Associated Press: Georgia jail fails to let out inmates who are due for release and met bail, citing crashed database. “The jail in a suburban Atlanta county held inmates for days who were due for release because a state database had crashed, preventing jailers from being able to check whether a person was wanted in another jurisdiction.”
Johns Hopkins University: American Prison Writing Archive Moves To Johns Hopkins. “With the move, principal investigator Vesla Weaver, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of political science and sociology at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and Doran Larson, the archive’s founder and Edward North Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, plan for the new collective to aggregate 10,000 pieces of first-person witness, making it the largest digital archive of writings by incarcerated people in the world.”
Associated Press: Arkansas jail, doc: Ivermectin lawsuit should be dismissed. “Attorneys for an Arkansas jail and doctor being sued by inmates who say they were unknowingly given ivermectin to treat their COVID-19 say the lawsuit should be dismissed because the men are no longer being held in the county facility.”
San Diego Union-Tribune: Judge declines to order sheriff to improve COVID-19 protections in San Diego County jails. “Judge Joel R. Wohlfeil has upheld his tentative ruling from last week and rejected a plea to issue an injunction that would have forced the San Diego Sheriff’s Department to do more to protect people in county jail from COVID-19. A trio of civil rights law firms sought the order earlier this year, saying too many men and women in San Diego County jails were exposed to the virus due to lax protocols by sheriff’s deputies.”
Salt Lake Tribune: Utah prison, jail facilities report COVID-19 outbreaks. “As Utah continues to report record-high coronavirus case counts, cases also are spiking in the state’s prisons and jails. The Davis County Jail is experiencing a new outbreak after the facility had been COVID-free for nine months. As of last week, 24 individuals had tested positive, and a dozen other inmates were being monitored for exposure. On Monday, the number of confirmed cases had jumped to 35, according to a spokesperson.”
KSRO: Sonoma County Inmates On Lockdown Due To Covid. “Nearly 200 inmates at the Sonoma County jail are on lockdown. The inmates were placed on lockdown because of a coronavirus outbreak among staff and inmates according to officials yesterday. ”
New York Times: Virus cases spike in New York City jails, where less than half of detainees are vaccinated.. “According to a letter sent by the outgoing Correction Department commissioner, Vincent Schiraldi, the coronavirus positivity rate has jumped drastically in the last several days among incarcerated people, only 38 percent of whom are fully vaccinated. Among city residents, 71 percent are fully vaccinated.”
Politico: Biden starts clemency process for inmates released due to Covid conditions. “The Biden administration has begun asking former inmates confined at home because of the pandemic to formally submit commutation applications, criminal justice reform advocates and one inmate herself tell POLITICO.”
TVO: Writing in the margins: The story behind Kingston’s Prison for Women magazine. “When inmates at Kingston Penitentiary decided in 1950 to start the KP Telescope, their very own newspaper, they already had a printing press and resources to start producing it. But when inmates across the street at the Prison for Women created their own publication, called Tightwire, in 1970, it was a different story…. For the past 10 years, Melissa Munn, a professor at Okanagan College, in British Columbia, has been building a digital collection of penal-press issues at Penal Press — A History of Prison Within. It now features more than 1,500 PDF copies of issues from institutions across North America, including 31 issues of Tightwire.”
Health & Justice Journal: The Compendium of U.S. jails: creating and conducting research with the first comprehensive contact database of U.S. jails. “Millions of people pass through U.S. jails annually. Conducting research about these public institutions is critical to understanding on-the-ground policies and practices, especially health care services, affecting millions of people. However, there is no existing database of the number, location, or contact information of jails. We created the National Jails Compendium to address this gap. In this paper, we detail our comprehensive methodology for identifying jail locations and contact information. We then describe the first research project to use the Compendium, a survey assessing jails’ treatment practices for incarcerated pregnant people with opioid use disorder.”
NOLA: Louisiana doesn’t count people who die behind bars, so Loyola Law School will fill the void. “There’s been no shortage of needless deaths in New Orleans-area lock-ups, but until now there’s been no count. That will change thanks to an effort by Loyola University law school to create the database that Louisiana officials have not: a full list of everyone who dies in the state’s prisons, jails and detention centers. Professor Andrea Armstrong’s project aims to restore dignity to people who die behind bars while giving jailors in the world’s incarceration capital the tools to prevent more deaths.”
KTLA: New app to help California family, friends schedule video visits with inmates at 4 state prisons. “The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has announced a new tool to help friends and family visit inmates. The Visitation Scheduling Application app can be accessed on smartphones, tablets and computers and allows approved visitors to easily schedule their own video visits and receive instant confirmation. The CDCR said the app will first be used to schedule video visits at four state prisons: San Quentin State Prison, Valley State Prison, the California Institution for Men and the Central California Women’s Facility.”
New York Times: America Is Letting the Coronavirus Rage Through Prisons. “Like the nation overall, U.S. correctional facilities are experiencing record spikes in coronavirus infections this fall. During the week of Nov. 17, there were 13,657 new coronavirus infections reported across the state and federal prison systems, according to the Marshall Project, which has been tracking these numbers since March. The previous week saw 13,676 new cases. These are by far the highest weekly tolls reported since the pandemic began. With winter descending, the situation threatens to grow bleaker still.”
Phys .org: Study shows more centralized, uniform COVID-19 response needed in prisons and jails. “A more centralized, uniform response to combating the COVID-19 pandemic in American prisons and jails is required to curb the spread across an especially vulnerable incarcerated population, according to new Rutgers University–Camden research.”
Vox: 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime. “Over 230 people have died from Covid-19 in Texas’s correctional facilities — and in county jails, nearly 80 percent of them were in pretrial detention and hadn’t even been convicted of a crime, according to a new report. A team of researchers at the University of Austin at Texas reviewed data from the the Texas Justice Initiative which collects information from multiple sources including the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). They found that at least 231 people have died of Covid-19 in the state’s correctional facilities between March and October.”
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