Vaccination Plus Decarceration — Stopping Covid-19 in Jails and Prisons

COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacy of the public health infrastructure in the United States and forced us to confront associated biosocial dynamics that are driving the pandemic, including poverty, structural racism, distrust, unequal access to health care and other social sources. But perhaps no collective preexisting condition has been more acute and preventable than that associated with the U.S. system of mass incarceration. U.S. jails and prisons house nearly 25% of the world’s incarcerated population even though the United States accounts for only 4.2% of the global population.