We continue our series of articles that explore the racial
health disparities exposed by COVID-19. In this interview, we examine the issue
of incarceration as a public health concern in the United States, as well as
the toll it takes on Black communities, especially in the context of the
pandemic.
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on PinterestThe importance of incarceration for public health often gets
overlooked. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
According to some of the most recent data,
Black Americans are 2.4 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than their white
counterparts, and 2.2 times as likely as Asian Americans and Latin Americans.
Other studies have also suggested that Black communities, followed by Latinx
communities, are being hit the hardest by the pandemic.
Through a series of Special Features and interviews, Medical News Today have been
trying to untangle some of the mechanisms behind these racial
disparities.
In our previous interview on
COVID-19 race-related health inequalities, Prof. Tiffany Green quoted the work
of John Eason, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of
sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — to point out one such
potential mechanism.
Prof. Eason’s ongoing research shows that Black and Latinx people
are overrepresented as corrections officers in county jails and suggests that
these workers may be inadvertently spreading the new coronavirus.
In this interview, MNT has followed up on this issue by
speaking to Prof. Eason himself about his research.
Prof. Eason’s expertise focuses on imprisonment, healthcare
access, and health disparities across the rural-urban continuum. He is also the
director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Justice Lab.
We have lightly edited the interview transcript for clarity.
MNT:
Can you tell us about the role that incarceration plays in the uneven effect
that COVID-19 is having on Black and Latinx communities? Your research suggests
that a disproportionate number of corrections officers may inadvertently
serve as SARS-CoV-2 vectors in these communities, could you kindly expand on
that?
Prof. Eason: We’ve paid a lot of attention to the disproportionate
rate of incarceration for Black and Latinx people in the U.S. — it’s more so
for Black people. So, while over 60% of Americans know someone or have a family
member in prison, it’s more like 90% for African Americans, so the scale of
mass incarceration is unprecedented.
What’s also quite unprecedented in the U.S. compared to any
other country is prison building, or what I’ve labeled as the “prison boom,”
where we built over 1,100 prisons […] in about 35 years, and we’ve expanded the
footprint [of these facilities].
Just the landmass is more than 600 square miles in terms of
the number of prisons and how big they are.
In that expansion, we’ve grown to
now 450,000 corrections officers, and in the last major study done on this, we
saw Black folks, more than Latinx, being overrepresented in the corrections
officers […] labor force. Black folks were nearly double, 22 or 23% of corrections officers were Black
while only 11% were Latinx.
There’s also a lot of conjecture and a lack of understanding
about the empirical reality of where prisons are built.
My research has shown that while we think that these are
overwhelmingly white towns, the average town that gets a prison has a higher
percentage of Black and Latinx people in it, and that’s accounting for whether
or not it already has a
prison (so I’m not counting the population of prisoners in predicting that).
[S]o this goes back to the heart of your question about the
transmission of COVID between communities and prisons. If Black and brown people
— Black people, especially — are over-represented in corrections
officers, and most
prisons are built in rural communities that have a higher number of Black
folks, the workers — not the incarcerated people — [could spread the
virus.]
The incarcerated people come from anywhere across the state,
as most prisons are built by states. Another source of confusion is the belief
that most prisons are privately owned, but roughly only 12–13% […] are
privately owned; the vast majority of them are owned by state operators.
So, Texas, Georgia, and Florida have built the most prisons;
and in those places, in rural Black communities, you have workers who are
disproportionately Black coming and going out of these facilities.
And because they’re essential employees […] who are
disproportionately Black and Latinx […] they’re serving as vectors for
transmission of the disease, more so than prisoners.
Because in prisons, we haven’t decarcerated a whole lot of
people under COVID. We’ve done more so through jails, which is a different
system. In the U.S., about 1.6 million people are in prison, and about another
600,000 are in local jails, and most of the decarceration under COVID has
occurred in [local county] jails.
Prison guards [may spread the virus] in particular. I formed
a team of researchers, and we’re running analyses to see if this hypothesis
holds true and if it will hold during the whole COVID crisis.
But places with prisons — I’ve
already done the analysis on this — counties with prisons have higher
rates of COVID than counties that don’t [have prisons].
So that’s the baseline descriptive, and now we have to look
to see the number of cases per facility and worker.
MNT: Do
the type of employment contracts that these workers work under play a role as
well?
Prof. John Eason: I think they would […] In a lot of states you have
unionized corrections officers; and even if they’re not unionized, the level of
pay for a corrections officer is going to be better compared to other jobs in
the state. So, in a state like Arkansas, […] the pay for a corrections officer
is going to be pretty good compared to most other salaries.
So, you may see variation; you might see differences not so
much by employee status — like whether they’re temporary or permanent — but
corrections officers tend to have a less fluid job than one might imagine. I
think there’s higher fluidity in the private sector, […] so we could look to
see if privately-owned prisons have a higher infection rate.
[I]’m not sure if we have that level of data on the
individual employees at this point, but that is something we could definitely
investigate. I think that is an interesting question and I’d expect to see a
higher rate of transmission in private facilities.
MNT:
Have you encountered any issues in terms of accessing COVID-19 data broken down
by race or ethnicity in prisons?
Prof. John Eason: Jails would be a little different [but] with prisons,
yes, there’s difficulty. I actually have another project locally here in
Madison, Wisconsin, where in Dane County, the county sheriff has given me data
on the jail, and it’s looking at race. That’s because they’re actively trying
[to reduce their number of inmates; they’ve reduced the number of people
incarcerated in their facilities by over 40%.
Early on, they saw that this is a public health crisis and
they didn’t want that on their hands, so they’ve done a lot — they can do a lot
more, but they’ve done a lot to reduce the number of people in their
jail.
But overall prisons? No, this data [for prisons] is very
difficult to get and quite separately, if you go to immigrant detention
facilities, it’s impossible to get good data on that. We have multiple penal
regimes in the U.S., [there are] multiple ways that we incarcerate people.
[I] have another research project where I’m looking at
[immigrant detention] and […] we lack data. We’re going to see a lot of death
coming out of immigrant detentions because of [this lack of data].
“We’re
scraping data from the web from the Federal Bureau of Prisons daily, but we
can’t get race data in that right now. [W]e have COVID cases by facility, but
we can’t get a racial breakdown.”
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