This story appeared in the Spring 2021 Letters & Science magazine.
For John Eason, the equation is very simple: If you want to slow the continued spread of COVID-19 in America, you need to focus on the country’s prison system.
Backed by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Eason, a professor of sociology, is part of a national team working on a project under the NSF’s “Rapid Response Research” banner. Eason and colleagues are mapping the correlation between COVID-19 infections in prisoners and prison staff and infections occurring in nearby rural and urban communities.
“I’m trying to produce good scholarship to show how we improve public safety and public health by reducing our overreliance on the prison systems,” he explains.
According to the Marshall Project, a joint effort between the Associated Press and a network of nonprofit journalism outlets designed to track the number of COVID-19 infections among U.S. prisoners, as of early February, more than 377,000 prisoners had been infected, and more than 76,000 have died. At the end of 2020, the rate of COVID-19 infection among prisoners was four times higher than that of the general population.
Eason, who’s been studying racial inequities in the prison system for years, isn’t surprised by this at all.
“The prison, as an institution, is a symbol of stratification, and it’s an inequality generator,” Eason asserts, pointing to overrepresentation of Black and Latinx individuals in the prison system, both in terms of prisoners and prison staffing. Nearly 35 percent of staff in state and federal prisons (think bailiffs, jailors, and correction officers) are Black, and 12 percent are Latinx.
“Understanding how the disease gets in is key,” says Eason. “There are staff members coming in and out of what we perceive to be a closed system. We think of these facilities as self-contained islands, and they’re not.”
Eason’s initial analysis has shown that the spikes in COVID-19 infections are going both ways, affecting staff and nearby communities. Because COVID testing in prisons isn’t mandatory in all states, it’s impossible to draw a causal relation. But the correlation is clearly strong.
By looking at the data, Eason is hoping to make policy recommendations to decrease infections and control the spread of the disease. At the top of the list is prioritizing the vaccination of prisoners, an issue that, in many states, including Wisconsin, has been politically controversial.
Eason says it’s critical to look past politics to see the bigger picture.
“This disease will hang around longer if you don’t go to the hottest spots,” he says. “If you want to slow down the incidence and disease rate of COVID-19, the center of the storm is prisons.”
