Study from University of California, Irvine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital shows prison mortality rate spiked at least 50%
When the Covid-19 pandemic began, it wasn’t hard to predict that incarcerated people would be at higher risk. Many prisons and jails are crowded, dirty places with inconsistent access to healthcare – breeding grounds for the highly infectious virus. But the job of documenting the deaths has fallen to a patchwork of research groups and reporters.
Now, a national study from one of these collaborations, between the University of California, Irvine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, shows that at the peak of the pandemic in 2020, people inside prisons died almost three-and-a-half times more frequently than the free population.
The mental health outcomes are also worse. The way the prisons here in my state handled this was to keep everybody on lockdown essentially through the whole pandemic. Some prisons are still on lockdown due to staff shortages.
What this means is that prisoners are spending 24 hours a day in their cells with only a celly to keep them company. No visits. Probably some time out for phone calls.
Three or more years in the same 6x12 cell.
Cruelty’s the point