As COVID rates rise, mandate vaccine for prison staff
"Across the United States, unvaccinated corrections staff are helping to fuel a public health emergency. In the majority of states that report this data, fewer than half of prison staff have gotten a shot, according to data collected by the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project. This is a particularly alarming fact considering that at least 114,000 prison workers have been infected with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, at least three times the rate of the overall population."
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Get Police Vaccinated
These especially high rates of vaccine refusal by public employees who ostensibly serve in the interest of public safety put incarcerated populations and overpoliced communities of color at continued, preventable risk of COVID-19 outbreaks. Ultimately, these employees risk putting everyone else in harm’s way too. Outbreaks in jails and prisons inevitably spill over into surrounding communities, as seen repeatedly with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. COVID-19 is no different: At least hundreds of thousands of cases—and very likely several million, along with thousands of deaths in the U.S.—are attributable to community spread associated with outbreaks that began in jails, prisons, or ICE detention centers. Neglecting incarcerated people’s welfare multiplies disease and amplifies epidemics, causing harm for everyone.
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PBS News Hour Appearance: Incarcerated People Face Potential Disaster During Outbreak
Dr. Amanda Klonsky is an advocate for prisoners rights who has spent the last two decades teaching and running education programs in jails and prisons.
“It's almost as if we've designed a petri dish to spread the pandemic and to heighten this crisis.”
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For Cook County Jail, a hot spot of COVID-19, our choices are fast action or mass death
Even as the number of people in the jail with COVID-19 increases, another week has passed without significant action to reduce the jail population.
Apr 20, 2020, 1:58pm CDTAmanda Klonsky and Dan Cooper
Nicholas Lee, age 42, died of COVID-19 on April 13 while awaiting trial in the Cook County Jail. He was the third person to die of COVID-19 while jailed, and 353 incarcerated people and 261 staff have since then tested positive.
“I feel like I lost the battle for my husband,” Lee’s widow told the Chicago Sun-Times.
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An Epicenter of the Pandemic Will Be Jails and Prisons, If Inaction Continues
The conditions inside, which are inhumane, are now a threat to any American with a jail in their county — meaning just about everyone.
This Op-Ed first appeared on the New York Times Opinion Page on March 16, 2020
If you think a cruise ship is a dangerous place to be during a pandemic, consider America’s jails and prisons. The new coronavirus spreads at its quickest in closed environments. And places like nursing homes in affected areas have begun to take precautions at the behest of families and experts. As this new disease spreads, it has become equally important for all of us to ask what steps are being taken to protect the health of people in jails and prisons, and the staff who work in them.
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The lifelong damage we do in Cook County when we jail kids as young as 10
Last year, the Cook County Board passed a law prohibiting jail for children ages 10 to 13.
But last week, an Illinois appellate court ruled that the county law conflicts with state law, so judges can continue to jail these young children.
In nearly a decade of work as an educator at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, I taught many children who were 10 to 13 years old and learned just how damaging a stay in Cook County’s “Audy Home” can be.
I taught children who were so small that their jumpsuits dragged on the floor and their sleeves were too long for their tiny arms. I met children who so desperately missed their mothers that they accidentally called me “mommy,” or asked me to sit beside them and read to them from books like “The Cat in the Hat.”
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As 1.4 Million People Gain the Right to Vote in Florida, Let’s Not Resurrect Jim Crow
In November 2018, Florida voters passed a resolution, Amendment 4, that allows the 1.4 million people with felony convictions in their state who have served all the terms of their conviction to regain their right to vote. Amendment 4 passed with 65 percent of the vote—a mandate from the people of Florida. Like the brave civil rights activists of the 1960s who organized to overturn Jim Crow laws, Desmond Meade and other leaders of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) have led the charge to upend a system that disenfranchises millions of voters, through their advocacy around Amendment 4 and then working to register newly eligible voters. While comprising only 13 percent of Florida’s electorate, African Americans make up about 45 percent of the state’s incarcerated population, numbers that cascade to marginalize thousands of families. The amendment’s passage was a proud victory for the FRRC.
Today, the Senate Rules Committee in Florida are voting on SB7086, a bill meant to undermine Amendment 4.
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The Rejection of Michelle Jones is Harvard’s Loss
This essay was originally published in the Harvard Crimson.
By Amanda R. Klonsky, September 19, 2017
I am a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For nearly a decade, I taught creative writing and literacy workshops inside Chicago’s Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, and now I am writing about the education of young people in prison.
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Growing Up Locked Up: Ella's Story
Ella was 15 when we met. She was short with a round face, her hair in two upright pigtails on top of her head, secured with the kind of shitty elastic bands they give you in jail—the kind that break your hair after you get them off of a delivered newspaper, or on a bundle of broccoli in the grocery store. She was arrested just before my first day as a teacher in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center’s school.
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