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. This report only looked at state-operated prisons and county-operated jails, as researchers were focused on how Texas’s Covid-19 prison policies had fared.
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The 231 figure is likely to be a conservative count. As the researchers note, TDCJ and county jails update death reports after autopsies are conducted, sometimes months after the fact. Additionally, many people have “died without ever having been tested for COVID,” and others died due to a preexisting conditioned worsened by the virus and are not counted in this figure.
The death of an inmate is tragic regardless of their conviction status, but the UT Austin report reveals the state’s lack of urgency in keeping as many people safe as possible. Of the inmates in prison who died, nine of them had been approved for parole and were awaiting release, 21 of them had served 90 percent or more of their sentence, and 58 percent of those who died in prisons were eligible for parole.
Texas isn’t alone: Despite the alarms sounded by policy experts, correctional officers, and prisoners themselves earlier this year, Covid-19 has been allowed to ravage prison populations, harming inmates, correctional officers, and the surrounding communities for months. Civil rights groups and criminal justice experts advocated reducing the prison population as much as possible to flatten the curve. Unfortunately, few states took serious action to combat the virus in prisons and jails — according to a June ACLU report, no state earned more than a D-, and most earned F’s.
As the pandemic was spreading through the US in the spring, prisons quickly became one of the epicenters of the crisis.
— source vox.com | Nov 12, 2020