Each day we watch with appreciation and humility as healthcare workers and first responders bravely band together to protect all of us from the invisible threat that COVID-19 presents to our society and personal wellbeing. Sadly, there are also unsung heroes who do not make it on the evening news because their daily acts of bravery occur in locations most people do not think about – our prisons, jails and juvenile detention centers.
There are more than 2.4 million people residing in detention facilities across America, supervised, treated, and rehabilitated by an estimated 500,000 custody employees, medical personnel, cooks, facilities maintenance staff and rehabilitative program providers. Combined, nearly three million Americans reside within or work in detention confinement conditions, communal living environments that create a high risk for virus outbreaks and challenges in abating.
Americans may not be mindful that 95 percent of all people who go into detention return to our communities. The reality is that hundreds of thousands of people are entering and existing detention centers every year and society must understand the COVID-19 strategy of social distance is simply not viable in many of the nation’s overcrowded and under-resourced facilities. One only needs to imagine the COVID-19 containment challenges on cruise ships and equate that to attempted social distance measures in prisons. Prisons are not cruise ships by any stretch of the imagination but they mirror the communal living strategies of a ship without the individual rooms, bathrooms, showers, and solid room doors that a ship can employ to control a virus.
Americans would be horrified today to consider a circumstance where three million people remained on or continued to get on cruise ships, recognizing the risk of cross-contamination between staff and passengers and knowing that citizens on those ships were disembarking back into our communities, likely unknowingly spreading disease. We all recognize the risk of cruising right now, yet insufficient attention is being given to the living and working conditions in the nation’s detention facilities, even though thousands of people exit these facilities every day after work or when released back into their neighborhoods.
The experts who oversee the nation’s correctional facilities and community supervision agencies – prisons, jails, probation, parole, and juvenile justice systems – understand our role to protect the public with our collective responsibility to supervise and rehabilitate those in our charge. We do so with a heavy heart today, realistic about our ability to safely address this pandemic in many of the nation’s facilities with the resources and the physical plants available. We know the risk to our staff, inmates, youth and our communities. But this fails to mark the psyche of everyday citizens, who do not understand that the risk this creates to our collective health may be far greater than the risk of being a victim of a serious crime. Those of us who work in the corrections field know the very real public health risk of ignoring the working and living conditions in facilities across America. We only need to look at the tragic loss of correctional staff in New York, Louisiana and Riverside County to know the threat is not hyperbole. We are responsible for the staff and inmates in our charge and like a navy ship captain, we worry about our ability to protect the people working and living in our facilities if and when the virus infiltrates.
It is critical for states and local municipalities to continue evaluating the crowding levels and health care services available in their detention facilities while also employing all the critical strategies of
sanitization, clinical treatment, access to protective equipment and quarantine. More than 20 states have also engaged in the necessary evaluation of who they are incarcerating, making tough but necessary decisions to close jails and prisons to intake for non-violent offenders, diverting pre-trial detainees, releasing inmates identified as low risk, medically fragile, elderly and those nearing their established release date. This common sense, public health approach is fueled by courageous and thoughtful leaders with eyes wide open while making decisions steeped in risk analysis.
Now is not the time for tough on crime policies, political fear-mongering and unscientific rhetoric. Now is a time for policymakers, criminal justice leaders and corrections executives to engage in critical analysis when choosing whether to place non-violent and low-risk offenders into detention knowing there is no vaccine or proven treatment for this silent killer. Limited jail and prison capacity, now more than ever, should be maintained for those who create a risk of violence to our communities, not those that we are frustrated by or lack the ability to address underlying factors that drive the poor, addicted, homeless, and mentally ill into our correctional systems.
We owe it to our heroes who go to work every day in our prisons, jails and juvenile detention facilities; to the inmates serving time; and to our communities who will be accepting citizens releasing from detention, to have an honest conversation about who and how we have been incarcerating in America for the past 30 years. In this time of significant reflection, we need to commit to do better. The current strategies governing who we incarcerate as we battle a silent disease demands a public health approach and courageous leadership. We owe it to those three million Americans who work in and reside in correctional settings as well as the communities in which our employees live and where the incarcerated return —and that is virtually everywhere.
Terri McDonald is the president of the Association of Women Executives in Corrections.
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