David Helps in Washington Post: Covid-19 Outbreaks at Jails and Prisons Should Make Us Rethink Incarceration (June 25, 2020)

David Helps op-ed in the Made by History section of the Washington Post: “Covid-19 Outbreaks at Jails and Prisons Should Make Us Rethink Incarceration” (June 25, 2020)

David Helps is a PhD candidate in History and a researcher with the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement project at the University of Michigan. He is a historian of urban politics, policing and the global United States.

Jails and prisons have become centers of the coronavirus, as they have been during every outbreak before it. Incarcerated people have been denied tests and medical care, with those exhibiting symptoms simply thrown into solitary confinement. Prison libraries and educational programs have shut down, but social distancing remains impossible when prisoners live in shared cells and eat in dining halls, four or five to a table. More than 46,000 imprisoned people in the United States have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and nearly 550 have died.

But jails are even more deadly transmitters of the virus than prisons, because they are embedded in local communities. Unlike state and federal prisons, jails are run by counties. Each year, almost 11 million people spend time in U.S. jails — most of them before being convicted of crimes — and during this time, they interact closely with police officers, nurses, custody officers and, of course, other incarcerated people. The covid-19 pandemic has intensified calls for “decarceration” — a push to reduce the number of people under punitive control, in jails and prisons or under electronic monitoring. Though municipalities have met the latest pandemic with modest reforms, the history of jails reveals that saving lives will require permanently reducing the number of people behind bars.

Long before covid-19 ravaged incarcerated populations and local communities, government officials turned jails into deadly places by gutting welfare programs and expanding incarceration — policy decisions that have brutalized communities of color in particular. A new report from the University of Michigan’s Documenting Criminalization and Confinement project, “We Live 24/7 in Hell,” reveals that by the early 1970s, prisoners in Detroit’s Wayne County Jail endured systematic abuse and medical neglect — with lethal consequences.

Read the rest of the piece here.

By Matthew D Lassiter

Professor of History, University of Michigan