The UCLA project tracks jails too — though only a few jail systems are making coronavirus data readily available to the public, mostly in larger cities where scrutiny is highest. Those jails have been devastated by the virus. At Rikers Island, in New York City, where three inmates and nine corrections staff have died, the reported infection rate is almost 10 percent. At Cook County jail in Chicago, where six inmates and two staff have died, almost 900 inmates and staff have tested positive.

In prison, age is a significant risk factor for tens of thousands of people: There are nearly 200,000 incarcerated people over the age of 55, a number that has spiked by nearly 300 percent over the last 20 years. That’s indicative not just of how many people the U.S. incarcerates, but also for how long. About 40 percent of people in prison have at least one chronic health condition such as asthma or diabetes, which makes those individuals particularly susceptible to serious illness with Covid-19.

But if people in prison tend to be older and sicker, people in jail move in and out at much higher rates, making those incarcerated in jails especially vulnerable to catching the virus and more likely to spread it. There were 10.7 million jail admissions in 2018 alone — and each admission puts police officers, guards, and other staff, in addition to the incarcerated, at risk of exposure. “Social distancing is even worse in jails, because jails are meant to be temporary holding facilities,” Ofer said. “People tend to live in dormitory-style rooms with bunk beds 2 feet apart, if that. There’s absolutely no social distancing in jail, it’s kind of a one-two punch.”

The situation at Rikers and Cook County offers a bleak foreshadowing of mass deaths to come across the jail system, particularly in rural areas where health care access is already a chronic issue and jails often fill in for a lack of services. A report released in April by Data for Progress warned that rural communities are particularly vulnerable in a pandemic. In those communities, jails are often filled with people who have substance abuse problems or are too poor to post bail. Worse, the report warns, rural jails “are frequently located in counties that lack hospital capacity to handle the coronavirus pandemic.” In Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia, for instance, more than one-third of people held in jails are in counties with no ICU beds.

“We know rural America is at least a couple of weeks behind the curve,” said Rahman. “But when it comes, it’s going to be devastating. … It will be worse than Rikers.”

Death by Incarceration

The solution, health experts and prisoners’ rights advocates have been saying all along, is simple: Prisons and jails should release far more people as quickly as possible. “Mass incarceration was a public health crisis before Covid-19, but the pandemic pushed it past the breaking point,” said Ofer. “We need governors and prosecutors and judges, and we need the president of the United States, to act immediately and dramatically to reduce jail and prison populations to stop the spread of Covid-19, not only in jails and prisons, but in the broader community.”

But as calls for people to be released have echoed across the country, and some states, like Vermont, have taken decisive action, many law enforcement officials have resisted what they called the “mass release” of incarcerated people. In general, jails have reduced their population at a much higher rate, about 25 percent, according to a new analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative. But prisons, the same analysis found, “have released almost no one.” Some officials have suggested that those incarcerated for “violent” crimes are unworthy of release — a distinction that has long crippled efforts at substantial criminal justice reform, even before the current crisis. “If we don’t tackle the question of people serving time on violent convictions, we can’t meaningfully stop the spread of Covid-19,” said Rahman. “That’s just not going to make a meaningful dent.”