For 15 months, The Marshall Project and The Associated Press tracked the spread of COVID-19 through prisons nationwide. They counted more than a half-million people living and working in prisons who got sick from the coronavirus. Prisons were forced to adapt to unusual and deadly circumstances. But now, as new cases are declining and facilities are loosening restrictions, there’s little evidence to suggest enough substantive changes have been made to handle future waves of infection. With crowded conditions, notoriously substandard medical care and constantly shifting populations, prisons were ill-equipped to handle the highly contagious virus, and it’s killed nearly 3,000 prisoners and staff.
