Criminal Justice

Prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities are very dangerous places to be during a pandemic because they are essentially "petri dishes" for the spread of disease. Moreover, corrections facilities house people who are especially medically vulnerable to poor outcomes if they get infected with the coronavirus. As COVID-19 ravages prisons and jails across America, it is critically important to have a clear picture of what is happening inside these closed institutions. Data is key to transparency, since it is the only way to understand the full toll of the pandemic in correctional facilities and the risks faced by people who live and work in these settings, as well as risks to people in nearby communities. Effective oversight — by legislators, regulators, monitors, and others — requires access to meaningful and accurate data. Moreover, detailed and current data is essential to enable appropriate policy responses.

In this report, we identify the critical COVID-related metrics that corrections agencies should be tracking and reporting. We developed a grading rubric based on those metrics that we used to document and rate how well prisons, jails, and juvenile agencies are tracking and sharing data on COVID inside their facilities. Based on our fndings, we recommend ways in which prisons, jails, juvenile agencies, and state and local leaders should improve the reporting of data to meet the needs of this unprecedented time.

Our research fnds a troubling lack of transparency about the spread, toll, and management of COVID in state prisons, local jails, and state-run juvenile facilities. While some agencies, primarily state prison agencies, are publishing the most essential information about the number of COVID cases, deaths, and tests for people who live and work in these facilities, a great many others — especially jails and juvenile agencies — are not providing even this basic data. And few agencies provide information about other key metrics, such as demographic breakdowns of the data by race, ethnicity, age, and sex; information about how the impact of the virus is changing over time; the status of vaccination efforts; the numbers of people hospitalized; the numbers of people on lockdown or in medically-restricted housing; and changing population numbers.

This data gap means that policymakers, stakeholders, and the public do not know whether people in custody or the staff that work in these facilities are safe during this public health crisis; they cannot assess the risks to surrounding communities; and they do not know if correctional management approaches and policy responses are effective or equitable.

Texas has had more COVID-19 infections and deaths among incarcerated people and staff than any other state in the country, according to a new report from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. The report, titled "COVID and Corrections: A Profile of COVID Deaths in Custody in Texas," indicates that at least 231 people have died from COVID-19 in Texas prisons and jails, including both incarcerated people and staff. Among noteworthy findings, the report also finds that people in Texas prisons are testing positive for COVID at a rate 490% higher than for the state of Texas as a whole. This report was produced as part of the COVID, Corrections, and Oversight Project at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, with support from Arnold Ventures. The COVID, Corrections, and Oversight Project is led by Michele Deitch, project director, and Alycia Welch, associate director.

Criminal justice reform has become a refuge for bipartisanship in an era of tense political rivalries. Despite widespread polarization on other issues, Democrats and Republicans tend to agree on one fundamental truth—high incarceration rates in the United States create unnecessary human and fiscal costs for all communities. As a result, criminal justice reform movements have developed at local, state, and federal levels of government. These efforts have largely focused on de-incarceration initiatives, such as changes to bail and sentencing policies, that aim to divert people away from the justice sys-tem and toward community services, treatment, and productive citizenship. Even as government leaders attempt to depopulate the nation's correctional facilities, however, 2.3 million people remain incarcerated, while many more cycle in and out of jails almost 11 million times each year.1 Moreover, as a nation, the United States claims the highest incarceration rate in the world, locking up its citizens at a rate of 698 per 100,000.2

These troubling figures raise several important questions that are often overlooked:

What do conditions of confinement in the United States actually look like, and how are people treated behind bars?

What is being done to ensure that these conditions and the treatment of prisoners are humane?

How can we make our prisons and jails more transparent?