An Invisible Threat Creates a Visible Opportunity to Green and Reform the Prison System

The United States is the global leader in mass incarceration. Right now is the perfect opportunity to take a COVID-19 moment to determine how we can do better. We can address our own personal bias, and how it contributes to our ignorance of or resistance to the reforming and greening of our prison system. We can use this pandemic as an occasion to consider ways to reduce mass incarceration, and make America’s prisons more environmentally compatible and therefore safer and more humane.

COVID-19 outbreak prevention in prisons oftentimes focuses on protection for those on the outside rather than for those on the inside. Advocates and lawmakers alike take into account the bias most of us have toward the incarcerated: an often reviled, and certainly marginalized population of our society. In an effort to sway public opinion, calls to reform often evoke our feelings of superiority and fear: free people ought to care about incarcerated people not because prisoners' lives matter, but because infected inmates may get free people sick. Pragmatic calls for preventative actions -- lessening prison sentences, offering home confinement, reducing arrests, releasing prisoners who cannot make bail, as well as prisoners who are awaiting trial for non-violent offenses -- have provoked controversy and fear.