COVID-19 EXPOSES A BROKEN PRISON SYSTEM

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed innumerable flaws in US society, including a failure to ensure equitable community health, systemic racism, and a broken system of punishment and incarceration. Given the demonstrated risk of COVID-19 transmission in prisons and jails, any actions short of substantial decarceration represent a "deliberate indifference"-that is, knowing that incarcerated people face a substantial risk of serious harm and failing to take measures to abate it, which the US Supreme Court has found violates the Eighth Amendment. Alexandria Macmadu is a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health.