As COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly, state prisons and local jails have failed to mitigate the risk of infection behind bars

COVID infections are rising across the country. So why are we allowing jail populations to rise?

by Emily Widra

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the strategy to slowing its spread behind bars was clear: Reduce the number of people in jails and prisons. In March, public health and medical officials were already warning that incarcerated people would be uniquely vulnerable to the spread of the disease and its most serious medical consequences, due to their close quarters and high rates of preexisting health conditions.

And yet, more than eight months after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic, prisons and jails have generally failed to reduce their populations enough to protect the health and lives of those who are incarcerated.

While state prison populations have slowly declined from pre-pandemic levels, the pace of these modest reductions has slowed since the spring, even as national infection rates continue to rise. And county jails -- which made promising reductions in the spring -- have failed to sustain those reforms.

This graph contains aggregated data about 514 jails collected by NYU’s Public Safety Lab. To learn more about the data see the web version of this caption.

As a result of these failures to sufficiently decarcerate, the early warnings of health experts have come true: the COVID-19 case rate in state and federal prisons is more than four times as high as that of the general public, and the death rate is more than twice as high. The Texas prison system alone has had more COVID-19 cases than in four states and Washington, D.C. combined. And since people who work in prisons and jails regularly return to their communities, correctional facilities are dangerously poised to become incubators for the disease and contribute to rising infection rates in surrounding communities.

Initially, many local officials -- including sheriffs, prosecutors, and judges -- responded quickly to reduce jail populations. In a national sample of 514 county jails of varying sizes, most (88%) decreased their populations from March to July, resulting in an average population reduction across all 514 jails of 26%. (For detailed information about where this statistic comes from, see footnote 1 in the web version of this report.)

These population reductions came as the result of various policy changes, including police issuing citations in lieu of arrests, prosecutors declining to charge people for "low-level offenses," courts reducing cash bail amounts, and jail administrators releasing people detained pretrial or those serving short sentences for "nonviolent offenses."

But now the data tells a different story. Since July, 77% of the jails in our sample had population increases, suggesting that the early reforms instituted to mitigate COVID-19 have largely been abandoned.

For example, by mid-April, the Philadelphia city jail population reportedly dropped by more than 17% after city police suspended low-level arrests and judges released "certain nonviolent detainees" jailed for "low-level charges." But on May 1st -- as the pandemic raged on -- the Philadelphia police force announced that they would resume arrests for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier reduction efforts. Similarly, on July 10th, the sheriff of Jefferson County, Alabama, announced that the jail would limit admissions to only "violent felons that cannot make bond." That effort was quickly abandoned when the jail resumed normal admission operations just one week later. The increasing jail populations across the country suggest that after the first wave of responses to COVID-19, many local officials have allowed jail admissions to return to business as usual.

On the other hand, state prison populations have continued to decline, but not quickly or significantly enough to slow the spread of COVID-19. Even in states where prison populations have dropped, there are still too many people behind bars to accommodate social distancing, effective isolation and quarantine, and increased health care requirements.

For example, although California has reduced the state prison population by about 20% since January, the number of large COVID-19 outbreaks in California state prisons suggests that the population reduction needs to be much more drastic. In fact, as of November 18th, California's state prisons were still holding more people than they were designed for, at 105% of their design capacity.

This graph shows 21 states where data was available for Jan., May, July, Aug., Sept., Oct., and Nov., either from state DOCs or the Vera Institute of Justice. See Appendix B for more detail.

(Sharp-eyed readers looking at the above graph may wonder if Connecticut and Vermont are showing larger declines than most other states because those two states have “unified” prison and jail systems. However, data from Connecticut as well as from Vermont show that the bulk of their population reduction is coming from within the “sentenced” portion of their populations.)

Early in the pandemic, North Dakota quickly reduced its prison population by 19% between January and May 2020, a trend that continued until the beginning of October. But over the past month this trend reversed and the states' prison population actually started to increase (by 3% from October 8 to November 19). Now, North Dakota is experiencing the state's first major outbreaks of COVID-19 in prison. In one facility, the James River Correctional Center, more than half of the incarcerated population had active COVID-19 infections as of November 23rd.

According to a October 2020 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the modest declines in prison populations can be largely attributed to changes in arrests, jail bookings, and court closures -- not releases. Despite evidence that large-scale releases do not inherently endanger public safety, states have elected to release people from prison on a mostly case-by-case basis, which the National Academies report describes as "procedurally slow and not well suited to crisis situations."

Thankfully, some states have recognized the inefficiency of case-by-case releases and the necessity of larger-scale releases. For example, in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy signed bill S2519 in October, which allowed for the early release of people with less than a year left on their sentences. A few weeks after the bill was signed, more than 2,000 people were released from New Jersey state prisons on November 4th.

Prisons and jails are notoriously dangerous places during a viral outbreak, and continue to be a major source of a large number of infections in the U.S. The COVID-19 death rate in prisons is three times higher than among the general U.S. population, even when adjusted for age and sex (as the prison population is disproportionately young and male). Since the early days of the pandemic, public health professionals, corrections officials, and criminal justice reform advocates have agreed that decarceration is necessary to protect incarcerated people and the community-at-large from COVID-19. Despite this knowledge, state, federal, and local authorities have failed to reduce jail and prison populations on a major scale, which continues to put incarcerated people's lives at risk -- and by extension, the lives of everyone in greater communities where incarcerated people eventually return, and where correctional staff live and work.