Addressing the Public Health Crisis of U.S. Carceral Facilities

Today, a network of scholars, advocates, and impacted individuals in the Justice, Health, and Democracy Rapid Response Impact Initiative is releasing resources to address two issues that are critical in the nation’s co-occurring crises of COVID-19 and mass incarceration. These issues include (1) the call for more educational resources about the COVID-19 vaccines that are sensitive to the unique concerns of incarcerated people and their loved ones, and (2) the need for an inclusive—and equitable—policy approach that fully integrates people impacted by incarceration into our public health response systems. These documents provide important information on these matters that we hope will support those in American jails, prisons, and detention centers, in addition to providing an ethically-based framework to inform and improve the decision-making of policymakers working on issues in the public health and criminal legal systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an urgent and unsettling magnifier of longstanding racial injustices in the United States. These injustices are laid bare most profoundly in the United States’ prisons and jails, where one out of every five people has had COVID-19 and where the rate of infection is four times as high as the general population. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine prisons and jails as separate from society. The rampant infection and profound suffering under COVID-19 in carceral facilities serves as a major source of transmission into communities at-large, particularly Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities.

This vicious cycle—largely unaddressed by criminal legal and other state apparatuses—continues unabated, leaving behind a social precedent that undercuts well-established epidemiological and public health research, basic human rights principles, and the imperatives racial justice and antiracism.

To meet these challenges, stakeholders from universities, advocacy organizations, organizing communities, and policy groups have formed the Justice, Health, and Democracy (JHD) Justice Network. The JHD Justice Network (or simply, Justice Network) is a collaborative coalition of leading scholars, advocates, practitioners, and activists working at the intersections of justice, race, and equity. Mirroring the diversity of expertise that individual network members bring to the collective, the Justice Network is convened across three diverse and high-impact anchoring institutions: the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, New America, and the Brown University School of Public Health. The initiative is a core component of the Justice Health Democracy (JHD) Rapid Response Impact Initiative.