Institutional Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in American Prisons

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic infiltrated the United States in early 2020, with correctional facilities becoming hot spots for the novel coronavirus shortly thereafter. Using data gathered from Departments of Corrections’ official websites, we provide a summary of state and federal prison system responses to COVID-19 as of June 2020. We highlight strengths and deficiencies in system responses as well as pertinent variations across jurisdictions. We conclude with a call for scholars and grant funders to prioritize incarceration-based data collection efforts on COVID-19 so the short and long-term consequences of the pandemic, and systemic responses to it, can be more fully assessed.

KEYWORDS:

• Prison experience
• prisons
• public safety
• Covid-19
• pandemic
• alternatives to incarceration
• early release mechanisms
• prison reform

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While we include the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) as one of fifty-one jurisdictions in our analysis, it was not our focus. The federal response is the focus of a separate article (Hummer, this issue).

2. To offer one further example, mortality data posted by the Ohio Department of Corrections changed midway through the pandemic from one indicator (“number of confirmed COVID-19 related inmate deaths”) to two indicators (“number of probable COVID-19 related inmate deaths” and “number of confirmed COVID-19 related inmate deaths”).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN) of Northeast Ohio [Amplify & Apply Mini-Grant].