Two years into the pandemic, prisons are still using torturous conditions over depopulating prisons to stop the spread.
of incarcerated people tracked by the COVID Prison Project. Most recently, the highly contagious Omicron variant has shown what happens when prisons and jails remain crowded. Diseases like COVID-19 spread like wildfire, and incarcerated people pay the price not only through high rates of infection and illness, but also through extreme, seemingly never-ending lockdowns.When the pandemic first hit D.C.
During lockdowns, Rowe said, people have restricted access to group therapy sessions, educational course resources and even legal case managers. Lack of legal access is particularly concerning in jails, where the majority of people are legally innocent and rely on fair access to legal support to prepare for their upcoming court dates and trials. “People are just sitting there, at the risk of catching COVID,” Rowe said.
Intense restriction of resources also makes medical care even worse than usual. “Because there wasn’t a lot of transport of [prisoners] — even to another part of the jail — a lot of people weren’t being seen medically,” Rowe said. “If a person had gout in their foot and their foot looks like 100 pounds the next day, they won’t do anything because they’re like, ‘Oh no, you’re still in quarantine. You got to wait.’ And they kept extending the quarantine. It was frustrating.
Ultimately, said Rowe, the conditions leave people with no choice but to go to extremes to get staff attention. “The only time it seems like we get a response in the jail is if we act out,” he said. “Or if we riot, or if we bang on the door, or go to these extreme measures that are looked at as behavioral things.”
In 2021, a new group of people was booked into the D.C. Jail — those accused of storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. When their defense attorneys and supporters raised the alarm about conditions of confinement, the jail came under
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