Will COVID-19 vaccinations mean more prison overcrowding deaths?
California’s decades-old ‘tough on crime’ laws still fill prisons, creating disease danger zones.
In January, Alfred King , a 68-year-old man with a Santa Claus belly bulging out of a Nike Dri-FIT shirt, stood before my cell gate at California’s San Quentin State Prison, holding up a small white card. “I got my shot — I’m good to go,” he said, smiling as he handed through the bars proof that he received his first Moderna coronavirus vaccination.
King, who has asthma, has been in prison for 41 years. He barely survived a prison outbreak of valley fever, a deadly fungus that attacks the lungs. The coronavirus vaccine meant that he might not die trapped in a cell as the disease spread through the overcrowded prison system.
I handed the card back. Although the vaccine might slow the spread of the coronavirus, I knew it was no cure for the prison overcrowding that has been slaughtering us for decades. The pandemic had forced California to reduce prison populations for the time being. I worried that with vaccinations, we would go back to those previous deadly conditions.
Men like King and me were caught up in the “tough on crime” agenda of the 1980s and ’90s, when harsh sentencing requirements, including California’s three-strikes law and sentence enhancement laws, packed the California prison system to nearly double its design capacity. More recent laws have eliminated or modified some sentencing enhancements and made others discretionary. Most of those developments aren’t retroactive, even though I’ve observed that many over-sentenced prisoners are in our 50s or older, and studies show we no longer pose a threat to public safety.
Today, prisons remain overcrowded because of racist sentencing practices. For example, more than 90% percent of the people sent to prison from Los Angeles County are people of color. Blacks make up just 9% of LA’s population, but comprise almost 40% of LA’s state prison population, according to a special directive by Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón.
Over-sentencing people and packing them into prisons is deadly, and California’s prisoners have been battling unsafe conditions through lawsuits for decades. In 2011, the Supreme Court upheld a decision by a federal three-judge panel, finding that overcrowding causes unnecessary medical deaths. The ruling ordered the California Department of Corrections (CDCR) to reduce its prison population from nearly double occupancy, to almost 138% of design capacity.
