  The coronavirus pandemic has already left a trail of destruction inside America’s jails and prisons.
Since the onset, at least 414,500 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons have contracted COVID-19 and at least 2,556 have died from it. We don’t know these numbers for jails, which mostly imprison people who have not been convicted of a crime and where deaths are notoriously difficult to track. These official estimates are also almost surely undercounts. But we do know that the rate of infection inside prisons during the first year of the pandemic was more than three times higher than for the rest of the country, as The New York Times reported in April.
Now comes the delta variant.
The more easily transmissible COVID-19 mutation presents a grave threat to the nation’s incarcerated population — and by most indications, the system will yet again fail to protect them. The fundamental structure of the country’s prison system, which relies on cramming people in close proximity to one another in poorly ventilated buildings, makes detention facilities among the most dangerous places to be during an infectious outbreak. With some exceptions, most prison systems haven’t done nearly enough to reduce populations to safe levels.
As the fall and winter flu seasons approach and delta surges, there may still be time to protect vulnerable people inside jails and prisons. But not much.
“There is still an opportunity to mitigate the effects of delta and the other variants that are going to siege correctional facilities,” said Forrest Behne, a policy analyst with the COVID Prison Project. “And the answer is vaccination and decarceration.”
President Joe Biden stood by his decision to pull American troops out of Afghanistan by Aug. 31, saying his decision to do so saved lives. “I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit,” Biden said in a speech at the White House on Tuesday. On Monday, the U.S. had finally withdrawn the last of its troops out of Kabul, officially ending America’s 20-year war with Afghanistan. Since Aug. 14, the U.S. evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of about 124,000 people, around 5,500 of whom were Americans. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam granted posthumous pardons Tuesday to seven Black men who were executed in 1951 for the rape of a white woman, in a case that attracted pleas for mercy from around the world and in recent years has been denounced as an example of racial disparity in the use of the death penalty. The “Martinsville Seven,” as the men became known, were all convicted of raping 32-year-old Ruby Stroud Floyd, a white woman who had gone to a predominantly black neighborhood in Martinsville, Virginia, on Jan. 8, 1949, to collect money for clothes she had sold.
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