AS THE COVID-19 pandemic continues to devastate communities across this country, correctional facilities have become one of the most explosive epicenters of this public health crisis. Despite calls to rapidly depopulate jails and prisons, governors and correctional officials across the country are asserting that people behind bars and correctional staff could be kept “safe” inside,(...)
We recommend this article from CommonWealth Magazine. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, people suffered under Massachusetts’s practice of involuntarily committing substance abusers. Massachusetts is perhaps the only state that sends people, who are in need of treatment and have not broken the law, to jails and prisons.
Now, as the pandemic rages, these people face a drastically increased risk of illness. As the article describes, the “pandemic has made a civil commitment for substance use a potential death sentence.” Indeed, every incarcerated person faces a potential death sentence as they must live in epicenters for the virus in conditions that don’t allow for proper hygiene and social distancing.
