Toward a critical race analysis of the COVID-19 crisis in US carceral institutions

Abstract

People in carceral institutions are at increased risk for COVID-19 infection. Applying critical race theory to the problem of COVID-19 provides tools to analyze the risk of infection and evaluate the public health response within the imprisoned, jailed, and detained population. On the surface, this is due to factors related to a lack of hygiene products, an inability to physically distance, a low quality and inaccessible health care, and poor health. However, at root, the increased risk for infection is directly linked to the legacy of slavery and colonization within the history of US prisons, jails, and detention centers. As a solution to the crisis of COVID-19 and prevention of future pandemics within prisons, jails and detention centers, a critical race orientation provides reason and direction for mass decarceration and racial justice.

Addressing mass incarceration amid a pandemic: Psychology informing decarceration as a racial justice and public health response.

“…According to The Sentencing Project (2013), 159,520 individuals received life sentences in 2012, compared to 34,000 in 1984. These tough-on-crime policies and truth-in-sentencing laws disproportionally affect racially minoritized groups, significantly contributing to mass incarceration and DMC in the prison system (Farr, 2022). Even though 65 is typically thought of as the threshold for old age among the general population, other factors, such as persistently inadequate healthcare among incarcerated populations, contribute to the earlier onset and quicker progression of many chronic conditions, thus making 50 a more accurate age marker (Sharupski et al, 2018) for the incarcerated population.…”

“…Prevention efforts can be made to keep individuals from entering the criminal legal system (Pettus-Davis & Epperson, 2015). Scholars, policymakers, and activists have been attempting reforms to the legal system over the last few decades to reduce the rate of incarceration (Farr, 2022). There is the potential to divert people from incarceration (Epperson et al, 2021).…”

Contesting neoliberalism: Mapping the terrain of social conflict

“…The prominence of Occupy Wall Street, and the Occupy movement more generally, clearly highlights the scale of opposition to what was considered to be a highly inequitable system of over-financialised capitalism. This was followed in later years with a prominent focus upon the racialised nature of the US model of capitalism, a development with obvious roots in its history of slavery, Jim Crow laws and the civil rights movement, but which in more recent times was associated with the experience of Black US citizens at the hands of the police, and (more indirectly) the way in which the pre-2008 financial and housing bubble had affected Black US citizens especially badly (Farr 2021; Narayan 2017). The combination of financialisation, a burst bubble economy and highly racialised patterns of inequality, each of which were (and continued to be) central to the US model of neoliberal capitalism, played a clear role in terms of the terrain of social conflict witnessed in that country during the period under investigation.…”