Prisons are the ultimate vectors for pandemics—especially airborne viruses like influenza and SARS-CoV-2. Poorly ventilated, overcrowded, and without robust healthcare options for those inside, prisons have long been some of the hardest hit institutions during previous outbreaks of other contagious illnesses. Prison administrators typically punish individuals who are unwell, isolating the sick and stigmatizing testing in the process. It’s a grueling, dehumanizing cycle of harm inside institutions built for brutality.
Journalist and author Victoria Law has reported on prisons for more than 15 years and has written several books about incarceration, resistance, and gender. Her latest book, “Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration,” follows five people incarcerated in U.S. prisons during the first several years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Law’s reporting includes sobering statistics on COVID-19 cases and deaths, and the scant progress activists made calling for decarceration and compassionate release since 2020.
Early in the book, Law asks: if she documented these years, would the public be less likely to shy away from abolition? It’s too early to tell, given the widespread pandemic denialism of the past few years. But beyond the devastating data, “Corridors of Contagion” details the individual human harms of incarceration, further exacerbated by COVID.
Law recently spoke to Prism about prisons’ punitive pandemic measures, the Long COVID crisis in American prisons, and the ways that the harms of pandemics and incarceration will continue to overlap.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Britta Shoot: I’ve been thinking about the dualities in your book: how SARS-CoV-2 infections harm and kill individuals and how supposed protections against the virus are often punitive for all people in prisons, such as barring in-person visits as well as phone calls and mail service. You explain how this is a pattern in prisons during pandemics and a crisis that is ongoing—even though the book had to end at some point. What are you thinking about at this point in the pandemic, now that the stories in the book ended on the page about a year ago?
Victoria Law: The start of the COVID-19 pandemic was a missed opportunity for the U.S. as a whole—and for different states individually—to rethink this 50-year addiction to mass incarceration. Instead of releasing people, prisons doubled down on punishment under the guise of protecting people. Like you said, visits were canceled, which at the time made sense from a health perspective, but locking people in their cells 24/7 or putting them in solitary with no treatment if they tested positive—those are punitive measures. It also discouraged people from seeking testing. And these measures didn’t work; jails and prisons became COVID hotspots because these measures did not stop the virus from entering or spreading.
As much of the outside world has walked back precautions like requiring masks and testing, prisons have not walked back punitive measures. In many prisons, people don’t want to test because they’re afraid of their entire unit being locked down or being blamed for a lockdown. You have incarcerated people rightfully angry they aren’t allowed visits from family or aren’t allowed to attend an education program. Some programs, including those run by outside volunteers, still haven’t been allowed to resume. Many recognize that the prison does not have their safety, health, and well-being at heart.
Shoot: I wanted to hear more about Long COVID inside prisons because the more COVID spreads, the more infections a person survives, the higher their chances of developing Long COVID. When your reporting for the book concluded at the end of 2023, one of the subjects of the book, incarcerated journalist and Prism contributor Kwaneta Harris, discussed her concern that she has Long COVID. Work is a requirement in Texas prisons, and she was worried about being penalized for not working, even when sick. What are you now hearing about how the Long COVID crisis impacts incarcerated people?
Law: One of the outrageous things about prisons is that early on, some started censoring information that was coming in about COVID, protective measures, and then later on, Long COVID. So, a lot of people in prison don’t really understand Long COVID, or they are unable to access information.
I write about Malakki, who has multiple sclerosis, and whether some of the symptoms that he’s experiencing with multiple sclerosis are because he got COVID. Did that exacerbate some of his symptoms? And he may not even know these things because he doesn’t have access to his medical records because he’s incarcerated.
I remember I sent information via the electronic monitoring system JPay about Long COVID to a woman in a New York prison who asked about it early on, and a day or two later, I got notice that my message was rejected because it threatened the safety and security of the institution. Information about Long COVID should not be seen as any sort of threat. If anything, perhaps it would be helpful for people to understand that this is not just a two-week virus; that it could have long-term ramifications, and people should continue to mask, social distance, and take precautions against contracting the virus.
Because Kwaneta Harris had access to so much information from so many sources, she was able to connect those dots to say, “Hey, this is what I’m feeling. This seems to be what all of these articles are describing.” Other people might be like, “I feel run down, but maybe I’m under the weather today.” Or, “I feel run down, but maybe that’s because the food has been terrible.”
Shoot: Many media professionals have stopped covering COVID-19 even as it continues to spread, disable, and kill. But as you describe in the book, incarcerated people continue to disproportionately experience both waves of infection and pandemic-related restrictions. How has reporting on prisons impacted your understanding of the ongoing pandemic?
Law: I’ve long reported on people who are used to being forgotten or reviled. I looked at what was happening to people in prison, especially during the start of the pandemic, with a view of what happens when you are literally trapped in these institutions, unable to protect yourself. Knowing all of these ways in which prisons are terrible and fail to protect people informs the questions I asked: What is happening in there? What is this like for other people? I kept asking questions after it seemed like COVID was no longer an issue for other people—the wider general public, the media, politicians.
Shoot: What do you imagine for the near future regarding how the ongoing pandemic and incarceration continue to overlap?
Law: Just because there was a missed opportunity for mass decarceration doesn’t mean that people should not keep pushing for it. Unfortunately, incarceration intersects with so many different issues that people are fighting for. When you have so many resources going into jails and prisons, you don’t have resources to put into anything else. One of the startling things that I found out recently was that there’s an area in upstate New York that has two maximum security prisons that have been there a long time. They authorized a jail and, at the same time, closed the regional hospital either before or just at the start of the pandemic.
That meant that if you needed hospital care, you needed to drive to a different area of the state. And when the COVID-19 pandemic happened, it meant that people who had COVID-19 and needed to get to the hospital would need to go someplace else because the jail sucked up all of that area’s resources. Instead of saying that we need a hospital where people can go when they are sick or to go for preventative care—something that benefits everybody in our community—leaders in that region decided to put millions of dollars into a state-of-the-art prison. Even if you don’t care about people in prison, you should at least see [prisons] as a resource suck. When you start to look deeper, you can see how our terrible lack of universal healthcare, a lack of adequate mental health care for all, and drastic education cuts ties into and feeds into the incarceration machine.
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