Drug-related mortality rates have increased in prisons and jails even as the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses has dropped. The pandemic lockdowns on visitors didn’t eliminate the problem, showcasing that guards have been a source of the contraband.
A backlog at Montana’s psychiatric hospital for those facing criminal charges has left people with serious mental illness behind bars for months without adequate treatment. In some cases, judges have freed defendants over due-process violations.
Montana has yet to start spending nearly $2.5 million in federal aid to boost covid detection and mitigation in the state’s prison and jails.
Covid is running rampant through the Alderson women’s prison in West Virginia, in one of the deadliest outbreaks this year at a federal correctional facility. This comes as Bureau of Prisons officials take heat for how the agency has handled the pandemic.
An estimated 300,000 people were held in solitary confinement in U.S. jails and prisons at the height of the pandemic. An international movement is pushing to limit the form of incarceration due to its damaging physical and psychological effects.
As covid case numbers rise nationwide, Georgia and some other states have restricted the case count data they share publicly.
Hesitancy about the vaccines among prison staffers has led to a striking disparity: Inmates are better protected than corrections officials.
In the Los Angeles County Jail system, many inmates hope being vaccinated will get them transferred more quickly to state prison. Some just want to protect themselves against covid, while others are distrustful and refuse vaccination.
Many inmates at Western Missouri Correctional Center, like their peers in prisons across Missouri and the nation, are hesitant about getting vaccinated against covid-19 because they don’t trust prison health care.
One California county is home to the two worst clusters of covid in prisons in the country. Ninety-four percent of Avenal State Prison’s inmates contracted the virus. Physical distancing has proved impossible in a facility housing 50% more people than it should.
