US prisons are a disease's dream environment. During COVID-19, while many facilities struggled to control outbreaks, one Colorado woman offers a model for how to do better.
The threat that prisons present to public health has never been clearer than during the COVID-19 pandemic.In early 2020, Alexis Triplett watched
Even something as seemingly straightforward as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggestions for hand hygiene present challenges. Prisons often ban alcohol-based sanitizer because of the potential for abuse. Inmates sometimes must buy soap from a commissary. found that arrestees cycling in and out of Cook County Jail in Chicago were associated with 15.7 percent of coronavirus cases statewide. An April 2020 modeling, in collaboration with data experts from three universities, found that omitting jails from predictions could mean underestimating forecasted deaths by between 19 and 98 percent, depending on how well communities practice social distancing.
No one with any authority had ever wanted to know her that way. And so she summed up her childhood: She’d often lived with extended family, because her young mother had gotten hard into drugs. Triplett ran away twice, at 13 and 14, the latter time all the way to California. She also loved a job she had training dogs, something she hopes to do again someday in her own house. “A lot of them came from shelters,” she says, “so they were broken. We helped them to regain their confidence and to understand humans aren’t bad.”
Staff then grouped inmates into fixed cohorts—of eight women, in Triplett’s case—so that if one person became ill, they’d expose only each other. But to Triplett’s thinking, the system had a flaw: Those assigned to maintenance or kitchen crews mingled with people outside their cohorts. “They didn’t really keep people separated, but they wanted the illusion of separation,” she contends. Skinner says all work crews would have been canceled in the event of a positive case.
Federal and state prison populations dropped by 8 percent between March and June, from 1.3 million to 1.2 million, according to ananalysis. Some of that was because people like Triplett walked out the door. More significant was a relative pause on putting more people inside. According to analysis from the data firm Appriss, by the end of May, jail bookings were down by 45 percent.
Imagine, she says, a world in which we had information about how many inmates got the flu, or had chronic diseases, and how they were being tested and treated. “That creates this overlay of accountability,” Brinkley-Rubinstein says, so that advocates, loved ones, and surrounding towns know whether incarcerated people—who can’t really advocate for themselves—are receiving adequate care and protection. And so that prisons don’t contribute to illness within the community.
On a shockingly hot day, the warmth radiating from a Denver strip mall’s asphalt, Triplett walks from her halfway house to meet me at Chili’s, texting that she’ll be the one wearing black leggings and a brown shirt. She’s excited about her food possibilities now; in prison, she’d sign up for different diets—kosher, vegetarian—just for the variety. She orders fajitas and smiles, her long dark hair framing her face, unmasked but appropriately distanced.
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