Prisons and custodial settings are part of a comprehensive response to COVID-19

by Stuart A Kinner, Jesse T Young, Kathryn Snow, Louise Southalan, Daniel Lopez-Acuña, Carina Ferreira-Borges and Éamonn O’Moore

The Lancet |  VOLUME 5, ISSUE 4, PE188-E189, APRIL 01, 2020

Prisons are epicentres for infectious diseases because of the higher background prevalence of infection, the higher levels of risk factors for infection, the unavoidable close contact in often overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and unsanitary facilities, and the poor access to health-care services relative to that in community settings.

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Infections can be transmitted between prisoners, staff and visitors, between prisons through transfers and staff cross-deployment, and to and from the community. As such, prisons and other custodial settings are an integral part of the public health response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

One of the first documented influenza outbreaks in prison occurred in San Quentin prison in California, USA, during the 1918 influenza pandemic. In three separate instances, infection was introduced by a newly received prisoner, and a single transfer to another prison resulted in an outbreak there. Isolation was central to containment.

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More recently, prison influenza outbreaks have been described in the USA, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, and Thailand.

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We are unaware of any published reports of influenza outbreaks in youth detention or immigration detention centres, although modelling suggests that outbreaks would progress similarly in these settings.

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Since early 2020, COVID-19 outbreaks have been documented worldwide, including Iran, where 70 000 prisoners have been released in an effort to reduce in-custody transmission.

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A Week in the Northeast

by David Rovics

Dissident Voice | September 29, 2019

“Are you going to write something about this?  If you do, I’ll share it.”

This wasn’t exactly a writing assignment, from one of the co-founders of the venerable anarchist newspaper from Detroit, Fifth Estate, but close enough to prompt a travelogue that I’d likely have written anyway…

The American Gulag

by John W. Whitehead

Dissident Voice | August 29, 2019

The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can ‘pay their debt to society,’ make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with their ideas or their criminal acts, is a practice as old as civilization itself. The rulers of ancient Rome and Greece sent their dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port on the Black Sea.”

— Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 2003

This is how freedom dies.

This is how you condition a populace to life as prisoners in a police state: by brainwashing them into believing they are free so that they will march in lockstep with the state and be incapable of recognizing the prison walls that surround them.

UK: Prison officers declare ‘major victory’ after government announces Birmingham prison will return to public ownership

by Marcus Barnett

Morning Star | April 02, 2019

PRISON officers declared a “major” victory today after the government announced that Birmingham prison will be returned to public ownership permanently.

Prisons Minister Rory Stewart has said that the West Midlands jail will be returned to state control after security giant G4S was given a 15-year contract in 2011.

Major banks are still funding the private prison industry

Daily Kos

Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase are still funding GEO Group and CoreCivic, the biggest operators of private prisons and immigrant detention centers in the United States.

Their funding makes possible GEO Group and CoreCivic’s day-to-day operations and those of facilities that detain and abuse separated families.¹

Women in Resistance, Women in Prison: A Public Hearing in Delhi

by Avantika Tewari

groundxero | January 25, 2019

The All India Union of Forest Working People and Delhi Solidarity Group organized a public hearing at the Constitution Club of India to talk about the increasing incarceration of women, the prison conditions, and the targeting of women from specific communities. Women spoke of their experiences in prisons across the country, from Tamil Nadu to Chattisgarh to Kashmir. Avantika Tewari reports on what was discussed, and the importance of the call for prison abolition.

With a steady rise in the incarceration rate of women over the last fifteen years, and with only 18 jails out of the 1401 in the country reserved for women, it seems rather obvious to ask – how do these 18 jails hold 2985 female prisoners? Most of the women inmates are housed in women’s enclosures of general prisons designed in colonial times to keep ‘delinquent’ men and freedom fighters. According to the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) Report 2015, globally,  the number of women and girls in prison have increased by 50 percent in the past 15 years. India, too, has seen an increase in the number of women prisoners. In 2001, 11094 women inmates formed 3.5 percent of the prison population. 15 years later, Indian prisons house 17834 women inmates — an increase of 61 percent — with their share in prison population having gone up to 4.3 percent.

Violent disorder: state of emergency in Britain’s jails

by Charley Allan

Morning Star | October 07, 2018

WE ALL know our prisons are in a state of emergency — with horrifying stories of hospitalised officers, soaring suicide rates and synthetic-drug-fuelled riots reported almost every week.

Attacks on staff and prisoners have skyrocketed since the coalition government sacked 7,000 prison officers under the direction of serial wrecker Chris Grayling, while the Tories’ recent desperate recruitment drive has proved to be too little, too late.

Five Hundred Faces of Mass Incarceration

by Maurice Chammah

Before he went to prison, Mark Loughney used watercolors and acrylics to create bright, playful portraits of his favorite musicians. His early work features Trey Anastasio and Grace Potter and Snoop Dogg, all smiling and content, deep into their guitars and joints. But then Loughney committed a crime that even now, years later, he can barely explain.

U.S: Books Are Everything – Which Must Be Why New York Prisons Want To Ban Most of ‘Em Except Bibles and Coloring Books

by Abby Zimet, staff writer

Common Dreams | January 10, 2018

New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in its enlightened wisdom has launched a pilot program drastically limiting books, fresh produce and other inmate care packages to six approved vendors selected by the department and listed on its website. Two of the vendors are mail-order companies selling sneakers and electronics, and two more will be added soon. As of December, Directive 4911A is in effect at Greene, Green Haven, and Taconic correctional facilities. If the new rule is deemed a success, the restrictions will be extended to all New York prisons. When DOCCS announced the initiative last March, it said its goal was to “maintain an efficient operation” and “enhance the safety and security” of prisons – aka to stop drugs, cell phones and other contraband from being smuggled in, presumably via novels and oranges. Members of PEN and prisoner advocate groups like Critical Resistance say the rule “appears to have no reasonable basis.”

The Great October Revolution: Prison And Punishment

by Farooque Chowdhury

Countercurrents.org | November 28, 2017

Russia’s tsar regent Boris Godunov exiled, as punishment, a 300-kilogram copper bell to the Siberian town of Tobolsk, in the east, from Uglich in 1591. The exiled bell had to cover a distance of 2,200 kilometers. The bell’s crime: to the tsar regent, the bell appeared as a symbol of political unity of the rebel residents of Uglich. The bell, before its journey to exile, was punished with 12 lashes, and its “tongue” was also tore down. The insurgent Uglich people were ordered to pull the bell across the Ural Mountains to Tobolsk. The military governor of Tobolsk registered the bell as “the first inanimate exile”. The Uglich Bell, by the mid-nineteenth century, emerged as the sovereign’s symbol of supreme authority and vindictive power. Lede of Daniel Beer’s The House of the Dead, Siberian Exile under the Tsars (Allen Lane, London, 2016) describes the incident cited here.