Inmates at an immigrant-detention centre in New Jersey have launched a hunger strike to demand soap
a pandemic, officials rush to close any place that threatens to become a centre of transmission. If fewer people mingle inside cruise ships, schools, churches or retirement homes then the risk of mass infections falls. Yet for more than 2m Americans squeezed into jails and prisons, along with many staff, a shutdown is not an option. Instead, such places risk becoming hotspots for disease.
“Universities and hotels you can close. I’m left with people I can’t send home,”, says Sheriff Dart. Instead he improvises. He clumps new arrivals in cohorts by the day they come in, hoping to isolate potentially sick ones for at least a week to prevent any infection spreading. Tents for quarantine are now going up in place of a mental-health centre. Staff take inmates’ temperatures, quiz them about sickness in the family and spray food trays with bleach water more often than before.
Inmates are often packed close and obliged to buy their own soap—seen as a luxury, not a basic need—from meagre earnings. They will struggle to fend off infection. Pam Oliver, a sociologist who studies prisons in Wisconsin, calls the lack of hygiene “extremely dangerous”. The current crisis at least is raising public awareness of “severe overcrowding and unsanitary conditions” for those locked up, says Inimai Chettiar, of Justice Action Network, which campaigns for reform.
Another effort in many states aims to prevent people entering jails in the first place. Sheriff Dart in Chicago says daily arrivals have recently fallen by nearly half, from 100, as police issue more citations and arrest fewer offenders. That is becoming common in dozens of counties and cities. In Baltimore the state attorney, Marilyn Mosby, has told prosecutors to stop charging non-violent offenders such as those caught dealing drugs, trespassing or illegally selling sex.
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