11% More First-Wave COVID-19 Cases in Counties With State Prisons

The presence of a state prison in a county was associated with an 11% increase in COVID-19 cases through July 1, 2020, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Many of the cases were likely due to the spread of COVID-19 in prisons. But researchers estimate that 95,000 cases and more than 3,300 deaths in the US — the majority of prison-related cases — were due to prison spillovers to surrounding communities.

The findings suggest both that prisons are vulnerable to diseases that enter from the outside and that they can then breed and amplify those diseases and spread them to surrounding communities. The study authors say counties that house prisons should prepare for future outbreaks by prioritizing the health of both incarcerated populations and those living in nearby cities.

“Your community is safer if your prison population is healthy,” said Jeremy Foltz, one of the study authors and professor of agricultural science and applied economics at UW-Madison. The findings are published today (June 29, 2021) in the American Journal of Public Health.

The researchers looked for links between COVID-19 and prisons by using publicly available data on the number of COVID-19 cases in the spring of 2020 and information on the presence of provincial, state and federal prisons. They controlled for provincial-level factors that could have influenced the spread of COVID-19, such as the presence of nursing homes and population density.

Neither provincial prisons nor federal prisons correlated with more COVID-19 cases. Federal prisons began restricting movement between and within prisons from April 2020, which may have reduced the spread of disease.

District-level data on the number of cases in prisons was not available, making it difficult to quantify the spread of disease inside versus outside prisons. But based on national data, the researchers estimate that about 70% of prison-related cases likely occurred in the surrounding community.

“Prisons are an important factor as we develop holistic public health policies,” said Kaitlyn Sims, report author and doctoral student in agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison. “Given the unique challenges that prisons face, it is important that we pay attention to them and recognize that they need equally unique policies.”

Reference: June 29, 2021, American Journal of Public Health.