"Horrible Here": How Systemic Failures of Transparency Have Hidden the Impacts of COVID-19 on Incarcerated Women
Over the last 40 years, the number of women incarcerated in the United States has skyrocketed from roughly 26,000 in 1980 to more than 230,000 in 2019. Just four percent of the world’s women live in the U.S., but more than thirty percent of all incarcerated women are held in this country.
In this report, we highlight trends from inside women’s prisons during the pandemic and draw attention to the lack of transparency from carceral agencies regarding COVID-19 in their women’s facilities. By sharing personal accounts drawn from the first-person oral history archive created by UCI PrisonPandemic, we also seek to elevate the voices and experiences of some of the women behind the data we present.
COVID-19 vaccination data in California jails: lessons from an imperfect model
In June 2020, California became one of three states where a state agency, the California Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC), has taken responsibility for collecting, aggregating, and reporting jail data. However, the Covid In-Custody Project, an initiative launched in March 2020 to collect COVID-19 data from California jails, has identified a number of issues with the BSCC’s data reporting practices that have prevented the agency from effectively fulfilling its intended oversight mission.
This report focuses on some of the Covid In-Custody Project’s primary concerns related to the vaccination data it has collected directly from county jail systems. Aparna Komarla, the project’s founder and director, draws attention to key issues that the BSCC and other data oversight bodies should address related to jail data collection and reporting.
Op-Ed: Newsom is afraid of a winter COVID surge? Then do something about prison crowding. (San Francisco Chronicle)
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Project Director Sharon Dolovich, Research and Policy Fellow Amanda Klonsky, and Data Scientist Hope Johnson warn about the possibility of COVID-19 case surges in California prisons and jails this winter and highlight the importance of a critical public health measure: depopulation.
"Refusing to reduce the number of people in jails and prisons during a pandemic can have deadly consequences both inside carceral facilities and in the surrounding communities," they write. "The need for bold measures to halt the transmission of the coronavirus in California's jails and prisons -- including mass vaccination efforts and dramatically reducing the number of people who are detained -- has never been more urgent."
RECENT TRENDS IN COVID-19 DATA
COVID-19 is still a threat to incarcerated people across the country. As winter comes, decarceration is as necessary as ever. In California jails, cases numbers have been rising since October.
As winter comes, COVID-19 is surging in Chicago jails. The number of people inside who have been infected has increased more than sixfold in November.
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You Can Analyze Our Raw Data
Do you want to download our raw data to perform your own analyses? On GitHub, you can access our raw data as well as our R package "behindbarstools," which includes a variety of functions to help pull, clean, wrangle, and visualize our data.
