2010) in correctional settings have illustrated their vulnerability. Due in part to a lack of social distancing, close quarters, shared spaces, and inadequate ventilation systems, infection control in jails and prisons is nearly impossible (Bick, 2007; Dannenburg, 2007). In the U.S., it is estimated that up to a quarter of the prison population has been infected with TB (Hammett et al., 1997), with a rate of active TB infection that is 6–10 times higher than the general population (Centers for Disease Control Prevention, 2006). Thus, it is not surprising that San Quentin prison in California has been an epicenter of three epidemics: 1918 influenza and 2009 swine flu epidemics (Chaddock, 2018), and, currently, the COVID-19 pandemic (Egelko, 2020).
People incarcerated in prisons and jails are more susceptible to acquiring and experiencing complications from infectious diseases than the population in the community. This is because people who are incarcerated are more likely than people in the community to have chronic underlying health conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, chronic liver disease, and lower immune systems from HIV (Maruschak et al., 2015). Correctional s...
