{"id":307117,"date":"2020-08-03T11:28:59","date_gmt":"2020-08-03T15:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=307117"},"modified":"2023-11-08T20:16:06","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T01:16:06","slug":"harvard-study-links-jailing-practices-to-covid-19-spread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2020\/08\/harvard-study-links-jailing-practices-to-covid-19-spread\/","title":{"rendered":"Jailing practices appear to fuel coronavirus spread, study says"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t
\"Cook

Data from the Cook County Jail in Chicago demonstrates the risk jails may present to surrounding communities.<\/p>

Steve Geer\/iStock<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t

\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tNation & World\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\tJailing practices appear to fuel coronavirus spread, study says\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t
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\n\t\tJuan Siliezar\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t

\n\t\t\tAuthors say research at Chicago facility bolsters mass incarceration concerns\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n
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This is part of our<\/em> Coronavirus Update<\/em><\/a> series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring.<\/em><\/p>\n

American jails and prisons, in which large numbers of inmates live together in close quarters, have become COVID-19 hotspots. In fact, one published analysis found that the top 10 biggest clusters of the virus<\/a> in the U.S. are now in correctional facilities.<\/p>\n

A new study, however, takes a look at the possible ripple effect these clusters may have in surrounding communities. The findings suggest that short-term cycling of prisoners through local jails for arrest and pretrial procedures may be putting entire cities and states at risk, especially communities of color, according to a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Health Affairs. The research also fuels the ongoing concerns over mass incarceration policies in the nation.<\/p>\n

The paper<\/a>, co-authored by Eric Reinhart \u201910, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology, and Daniel Chen \u201999, J.D. \u201909, a professor at the Toulouse School of Economics and a principal investigator for the World Bank\u2019s Data and Evidence for Justice Reform program, examined the relationship between jail cycling and community infections across different neighborhoods in the state of Illinois using publicly available data on booking, release, and COVID-19 status from Cook County Jail in Chicago and known coronavirus cases from the Illinois Department of Public Health.<\/p>\n

The quantitative study tracked inmate release data and found corresponding rises in COVID-19 cases in home communities. The analysis suggests that as of April 19, almost 16 percent of all coronavirus cases in the state were associated with the presence of people who in March had cycled through the Cook County Jail, one of the nation\u2019s largest jails. That one-in-six figure held true for the city of Chicago itself.<\/p>\n\r\n

\u201cIf we had the ability to test at intake beginning in January it would have shown the virus was coming in from the street, not the other way around.”<\/p>\nCook County Sheriff’s Department<\/cite><\/blockquote>\r\n\n

\u201cYou can think of cycling people through jail as having a multiplier effect,\u201d said Reinhart, who is also a student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. On average, \u201cFor every one person you cycle through the jail [whether that person becomes infected or not], in the ZIP code from which they have come and which they will return to, within a three to four week lag you\u2019re going to see 2.149 more cases. That doesn\u2019t sound like so much, but when you consider that 100,000 people are cycled through this jail every year, and then across the country approximately 5 million people are cycled through jails every year, then that multiplier effect acquires a huge scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Cook County Sheriff\u2019s Office and the Chicago Department of Public Health, which sent a letter to Health Affairs asking that the paper be removed, strongly disputed the study\u2019s results.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we had the ability to test at intake beginning in January it would have shown the virus was coming in from the street, not the other way around,\u201d the sheriff\u2019s office said in a statement. \u201cFurther supporting this is the fact the majority of the positive cases are coming from the communities hit the hardest by COVID-19.\u201d<\/p>\n

The statement also notes the facility began testing all arriving inmates after capacity became available and that \u201cvirtually all of the new cases in recent weeks have come from newly arrested individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the journal said that the print publication was going ahead as planned.<\/p>\n

The researchers stress that their findings represent only a correlation between infection rates and jail cycling. They did not trace infected individuals and could not establish a clear causal relationship through a randomized controlled trial, because adequate data to perform that type of analysis does not exist. They note that it\u2019s possible that factors for which they did not control could help explain the association.<\/p>\n

Reinhart and Chen also point out that they could not link community spread to jail employees because they did not have access to data on the ZIP codes of where staff live, limiting their analysis. During the period they studied, jail staff in Cook County made up more than 100 of its 600-plus coronavirus infections.<\/p>\n

The researchers argue in their paper, however, that \u201cthese provisional findings are consistent with the hypothesis that arrest and jailing practices are augmenting infection rates in highly policed neighborhoods.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers reached their results after running two types of statistical analyses on data from the jail, the state\u2019s Department of Public Health, and the U.S. Census Bureau. They looked at the ZIP code-level relationship between the presence of released Cook County Jail detainees and the rate of coronavirus infection.<\/p>\n\r\n

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