Photo courtesy of ABC News
As the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, incarceration systems pose a serious threat to containing the spread of the virus. Because of the close proximity of the prisoners, contracting and spreading the coronavirus becomes very easy — prisons in the U.S. are now among the largest sources of infections.
A study by American Civil Liberties Union Analytics found that “models projecting total U.S. fatalities to be under 100,000 may be underestimating deaths by another 100,000 if we continue to operate jails as usual.” Ultimately, if the U.S. wants to save lives, it needs to take swift action.
On April 3, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet told the Human Rights Council, “Authorities should examine ways to release those particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus, among them older detainees and those who are sick, as well as low-risk offenders.”
For instance, Germany released prisoners who were close to fulfilling their sentences to avoid overcrowding in jails and make space for quarantine areas. In the U.S., states such as New Jersey followed similar recommendations and released around 1,000 low-risk inmates. This is a necessary measure to practice social distancing and protect inmates from contracting the disease and spreading it to others. In fact, the U.S. should have started releasing inmates months ago, before prisons became petri dishes for the virus.
By imposing strict isolation measures, such as forbidding entry to all visitors and issuing health assessments to essential workers who enter the prison, countries like Spain and Italy have managed to curb the spread of the coronavirus in prisons.
However, these measures are far from ideal, evoking anxiety and fear in prisoners who have lost their tether to the outside world. In response to losing visitation rights, Margherita Coppola, an Italian prisoner, told Deutsche Welle, “It was everything to me, the only moment to talk with my father for real. You don’t tell the most intimate feelings in a letter.”
In Italy, inmates violently protested the new restrictions, setting papers on fire, ripping electric cables, and breaking water pipes. After beginning in Salerno, riots spread rapidly across the country. If the strict visitation measures put in place were justified given the unhygienic conditions and overcrowding inside jails, so was the revolt. The Italian government has given little regard to the horrible conditions within prisons.
Despite many jails in the U.S. implementing similar measures, the virus proved harder to control. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the country has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world with one admission to jail every three seconds. This makes mitigating the pandemic inside jails increasingly difficult because people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus are admitted every day.
To decrease the number of people admitted to prison, the U.S. needs to revoke low-risk pretrial detentions, which makes up more than half of the jail population. This would drastically diminish the number of people who can spread the disease upon their release, despite the little time they’ve spent in jail — the main reason so many cases trace back to prisons.
Additionally, the U.S.’s unpreparedness is a leading reason that prisons have become epicenters of the pandemic. John Pfaff, a criminal justice expert at Fordham University, told Vox, “If you’re going to keep people contained, at least make it possible for them to clean their hands and give them face masks or something they can wear.”
Most prisoners don’t have access to essential hygiene products such as soap and hand sanitizer, and face masks are often out of the question. Such conditions make it nearly impossible to contain the disease in an already overcrowded space.
Governments are responsible for finding ways to make life inside prisons safer and more hygienic. For example, Italian prisons hold on average 10 to 14 people in every cell. Inmates have almost no sense of personal space, and, in light of the pandemic, no way to practice social distancing. Other prisons are no different — the Hamblen County Jail in Tennessee houses 439 inmates even though its maximum capacity is a mere 250.
Ultimately, while the measures implemented by Italy and Spain, and later adopted by the U.S., have helped isolate the coronavirus in prisons, they’ve also revealed the ugly truth behind an often overlooked system. The coronavirus puts into perspective its many injustices — from the condition of jails to the incarceration rates themselves.
