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PACEs in the Criminal Justice System

Discussion and sharing of resources in working with clients involved in the criminal justice system and how screening for and treating ACEs will lead to successful re-entry of prisoners into the community and reduced recidivism for former offenders.

As COVID spread in federal prisons, many at-risk inmates tried and failed to get out (npr.org)

 

As of early March, officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) say 287 federal inmates have died from COVID-19, a count that does not include deaths in privately managed prisons. Bureau officials have been saying since the beginning of the pandemic that they have a plan to keep the situation under control, but an NPR analysis of federal prison death records suggests a far different story.

The federal prison system has seen a significant rise in deaths during the pandemic years. In 2020, the death rate in prisons run by the BOP was 50% higher than the five years before the pandemic. Last year, it was 20% higher, according to the NPR analysis of age-adjusted death rates.

Of those who died from COVID-19, nearly all were elderly or had a medical condition that put them at a higher risk of dying from the virus, NPR found. Many of them seemed to sense their fate — and had tried to get out. And those who made their case in court often faced a slow and complicated process that was unable to meet the pace of a rapidly spreading virus.

"All you heard was just coughing all night, all night"

The Federal Bureau of Prisons had a problem from the day the coronavirus arrived in the U.S.: Prisons were likely to be a petri dish for COVID-19. Because staying away from others is nearly impossible inside a prison, health experts said the most effective way to deal with that problem was to make the prison population much smaller — and quickly.

To read more of Meg Anderson and Huo Jingnan's article, please click here.

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