When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, public-health experts warned the virus was both highly contagious and airborne. This prompted governments throughout the world to institute lockdowns in an attempt to control its spread. Even the United States took heed, shuttering schools, worksites, airports and other once-bustling gathering places.

But when it came to prisons and jails, an ethos of disregard took hold, and a confluence of factors — inadequate and often negligent pre-COVID medical care, faulty ventilation systems, glaring overcrowding and a reluctance to listen to the recommendations of medical authorities — led a to a disproportionate number of incarcerated people contracting the coronavirus and dying. In fact, by May 2020, 30 of the top 50 U.S. outbreaks, including the four largest, were inside prisons and jails.

Journalist and prison-abolition activist Victoria Law’s latest book, Corridors of Contagion, zeroes in on this tragic (and preventable) outcome, introducing readers to five people imprisoned in different parts of the country. Their lived experience and insights allow us to understand the many carceral failures that unfolded.

It’s a depressing and enraging read, but Law’s reporting is tempered by her focus on the multiple ways that prisoners provided emotional support to each other and shared food, medicine and information, even though doing this violated protocol. 

These gestures, of course, were a forceful show of solidarity, but were not antidotes to the rapid spread of the coronavirus behind bars. Corridors of Contagion both emphasizes the carceral health deficits during COVID and simultaneously exposes a long roster of policy failures. For one, Law writes that prisoner-rights advocates and public-health professionals were ignored when they urged officials to begin decarceration, arguing that reducing the number of prisoners was the best way to mitigate the spread of the virus.  

Other countries, Law reports, did this — and quickly. “Iran ordered the temporary release of 85,000 people in mid-March 2020,” she writes. “Turkey released more than 114,000 people (nearly 40% of its prison population) while the Philippines, India, Iraq and Ethiopia released tens of thousands. … Several European nations also ordered mass releases.”

But the States? According to Law, during the first year of the pandemic, U.S. prisons released 648,400 people. “That might seem like a staggering number,” she writes, “but only 37,700, or 6% of them, were expedited releases.” The rest were people who were already scheduled for discharge. And because new prisoners continued to be sentenced and imprisoned, only 215,800 fewer people were incarcerated in February 2021 than a year earlier. 

Moreover, other policy changes added to worsening conditions for those at risk of infection. One of the most egregious took place in California, where beginning in late 2020 inmates in 40 state facilities were required to pony up a copay to see a physician or nurse. At $2–$8 a visit, this put healthcare out of reach for many people jailed in the “golden” state.

California, of course, was not the only locale to stymie healthcare access to a deleterious end. Coupled with a constant flow of incoming and departing staff members and prisoners, it is unsurprising that in the first months of the pandemic, 38% of the estimated 1.3 million people then in state and federal custody contracted the virus. 

Equally unsurprising, when vaccines were rolled out, Law notes that conspiracy theories and rumors ran rampant, limiting the number of inmates willing to be jabbed. It was only after they learned that the vaccine would result in the restoration of a range of activities — in-person visits from family members and friends and the resumption of classes, jobs and meals eaten outside of their cells — that they lined up for the shot. 

Still, even this was fraught, Law reports, because “the return to normalcy meant a return to mass numbers of incarcerations.”

This reality led Law to the central point of Corridors of Contagion. While the book supports several reforms — among them the expansion of compassionate release for elderly, sick or disabled people; improved, timely access to free medical care; upgraded HVAC and ventilation systems; and better education programs and work opportunities — she stresses that these recommendations do not replace the need for decarceration or prison abolition. 

“The pandemic could have been an opportunity to rethink the flawed logic of the U.S. criminal  legal system,” Law concludes. “Instead, it made clear the extreme harms of a country set on perpetual punishment.” 

That said, she nonetheless believes that change is possible. “We can always change our minds, change course, offer reparations for the harms that have been inflicted, develop resources that meet rather than suppress people’s needs, and try again to imagine and build a world where we can help each other survive — and even prevent — the next disaster.” Indeed, we can. And perhaps we will.

 
Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration
By Victoria Law
Haymarket Books; 288 pages
Sep. 10, 2024; available for pre-order.

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