Abstract
Numerous Michigan prisons emerged as national hotspots early in the coronavirus crisis. Once the virus entered the prisons, key actions and inaction by Michigan Department of Corrections and Governor Gretchen Whitmer allowed COVID-19 to flourish unabated, resulting in unnecessary infection and death; a form of cruel and unusual punishment. The callous neglect of the human rights of prisoners during the pandemic is not new, but rather the result of decades of punitive sentencing policies that disproportionately target people of colour. Through a case study examination of early coronavirus outbreaks in Michigan prisons, this paper will consider how Truth in Sentencing legislation, increasingly long prison sentences and declining parole rates, helped set the stage for coronavirus to spread, disproportionately harming Black and elderly prisoners. As the intersecting crises of coronavirus and mass incarceration exemplify, state crime scholars can no longer ignore the state-organized race crime occurring behind prison walls.
Highlights
Numerous Michigan prisons emerged as national hotspots early in the coronavirus crisis
Overcrowded conditions of confinement that are commonplace across U.S prisons and jails make it impossible to abide by the social distancing guidelines of six feet prescribed by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Human rights and criminal justice reform organizations have advocated for decarceration as an essential means of preventing the spread of coronavirus behind bars
Summary
The United States incarcerates more people in prisons, jails and detention centers than any other country in the world. Further contributing the problem of racial disparities in mass imprisonment, a record number of people in the United States are serving life sentences (with and without parole) and “virtual life” sentences (more than 50 years), representing 13.9 percent of the total U.S prison population. The average annual health care costs for prisoners in Michigan has been estimated at $5,801, with the costs for those who are younger (age 34 or under) being $4,200 or less and the costs for older prisoners (age 55 or older) ranging from $11,000 to $40,000 (Angelotti and Wycoff 2010: 15) Regardless of their physical or mental state, MDOC has no authority to release vulnerable and medically frail prisoners since Michigan’s TIS law requires prisoners to serve 100 percent of their minimum sentence before they can be released. Located in the south-east quadrant of the state, infections in these facilities comprised 99 percent of all positive MDOC cases, and each reported at least one of 68 prisoner deaths from COVID-19 (see Table 1)
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