I bring this up because epidemic typhus is famously known also as “jail fever.” Imprisonment, of course, forces dense populations into unsanitary conditions. Disease runs rampant.

I read today that the prisons in America, which are already bursting at the seams, are seeing escalating cases of COVID-19. This week, a state prison farm south of Little Rock that produces rice, cotton, and eggs, found that 680 of its 1700 prisoners had COVID. At a correctional facility north of Columbus, Ohio, 2,000 prisoners and 160 staffers have tested positive for COVID. In one Michigan prison, they found that 73% of the inmates tested had the virus. The number was 65% in a prison in North Carolina. These numbers are not happening because these particular prison systems are somehow exceptionally problematic. The reason we know that they are experiencing these surges is because they are the only states that have been testing in the prisons. And, as the Marshall Project has shown, even they have been remiss in testing their staff thoroughly.[2]

It is hard to imagine what it must be like to be in a prison with little to no PPE, knowing that the virus has come and that you can do nothing to protect yourself. Stealing a car or carrying weed or getting into a bar fight can now result in a death sentence.

Inside prison, all semblance of control fades. You spend every day unable to make choices about when you wake up, what you eat, where you go, what you do, or how to keep yourself safe. The famous criminologist, Norval Morris, once said that violence is not the major problem in prisons. It is the dull sameness of prison life…. Nothing seems to make any difference; everything is inconsequential other than when you will be free and how to make time pass until then.[3] Because of this, prison famously renders people helpless. It teaches helplessness, in fact.[4] It teaches that the world is inhabited by forces that are far beyond the control of any normal person, that those forces will chew and swallow anyone that stands in their way, and that it is a waste of time to imagine that you can be the master of your fate. (Weirdly, this is how some people describe their time at home during this quarantine.)

If this is the lesson of prison, then what must be the lesson of prison during the COVID pandemic? Perhaps the Buddhists are right that control is only a fantasy, a projection of one’s ego. For those in prison with our disease running rampant, this must be a thin gruel to swallow. The pandemic prison takes away the control of life, the ability to effect the odds, even in the slightest, of someday making amends and becoming free.

Notes

[1] Karen H. Keddy et al., “The Burden of Typhoid Fever in South Africa: The Potential Impact of Selected Interventions,” The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 99, no. 3 Suppl (September 2018): 55–63, https://doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.18-0182.

[2] Danny Johnston/Associated Press, “These Prisons Are Doing Mass Testing For COVID-19—And Finding Mass Infections,” The Marshall Project, April 24, 2020, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/04/24/these-prisons-are-doing-mass-testing-for-covid-19-and-finding-mass-infections.

[3] Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, New Ed edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 205.

[4] Juneman Abraham and Rigel Adiratna, “Learned Helplessness of Prisoners: Psychology and Knowledge Management Perspective,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 4, 2014), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2483010; Richard A. Schill and David K. Marcus, “Incarceration and Learned Helplessness:,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, July 27, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X9804200304