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Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19
March 11 marks the fifth anniversary of the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, urging countries to “double down” on protective actions. But for incarcerated people, many of those protections remained out of reach. When COVID-19 hit the United States, the millions of people incarcerated here were dealt structural blows from every direction. From the virus’s rapid spread behind bars, to the denial of adequate care, to authorities’ use of COVID as a justification for even more punitive policies, incarcerated people faced a devastating intersection of disease and systemic abandonment. In many quarters, the story of that abandonment has been quickly forgotten and even erased.
Thankfully, investigative journalist Victoria Law, a longtime Truthout contributing writer and author of five books (including Prison By Any Other Name, which she coauthored with me), has stepped in to ensure that the history of COVID’s rise behind bars is meticulously and trenchantly documented. Her powerful new book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration, is a profound chronicle of systemic neglect, structural violence, multitentacled injustice and inspiring resistance undertaken in times of great peril. In this interview, Law discusses how this shattering chapter in history has impacted people behind bars — and how they have responded with action.
Maya Schenwar: The initial period of COVID was a time when so many norms went out the window, including for those of us here in the outside world. But many people in prison experienced the pandemic in unique and amplified ways. In Corridors of Contagion, you chronicle some of those stories. What were people experiencing inside that might be different from what many of us experienced out here?
Victoria Law: At the beginning of the pandemic, inside jails and prisons and other spaces of confinement — like immigration detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, and other places in which people have lost their liberty — there was very little bodily autonomy or freedom of movement. There was also very little information coming in or coming out. Jails and prisons are tightly controlled spaces. People were not told, “There is a virus that is lethal and unknown and highly contagious bearing down on you.”
I start with Mary Fish, who was incarcerated in Oklahoma, which had the nation’s highest women’s incarceration rate for many years. Its two women’s prisons are perpetually overcrowded. They were not given very much information about why they had to lock in, why they had to clean, why they had to wear masks. Because Mary had bought a television set from commissary and was able to watch the news, she knew that there was a virus that was heading to the U.S.
The same thing happened in Texas, where I interviewed Kwaneta Harris, who listened to National Public Radio on a radio that she bought from commissary. She was in solitary confinement. Nobody bothered to tell anybody in solitary confinement about what was happening with the pandemic. Nobody knew that somebody who was coughing and sneezing was a potential vector for a deadly virus.
People got piecemeal information, so at first, they didn’t know how to protect themselves, or that they had to protect themselves. And even more than usual, they weren’t able to get information from the outside. Prisons and jails, in an attempt to stop the virus from coming in, stopped in-person visits very early on when the pandemic hit the United States.
Testing inside was very rare at first. Truthout readers may remember in the early days, if you had a cold or if you had the sniffles or if you didn’t feel so well, it was really difficult to get a COVID test. Inside prisons, where you don’t have the ability to walk to a drugstore or just go to the doctor, it was even harder to get any verification.
Nobody knew how to keep safe. And everybody inside already knew that they were in an environment that had proven again and again to be utterly indifferent to their health and well-being.
As the pandemic went on, particularly during the second wave, some prisons that hadn’t been previously hit were then hit. One thing that struck me is how some prisons were still, somehow, caught completely unprepared.
Yes, there had been months for jails and prisons to prepare. But the measures that they had put in place, under this guise of public health or prevention or protection, were actually just doubling down on punishment. While we all sheltered at home, prisons used COVID as a way to say, “We’re going to lock you in your cells for 23 to 24 hours a day.” Readers can imagine being locked in the smallest bathroom in their house.
In prison, showing humanity is often against prison rules and can be punished in any number of terrible ways.
The prisons twisted and distorted some of the public health messaging. For example, in New York, at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the state’s maximum-security prison for women, staff initially told women that they could not wear the blue surgical masks with the blue on the outside, because blue was the color of the uniforms of the correctional officers.
Prisons themselves did not actually do things like stock up on masks again, like figure out social distancing policies, like actually require that their staff wear masks and wear them properly. The second wave hit and we saw that prisons that had not had COVID outbreaks before suddenly skyrocketed in cases.
At the same time, prison populations began to grow again. At the start of the pandemic, many states had stopped sending people from jails to prisons because courts were closed. But later, they largely discarded these measures and prison populations grew.
In some instances, like in Oklahoma, they closed prisons and instead of releasing people, they just crammed hundreds of people into already overcrowded existing prisons, which then meant that the chances of the virus skyrocketing just exponentially increased.
Right, there was that moment at the beginning of the pandemic when it seemed like so many people were going to get released, and it would be a decarceration moment, and then it did not pan out. Could you talk now about the potential for decarceration early in the pandemic and what activists were pushing for — and then what actually happened?
When the pandemic started, even before it got to the United States, what we saw was Iran and Turkey and other countries that did not have, by any stretch of the imagination, sterling records on human rights, issue mass releases from their jails and prisons in an attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus. In the United States, advocates, formerly incarcerated people and legislators said we should be releasing people. What happened in 2020 is that prisons released 549,622 people — but that was actually fewer people than had been released the previous year. Of those, only 6 percent were released as expedited releases or early releases. More people had actually been released in the pre-pandemic 2019, when 608,026 people were released from state and federal prisons. So, more people were released in 2019 when there wasn’t a lethal pandemic bearing down than in 2020.
This was a missed opportunity for the U.S. to rethink the idea that we should lock people up and throw away the key forever and ever. Instead, they doubled down on punishments like perpetual solitary confinement, the canceling of visits, the canceling of programs, the canceling of anything that might make a person’s life behind bars more bearable and give them opportunities when they are released for some sort of meaningful reintegration.
What we also saw during the pandemic was that the percentage of people behind bars who tested positive for COVID was much greater than the number of people in the general population who tested positive for COVID. In 2021, there were almost 31,000 people for every 100,000 people in prisons, testing positive for COVID. Among the general population in the U.S., 9,350 people for every 100,000 people tested positive for COVID. That’s 3.5 times more in prison than it was in the general population.
That’s horrifying.
Yes. Also, what we have to remember is that the percent of deaths from COVID skyrocketed behind bars. For every 100,000 people in prisons or people behind bars, there were 200 deaths. In the general U.S. population, for every 100,000 U.S. residents, 81 people died from COVID-19.
Devastating. This says so much about how prisons responded to COVID inside. One bright spot in the book was how, even as you’re describing all these dire conditions, you’re also talking about the ways that people inside helped each other out, practiced mutual aid. One of your interviewees referred to mutual aid as “practicing socialism.” What were some of the ways that people inside supported each other during the height of the pandemic?
In prison, showing humanity is often against prison rules and can be punished in any number of terrible ways, from losing your ability to shop at commissary or losing your phone calls, losing your visits, getting thrown in solitary confinement, or getting a [disciplinary] ticket, which affects your chance at early release. Something as simple as making a cup of tea or making a bowl of soup for somebody in the next cell who is not feeling well is punishable by any of these things.
But early on in the pandemic, when people were not feeling well and they realized that getting a positive test would mean being sent off to solitary confinement, people were hiding their symptoms and other incarcerated people were making sure that they were okay.
They would swing by their cells — at risk to themselves, since sharing is prohibited — to make sure that they had what they needed. Do you need Gatorade? Do you need water? Do you need food? What can we bring you from our already scarce supplies? People took care of each other.
And in the COVID quarantine units, they were documenting staff abuses. They were documenting how much time it took medical staff to respond when an emergency happened. They were telling stories to their family members and encouraging them to tell advocacy organizations on the outside. They were encouraging them to call lawmakers, not just on their own behalf, but on behalf of others inside.
You wrote about some powerful organizing that happened inside at the height of the pandemic, from hunger strikes to working with outside advocates. I was wondering if you could discuss some of this resistance.
We saw a diversity of tactics. People contacted folks on the outside, people contacted media either directly or through advocates to let them know what was happening.
In California, people inside called into Zoom meetings on the outside to say, “Here’s what is happening in my housing unit.” Advocates then rallied outside the houses of Gov. Gavin Newsom and then-secretary for the California Department of Corrections, Ralph Diaz. They rallied outside prisons as well.
People also sometimes staged protests at the immigration detention centers. People staged protests over a video visiting technology to say, “Hey, somebody died in here. We need PPE, we need release. If ICE and GEO Group and CoreCivic cannot keep us safe from COVID-19, they need to release us.”
People would stage protests at great risks to themselves; just like sharing a pen is prohibited and punishable, having a protest is also prohibited and highly punishable.
At the beginning of the book and then at the end, you quote Arundhati Roy’s piece from the beginning of the pandemic, in which she says the pandemic could potentially be a “portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” Imagining that the country had embraced that possibility of a portal, how do you think our society could have responded to the pandemic in ways that actually helped challenge and dismantle the prison-industrial complex?
First, the pandemic could’ve been an opportunity, or a portal, to quote Arundhati Roy, for us to walk into a future in which we were not addicted to perpetual punishment. It could have been an opportunity to say, “We need to rethink, reenvision…. We need to rethink: Why are we keeping so many people inside for so long? How do we get people out?”
There have been numerous studies that show that education or health care or housing — or all of these things — cost so much less than locking people up. This was an opportunity to say: Hey, you know what? Maybe if we’re not locking up so many people, maybe everybody gets not just the one-time stimulus check, not just the two-time stimulus check, but enough money so people can just stay home and get paid until we figure out what the heck we’re doing about this pandemic. If you don’t have a home, if we’re not putting so much money into caging people, we can figure out how to convert unused hotels into places for people to stay, where they can shower, where they can be by themselves, where they aren’t facing either the elements or having lots of strangers breathe on them, or facing all the systemic violence that happens inside shelters.
If we had walked through this portal, we could say: Hey, maybe we can really start to become a society in which we are caring for people, in which we are shifting not just the material and financial resources, although we do need to do that, but also the mindset, from “we’re going to cage people” to “how do we take care of people?”
This could have been a portal into thinking: How do we want to make our society more robust, more healthy, in ways that take care of everybody?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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