COVID-19 Jail/Prison Condition Policies

Initially, we thought it would be useful to create a place where people could share details as to what was happening in the facilities in their jurisdictions. This effort quickly proved futile, given the sheer number of carceral settings and the rapidity with which things were changing on the ground. We readily ceded the challenge of portraying the concrete reality of custody during COVID to the many heroic journalists and organizers who focused their efforts in this direction, and turned our attention to collecting and posting the available quantitative data on COVID testing, infections and deaths in prison, jails and detention centers around the country. The few entries this early dataset contains reveals a very small slice of the institutional realities for those trapped in carceral facilities in the first weeks of the pandemic. In addition, with the leadership of Grace DiLaura, UCLAW ’12, we ultimately captured and coded nearly 3,500 COVID policies issued by corrections agencies from April 2020-April 2021. That dataset, the Prison Policy Index, is available on our website.