According to a recently published study by the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School the black prison population grew during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the same time period, the White prison population decreased steadily. The report highlights racial disparities as the reason for these trends.
Overall prison population during the pandemic in the United States in 2020 dropped by 17.3% but the percentage of Black prison populations increased and peaked in the last quarter of the calendar year and ended up 1 percent higher than the previous years.
What that means is that more white people were being released, whereas more persons of color were incarcerated.
People look at the [percentage] increase and can say it’s not a big deal but we know that 1% is tens of thousands of Black individuals that are affected by this,” Yale Professor Elizabeth Hinton, a professor at Yaletold theGrio.
The Public Welfare Foundation (PWF) which works on criminal justice reforms says it had warned the authorities of worrying trends that emerged during the pandemic. Candice Jones of PWF told The Grio, “One of the fastest rates of [COVID-19] spreading was in congregate care settings and we know prison is a big congregate care setting. This was before the vaccination. There was no way to control the spread in those settings. We were not adequately protecting people’s lives in congregate care.”
