As southern Illinois faces a surge in COVID-19 cases and a severe shortage of ICU beds, jails and prisons — which have fueled the pandemic across Illinois — have reported alarming new outbreaks in these parts of the state.
On Aug. 27, Robinson Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison in southeastern Illinois, reported an outbreak with 52 active infections among incarcerated people. This comes after the facility hadn’t reported a single new case since the first week of February. Other prisons across southern Illinois — including in Shawnee, Vandalia, and Vienna — have also recently reported new outbreaks among incarcerated people and staff.
For 18 months, the crowded and inhumane conditions inside jails and prisons have created taxpayer-funded disease incubators that intensify the spread of COVID-19. In a reality that our policymakers have widely ignored, outbreaks inside these facilities do not stay within prison walls.
Although health experts have agreed that reducing the number of people in jails and prisons is the most effective strategy to control viral outbreaks, their advice has been almost universally swept under the rug by prison officials and our elected representatives.
To manage the latest surge in Illinois, officials must follow the advice of public health experts by taking immediate steps to release people whose continued incarceration in Illinois protects no one and harms everyone.
Jails and prisons in Illinois are overcrowded, unsanitary and poorly ventilated, with people double-bunked in 6-by-6–foot cells, or in large bunk rooms where hundreds of people may share a bathroom. In these crowded conditions, social distancing is impossible. While the majority of incarcerated people in Illinois are fully vaccinated, most prison workers are not — fewer than half of people working in Illinois prisons have reportedly been vaccinated. These workers carry the virus into prisons, where it quickly spreads, and back home to their families and communities.
Many individuals who are particularly vulnerable to severe illness from COVID-19 could be safely released. Although a recent lawsuit settlement has finally forced the Illinois Department of Corrections to identify medically vulnerable people eligible for release, decarceration efforts throughout the pandemic in Illinois have been far too small and have repeatedly come too late.
To date, at least 11,150 people in Illinois prisons have been infected with COVID-19 — nearly three times the rate of the state overall — and 88 people have died after testing positive.
In addition to Illinois prisons, the situation inside the state’s jails — where the majority of people held are awaiting trial — also poses a threat. On Sept. 4, there were 60 active cases among people detained in the Cook County Jail system. Over the course of the pandemic, jails have been epidemiological engines, with research showing that the Cook County Jail was linked to nearly 16% of all statewide cases in Illinois and was a major contributor to racial disparities in COVID-19 cases in Chicago.
Outside of Cook County, where vaccination rates are generally lower and infection rates have soared, local sheriff’s departments share almost no data about outbreaks inside jails. But as we have seen in other parts of the country, the absence of testing and/or reporting does not mean that jail facilities are not suffering ongoing outbreaks. Instead, it’s almost certain that ongoing outbreaks of the highly contagious delta variant in jails — whether documented by officials or not — across Illinois are exacerbating COVID-19 spread in Illinois communities at large.
Eighteen months into the pandemic, there have now been several studies showing what advocates and public health experts have argued since the very beginning: The most effective strategies for controlling outbreaks inside jails and prisons are mass vaccination campaigns and mass releases.
A national study published last week (led by one of us and using data collected by the UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project), showed that reducing the number of people held in jails was one of the most effective government interventions — alongside mask mandates, school closures and nursing home visit restrictions — for reducing COVID-19 outbreaks in U.S. communities.
Under Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Illinois has an opportunity to take the lead on such bold, evidence-backed changes to mass incarceration as an essential policy for protecting public safety both during a still-raging pandemic and long afterward.
Alongside releases, vaccination is key. Pritzker announced a vaccine mandate for state-employed correctional workers effective Oct. 4. But with less than one month until the deadline, only 44% of Illinois prison staff are vaccinated; two facilities, Lawrence and Vienna, are not yet at even double-digit staff vaccination rates.
Incarcerated people in Illinois prisons have been getting vaccinated at much higher rates, with nearly 70% having received a vaccine based on the latest data reported by the Illinois Department of Corrections. Nonetheless, vaccines alone are not enough to prevent outbreaks behind bars nor their spillover into surrounding communities — particularly as reports of breakthrough infections and new variants emerge.
Both data and common sense make clear that releasing people to improve conditions in crowded jails and prisons is vital for protecting incarcerated people — and also for protecting public health statewide and beyond.
We need policymakers to follow the evidence and to grant clemencies and enact large-scale releases of all those whose continued detention serves no public interest and, in fact, directly undermines public safety for all of us.
Erika Tyagi is the senior data scientist at the UCLA COVID Behind Bars Data Project. Amanda Klonsky is the research and policy fellow at the UCLA COVID Behind Bars Data Project. Eric Reinhart is a resident physician at Northwestern University, an anthropologist of public health and a psychoanalyst.
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