America's mass incarceration blind spot is a public health disaster waiting to happen
There’s a handful of journalists, activists, academics, formerly incarcerated people, recovering prosecutors and reformist judges, who are obsessed with police and prisons. I call us “the criminal justice lunatics.”
Other politically engaged lefty people care about mass incarceration and police abuse. But they tend to scoff at defund, are loyal to Democrats despite Democrats’ atrocious record on criminal justice, and would rather click on a story about, well, anything than a depressing article about prison overcrowding and abuse (“I don’t want to know even more about prison!” my mother wailed once when I demanded to know if she’d read my latest story.)
I suspect it’s “just-world” fallacy. It’s the idea that if something horrible happens to someone, on some level they must have done something to deserve it. This is especially pronounced with incarceration. We’re a democracy—we can’t just take away a citizen’s freedom for no good reason like those barbarians in China or Iran. In fact, some US states imprison more people than the rest of the world combined.
But there’s a simple, terrifying truth, that you should care about even if you think all those lawbreakers deserve to rot in prison: crowded prisons are petrie dishes for disease and a very efficient way to spread viruses to the community.
I bring this up now because the New York Times has a sweeping investigation up about how we ended up topping more than a million Covid deaths: How America Lost One Million People.” American exceptionalism, amirite? But the word “prison” appears just once, combined with colleges and nursing homes. The word “jail” doesn’t appear at all.
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