Mapping Medical Neglect

As people on the “outside” gain increasing access to testing centers, testing for COVID-19 inside jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers has fallen behind.  As of June 2020, Los Angeles County Jails remain one of the only correction facilities in the United States to carry out system-wide testing. While people are incarcerated in jails temporarily, prisons hold people convicted of both shorter sentences and life without parole sentences. Advocates often encourage the release of “nonviolent offenders”, leaving out much of the prison population and unwittingly legitimating the logic of criminalization

Many facilities are avoiding conducting testing at all or only providing tests for individuals showing symptoms of the virus. This regime is dangerous, considering the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department discovered that more than half of the positive cases they identified are asymptomatic. While only 4% of people incarcerated in the largest jails in California have been tested, nearly one third of the 1,600 tests administered in jails located within the most impacted California counties came back positive. This small sample of California’s incarcerated population reveals the extent of the virus’ spread. In most cases where COVID-19 testing has been conducted, there appears to be no structure in how frequently this new data gets reported. These abysmal efforts to track the spread of the virus endanger healthy people behind bars. 

The Prison and Law Policy Program with the UCLA School of Law is collecting data that tracks the real-time number of confirmed cases and deaths among incarcerated people and prison employees across the United States. An expert team of data scientists, led by Dr. Sharon Dolovich, is capturing the most up to date information on federal and state prisons, including releases, reduction requests, legal filings and court orders, condition policies, mutual aid efforts, and organizing efforts. The COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project also collects reliable data that was used for geospatial analysis to track the growth in confirmed cases and deaths among prisoners and employees in prisons across the state of California.  Every 24 hours the data is refreshed to reflect the current status of each facility, so a map of confirmed cases can be generated to reflect an accurate representation of the spread of the virus throughout facilities in California. The data points on the map grow larger as more confirmed cases are discovered, with red shading to identify any facilities where confirmed cases have resulted in deaths.