Responding to COVID-19
Cases of coronavirus have quickly spread across police precincts, courts, jails, detention centers, prisons, and other places where the work of the criminal justice and immigration systems occur. Actors in these systems have a critical role to play. This is underscored by how vast the footprint of these systems is: almost 10.5 million arrests a year, 2.2 million people in jail and prison at any given time, 50,000 in immigration detention, and another 4.5 million under some form of criminal justice supervision (mostly probation or parole). Many people who have contact with the justice system are at high risk for contracting viruses and other infections, both because many of those who are incarcerated have serious chronic health issues and because the conditions in courts, police and immigration detention, and correction facilities create unique risks for disease transmission. As the number of people infected in the United States grows exponentially, administrators, staff, and government actors need to focus on prevention and containment in the criminal and immigration legal systems.
Spotlights
Featured
Coronavirus Guidance for the Criminal and Immigration Legal Systems
The coronavirus, or COVID-19, has been declared by the World Health Organization to be a global pandemic. As the number of people infected in the United States grows exponentially, we must focus on prevention and containment in the criminal and immigration legal systems. Vera and Community Oriented Correctional Health Services have created a series ...
COVID-19 and Criminal Justice: City and State Spotlights
Vera President and Director, Nicholas Turner, Covid-19 Statement
The COVID-19 crisis is bringing our world to a standstill. However, our nation's jails, prisons, and detention centers are continuing to operate without proper health precautions, leaving incarcerated people and corrections staff extremely vulnerable to the virus. Vera President and Director, Nicholas Turner, responds to the lack of immediate actio ...
Related Work
Vera Institute of Justice Public Comment at the Meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, December 1, 2020
Across America, there are 2.3 million people incarcerated today, and correctional facilities are consistently the site of some of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks. Correctional medical facilities are understaffed and under-resourced, resulting in incarcerated people either suffering without adequate care or occupying the limited beds and ventilators at ...
Recommendations to the Biden-Harris Coronavirus Task Force on Immediate Steps to Combat COVID-19 Behind Bars
Consistently among the biggest COVID-19 clusters in the United States, correctional facilities are seeing record high surges in coronavirus infections. The crowded and congregate nature of jails, prisons, and detention centers—where 2.3 million people are incarcerated and tens of thousands of staff work each day—pose a unique threat for the infecti ...
Leaders Must Act Now to Reduce COVID-19 Behind Bars
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, 63-year-old Ronnie Lauderdale was incarcerated at FMC Lexington in Kentucky, a federal facility that houses people requiring care for existing medical conditions. Many of these conditions—like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease—place residents at high risk of contracting COVID-19 and experiencing severe symptoms. ...
Blog Post
Insha Rahman
Elle Teshima
If Prison Walls Could Talk
Personal stories about COVID-19 and incarceration
Series: Covid-19
Policymakers Must Lift the Veil on COVID-19 in Jails and Prisons
We know the problem is bad, but we don’t know the details, particularly surrounding how COVID-19 in correctional facilities is impacting people of color. Currently, no central government reporting and collection agency, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tracks the data on COVID-19 in correctional facilities. Nonprofits a ...
Blog Post
Micah Haskell-Hoehl
Logan Schmidt
Election 2020
Justice Is on the Ballot
Series: Covid-19
A View from the Inside
What It’s Like to Be Incarcerated during COVID-19
Accessing medical attention or personnel is even more difficult than it was before the virus, and masks are provided for us to wear whenever we leave our cells as if they are a force field against COVID-19. Unfortunately, few staff consistently wear masks or gloves and can also be seen interacting in groups with little caution about possibly spread ...
Who's Got the Power
How to urgently decarcerate Louisiana in the era of COVID-19
As COVID-19 cases continue to rise, the novel coronavirus remains a threat to incarcerated people. In Louisiana, there are more than 30,000 people serving sentences in prisons and jails. Many people across the state urged the governor, the head of the Department of Corrections and Public Safety (DOC), and local lawmakers to act within their power t ...
The Scale of the COVID-19-Related Jail Population Decline
From mid-March to mid-April 2020—the first month of rapid spread of COVID-19 in the United States—there was an unprecedented reduction in the number of people held in local jails. Vera’s analysis of the most comprehensive jail data available shows that the number of people in jail in the United States fell by one quarter, mainly over the course of ...
Series: Covid-19
A New Vision for Justice in New Orleans
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, 25 percent of the people in jail have been safely released in Orleans Parish without an increase in crime. Before the coronavirus crisis, the criminal legal system assumed these people had to be locked up—despite being incarcerated on low bail amounts and nonviolent charges. But we’ve seen these assumptions—long c ...
Blog Post
William Snowden
Express Injustice
Expedited Immigration Hearings Pose Danger to Detained Children’s Right to a Fair Process
The Hidden Curve
Estimating the Spread of COVID-19 among People in ICE Detention