Decarceration from Local County Jails during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Closer Look

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic initially compelled population reductions at local county jails. This study uses daily population counts at 970 jail facilities in 43 different U.S. states to; assess changes in jail population levels during 2020; relate those changes to the demographic, economic, and political characteristics of the counties where they took place; and examine the relationships between jail population levels and COVID-19 cases and deaths. Jail population data was gathered by the Jail Data Initiative at New York University and linked to other publicly accessible data collections. Through descriptive analyses and latent growth curve modeling, our findings indicate that while jail population levels generally fell in the early stages of the pandemic, they remained higher in areas with larger proportions of minoritized populations, and returned more rapidly to pre-pandemic levels in areas with larger proportions of Black and Republican-leaning residents. Larger pre-pandemic jail population rates were associated with elevated COVID-19 case and death rates during 2020, and changes in local jail population rates predicted case and death rates over a following three-month period. Specifically, each percentage increase in jail populations was associated with between 80.4 and 101.9 additional cases and 1.2 to 1.4 additional deaths per 10 K county residents.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• county jails
• decarceration
• disparate impact

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the New York University Public Safety Lab’s Jail Data Initiative for making their data available for secondary analysis.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data used in this research are publicly available and can be found at the sources identified (Jail data initiative data are available at the JDI’s github repository: https://github.com/publicsafetylab/public-psl-jdi-pops. Election lab data are available at the MIT election lab’s github repository: https://electionlab.mit.edu/data.COVID data is available at the NYT github repository: https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data).

Notes

1. Data is available at the JDI’s github repository: https://github.com/publicsafetylab/public-psl-jdi-pops.

2. Available at the MIT election lab’s github repository: https://electionlab.mit.edu/data.

3. Available at the NYT github repository: https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.

4. At the time of the analysis, insufficient data was available to test for the period following the third time point (Oct./Nov., 2020).

Additional information

Funding

A portion of this research was supported by the IUPUI Office for the Vice Chancellor for Research COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant.