Files
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the United States, both in terms of public health and the economic and social rights of its citizens. The same holds true for the U.S. prison system. Cited as super-spreaders, each state’s department of corrections have been criticized for their inaction in response to the pandemic; these criticisms are just the latest in reference to the abuse of prisoners’ rights. As such, this paper’s objective is to assess the correlation between prisoners’ rights and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Are states that place lesser priority on prisoners’ rights and dignity impacted more by this pandemic? Operationalizing variables associated with inmate dignity, a basic regression was run connecting these variables with COVID-19 case and death numbers in each state’s prison system. This regression yielded a statistically sound relationship between medical copay fees and confirmed cases of and deaths due to COVID-19.