Teaching Missouri inmates, I know COVID-19 is not part of anyone’s prison sentence

Missouri and Kansas are starting to receive their first allocations of COVID-19 vaccine, with more allocations coming early in 2021. Our public health authorities and elected leaders are engaged in an ongoing process to determine who will be given priority for receiving the limited doses of vaccine. They will be steered in part by federal guidelines, but many decisions will be left to states and smaller jurisdictions. 

On Dec. 1, a federal advisory panel recommended to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that health care workers and the residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities be the first people to be vaccinated. Soon to follow will likely be essential workers.

I expect most of us agree with these priorities aimed at protecting those who are most vulnerable and most exposed. But a vulnerable group that we are less likely to think about is our prison population. To most of us, the incarcerated are invisible.

People in prison have similar vulnerabilities to nursing home residents. Both groups live in close quarters and have underlying health conditions. A significant number of the incarcerated are aging. 

Prisons and jails vary widely, but it is common to have several people bunked in a tiny cell, and inmates move in close contact all day long, mainly indoors. During the pandemic, outdoor time at many prisons has become more restricted as institutions have adopted limited-movement regimens to lessen contact among housing units. 

Underlying health conditions make people in prison more vulnerable than people on the outside. Incarcerated individuals historically are more likely to have conditions such as HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis C, and they suffer more from chronic illness — asthma, cancer, high blood pressure, arthritis. All this is worse still for incarcerated women.

Prison populations are aging. In both Missouri and Kansas, about 11% of the prison population is over 55 years old, according to 2015 statistics provided by the Prison Policy Initiative. Prison life ages the body faster. To make matters worse, prison health care is usually substandard.

For these and other reasons, the CDC vaccination playbook published on Oct. 30 lists people who are incarcerated as one of several “critical populations” that should be considered by those deciding vaccination priorities and recommended to be in the second of three phrases of vaccination rollout.

While it is clear that the incarcerated are especially vulnerable in this pandemic, some of us will question whether people locked up for crimes should receive a vaccine before people who are not. Indeed, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, disagreeing with the state’s draft vaccination plan, said that prisoners will not get vaccinations ahead of people who have not committed crimes. Polis is surely not alone in his position. But this is not a crime and punishment issue — it is a public health and epidemiological issue. Deciding who gets vaccinated is about saving lives, not about whose life has more value. Contracting COVID-19 is not part of anyone’s sentencing.

My concern around this question has been catalyzed by teaching incarcerated women at Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center, where I have discovered a group of students as eager, intellectually curious and insightful as any students I have taught in the last 20 years. These are women whom we must not measure by their worst moments, to paraphrase Bryan Stevenson from his book “Just Mercy.” As the pandemic worsened this past spring and summer, my students wrote to me that the coronavirus had made its way into the prison. As it spread to more and more of them and they watched friends disappear into isolation units, I could sense the anxiety and fear rattling their already precarious sense of well-being. 

Prisons, like nursing homes, put people close together, and many have become hot spots during the pandemic. A recent Kansas City Star story about a COVID-19 outbreak at the Jackson County jail illustrates the significant risk of infection inside jails and prisons. The report is also a reminder that many incarcerated people are in jails and have not even been convicted of a crime, but are awaiting trials that are often months away.

Beyond this human rights argument, policymakers are obliged to prioritize the health and well-being of the wider community. Prisons isolate people far better than they isolate disease. When the coronavirus spreads in a prison, it ricochets back into the community through staff and visitors into rural areas, where it not only makes individuals sick, but also burdens local hospitals. The prisoners who get seriously ill will go to these hospitals as well. Vaccinating the incarcerated is an effective public health policy that serves all of us.

As the vaccination priorities take shape and we find the incarcerated on the list, I hope we can get past negative preconceptions and understand the public health wisdom in vaccinating those behind the wire.

Daniel J. Martin is a professor of English who teaches in Rockhurst University’s Companions in Chillicothe project, which offers college credit courses to incarcerated women and prison staff.

This story was originally published December 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Teaching Missouri inmates, I know COVID-19 is not part of anyone’s prison sentence."