Mass Incarceration During the Pandemic for The New Yorker

“In late March, Governor John Bel Edwards announced that Louisiana had the fastest-growing coronavirus infection rate in the world. According to state reports at the end of last year, Louisiana also had the highest incarceration rate in the country. The pandemic posed an immediate threat in the state’s jails, where cells are crowded and poorly sanitized, and people frequently cycle in and out of custody. Since 2013, the main jail in Orleans Parish has been under a consent decree for what the Department of Justice called “dangerous and unacceptable” conditions, including “inadequate medical care.” Prisons, too, present a contagion risk; they have less rapid turnover than jails, but staff come and go, and large populations and underfunded health services make outbreaks hard to contain.”

Community groups have pointed out the social costs of the prison system for decades. Now the pandemic has exposed its public-health risks.

The New Yorker: Will the Coronavirus Make Us Rethink Mass Incarceration?

"‘Something Is Going to Explode’: When Coronavirus Strikes a Prison" for The New York Times Magazine

In Oakdale, Louisiana, the Federal Correctional Complex houses some 2,000 inmates and employs close to 500 staff members in two low-security prisons. The last time I worked there was during the government shutdown last year, when many of the prison staff saw their paychecks vanish overnight — it’s the unfortunate lifeblood for a town of fewer than 8,000 people. Now, the prisons at Oakdale are experiencing an alarming coronavirus outbreak.

"By the third week of April, seven Oakdale inmates had died. At least 100 inmates and staff members had been infected, with more than 20 hospitalized, as confusion, fear and anger gripped the interconnected community of inmates, officials, workers, family members and loved ones."

I photographed a few of the people - the mayor, the union president, and a prison employee - that writer Janet Reitman interviewed for a terrifying oral history of the first fatal outbreak of COVID-19 in the federal prison system, which published in The New York Times Magazine last week.

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‘Something Is Going to Explode’: When Coronavirus Strikes a Prison

An oral history of the first fatal outbreak in the federal prison system, in Oakdale, La.