People cycled through jails on minor offenses are taking the virus back to their communities.
Jails around the country have become a major breeding ground for the coronavirus. And as authorities arrest, book and release thousands of people charged with low-level offenses each day, they are unwittingly unleashing the virus on the outside world.
My colleague Daniel Chen and I found this dynamic at work as people were processed in and out of the Cook County Jail in Chicago, as we reported recently in a study in the journal Health Affairs. The consequences were startling. The cycle of arrests, jailings and releases was the most significant predictor of the spread of the coronavirus in Chicago and the rest of Illinois. Roughly one in six of all cases in the city and state were linked to people who were jailed and released from this single jail, according to data through April 19.
It’s not hard to understand why. People are arrested for low-level crimes, processed through crowded jail spaces where the risk of infection is high and then sent back to their communities, where they inadvertently spread the virus. We found that this churn of arrest, jailing and release was more consequential than race, poverty, population density and public transit as a harbinger of Covid-19 cases.
On average, for each person cycled through Cook County Jail, our research shows that an additional 2.149 cases of Covid-19 appeared in their ZIP code within three to four weeks after the inmate’s discharge. At least 60 percent of these cases were in Black-majority ZIP codes.
The scale of this virus multiplier effect is enormous.
