There are currently more than 2 million people incarcerated in prisons across the United States, and each prisoner is 3 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than unincarcerated individuals. In Angola Prison in Louisiana, prisoners didn’t receive masks until July, and most prisoners avoid wearing masks out of fear of being strangled. We should prioritize incarcerated individuals on the list of those getting access to the vaccine.
Prisons are a prime location for the spread of the virus. NPR writers Becky Sullivan, Ari Shapiro explain that the prison is an epidemiologist’s nightmare: hundreds tightly share indoor spaces, many sleep close together, and there’s a lack of resources like sanitizer, cleaner, and masks.
Due to these unsafe conditions, in December, there were 275,000 prisoners who tested positive for COVID-19, and 1,700 died from COVID-19. In Kansas, half of all prisoners have contracted COVID-19, eight times the infection rate outside of prisons.
1 in 5 prisoners are locked up on drug charges. All around the country, the spread of COVID-19 in prison has effectively become a death sentence for those serving minor drug charges.
This situation has raised the question of vaccination priority considering the severity of cases and deaths in prisons. Scientists and doctors generally agreed that prisoners should be high on the list of prioritization, but the proposition has faced pushback from conservative voices. “Killers and rapists set to get COVID vaccines before granny,” Trace Gallagher the co-anchor of Fox News’s America’s Newsroom said.
Sharon Dolovich, the director of the UCLA Prison Law and Policy Program, stated that, “What you have is, on the one hand, a really urgent public health need to prioritize both corrections staff and incarcerated people. On the other hand, you have at least four decades of tough-on-crime rhetoric which has primed the American public to think of people in custody as somehow less than human and less deserving.”
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, so far only seven states have prioritized prisoners among the first people to receive COVID-19 vaccines.
