A pandemic in prisons

Scott, Jason Bartholomew

doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12857

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 5 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…Interestingly, at a time when COVID-19 restrictions and changes to regular routines and activities have increased tensions in prisons worldwide (see e.g., Perkel, 2020;Scott, 2020), conflicts appear to be decreasing in BC Corrections' custody centers where inmate-on-inmate and inmate-on-staff assaults and use of force incidents have decreased from pre-COVID numbers (BC Corrections, 2020a). Senior management attribute reductions in assaults and use of force incidents to their decreased use of double-bunking and having fewer people on each living unit, changes made possible by reduced population counts (BC Corrections, 2020a).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

British Columbia Provincial Corrections’ Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Correctional Policy and Practice

Murdoch

2020

Victims & Offenders

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Health and justice officials across North America have described correctional institutions as petri dishes for the transmission of COVID-19. Individuals in custody commonly have health profiles that are more compromised than those of the general population. Institutional infrastructure issues and custody counts that create barriers to protocols, including physical distancing measures, that health authorities recommend to limit the spread of the virus compound these profiles. Many correctional authorities have struggled to implement strategies to mitigate infection rates among custodial populations. This paper examines the strategies employed by one provincial correctional authority in Canada that has to date successfully prevented the spread of COVID-19 in custody centers by adopting a health-informed approach to the crisis rather than a traditional justice-informed response. The findings highlight practices that can inform the responses of other jurisdictions as the pandemic continues and identify areas of future research on the effects of COVID-19 on incarcerated persons, correctional and health-care staff, and communities.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

British Columbia Provincial Corrections’ Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Correctional Policy and Practice

Murdoch

2020

Victims & Offenders

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“…Prisons were swiftly positioned alongside “cruise ships, care‐homes and refugee camps” as “‘petri‐dish’ spaces” (Sparke & Anguelov, 2020 , p. 499) for COVID‐19 contagion, even “hotbeds of death and disease” (Rose‐Redwood et al, 2020 , p. 98). Unsurprisingly, their perceived dangerousness on this count led to prisons in some world regions being near‐physically “abandoned” by the authorities, prompting prison riots (Scott, 2020 ; see also Raghavan, 2020 ), but also fuelled a more diffuse sense of their being abandoned globally as spaces where occupants' health matters all that much.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID‐19 in British prisons

Schliehe

Philo

Carlin

et al. 2022

Trans Inst British Geog

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The relationship between pandemic, or chronic infectious diseases, and the carceral, meaning set‐apart spaces of enforced confinement for “wrong‐doers,” has a long, tangled history. It features in Foucault's inquiries into disciplinary power and its associated spatial formations, not least in the shape of the modern prison. Drawing lightly from Foucault's claims about disciplinary and biopolitical power, as well as on his anti‐prison activism, this paper explores three possibilities for penal transformation arising during the early months of COVID‐19 in UK prisons (circa March to August 2020). Consulting primary source material, these possibilities are respectively identified as “retrenching,” “reworking” or “reducing” the carceral. A chief finding is that under the press of pandemic “emergency,” the tilt of emphasis has been towards a retrenched or reworked “carceral state,” disappointing any promise of abolition, let alone more humble reduction in carceral conditions. The “biological sub‐citizens” of prisons are hence being left especially vulnerable to the press of pandemic, in part precisely because of how carceral spatialities are being intensified.

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