INTRODUCING OUR NEWSLETTER

You have received the inaugural edition of our newsletter because you have previously expressed interest in our work. Each month, we'll share our latest blog posts, reports, data visualizations, and other findings.

Since the start of the pandemic, the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project has been collecting and reporting facility-level COVID-19 data from prisons, jails, and other detention facilities across the country. We've also been tracking
pandemic-related prison and jail releases, legal filings and court orders, and grassroots and community organizing efforts.

What began as an effort, led by UCLA School of Law faculty Sharon Dolovich and Aaron Littman and a few volunteers, to track early releases and case counts has grown into an organization of 12 staff and more than 100 volunteer researchers that continues to serve as a leading source of data for the public on COVID-19 in prisons and jails.

In December, we launched our new website to make this data more accessible to a broader audience. We now regularly share time-series visualizations of our data on Instagram and Twitter to highlight important trends, such as recent facility-level outbreaks. Last month, we added a blog to our site where we provide key context and updates about the state of the pandemic behind bars.

As we approach the one-year mark of the pandemic first entering the United States and its carceral systems, the situation remains dire. Death and infection rates are high, vaccinations have been delayed in many jurisdictions, and legal systems have routinely failed to respond to this crisis within a crisis.

We’ve launched this newsletter to make our data and analyses more accessible and directly available to you. We encourage you to reach out with questions, comments, and to share widely.

LATEST FROM THE BLOG

PRISONS MISTREAT LOVED ONES’ BELONGINGS AFTER THEIR DEATHS, SOME FAMILIES SAY

Families report that correctional staff have mishandled or neglected their relatives’ personal effects after their deaths, adding pain to already tragic circumstances. During the pandemic, more and more families have become familiar with the especially devastating consequences of losing a loved one behind bars, whether of COVID-19 or of other causes.

NEW ANALYSIS REVEALS DEVASTATING TOLL OF COVID-19 ON PRISON EMPLOYEES

Last week, an article published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has found that staff of U.S. prisons are three times as likely to contract COVID-19 as the general U.S. population. The study’s authors, including our director Professor Sharon Dolovich, cross-referenced data collected by the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project with publicly available personnel data from state and federal departments of corrections to measure the scale of what they called an “unprecedented occupational hazard” for employees of American prisons.

As COVID-19 vaccines are becoming available to more and more people across the United States, one especially vulnerable population is often left behind: people who are incarcerated.

VACCINE GUIDE IN PRISON LEGAL NEWS

In February, the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project published an article in Prison Legal News addressing common concerns about the coronavirus vaccines among incarcerated people deciding whether to be vaccinated.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project has been collecting COVID-19 data from the online dashboards maintained by correctional agencies nationwide. These agencies vary in what and how much data they publicly report. We created visualizations to highlight the gaps in reporting by state and federal correctional agencies as of mid-February 2021.

RECENT TRENDS IN COVID-19 DATA

As of March 3, 2021, 44% of people incarcerated in California prisons have received at least a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. While this is a good start — and is higher than in most states — there's still a long way to go.

Since the UK coronavirus variant was identified in Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility in Michigan — the first case in a U.S. prison — the facility has seen a dramatic spike in COVID cases. As of mid-February, at least 332 people inside were infected with COVID-19.

It's difficult to "flatten the curve" inside a prison, where social distancing is impossible. Kings County, CA has kept infection rates < 5% all winter, according to New York Times estimates. But in mid-December, more than 20% of people incarcerated at the local CA Substance Abuse Treatment Facility had COVID-19.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

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.

VACCINE DATA NOW AVAILABLE ON OUR HOMEPAGE

We recently added a table to our homepage that reflects data publicly reported by correctional agencies about the administration of COVID-19 vaccines to incarcerated people and staff in their facilities. As of this week, 10 state and federal agencies are reporting. We will add jurisdictions to this table as more data become available.

Copyright © 2021 UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project, All rights reserved.

Contact us at:
COVIDBehindBars@law.ucla.edu

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