By Brandon L. Garrett & Lee Kovarsky

The COVID-19 pandemic blighted all aspects of American life, but people in jails, prisons, and other detention sites experienced singular harm and neglect. Housing vulnerable detainee populations with elevated medical needs, these facilities were ticking time bombs. They were overcrowded, underfunded, unsanitary, insufficiently ventilated, and failed to meet even minimum health-and-safety standards. Every unit of national and sub-national government failed to prevent detainee communities from becoming pandemic epicenters, and judges were no exception. This Article takes a comprehensive look at the decisional law growing out of COVID-19 detainee litigation and situates the judicial response as part of a comprehensive institutional failure. We read hundreds of COVID-19 custody cases, and our analysis classifies the decision-making by reference to three attributes: the form of detention at issue, the substantive right asserted, and the remedy sought. Several patterns emerged. Judges avoided constitutional holdings whenever they could, rejected requests for ongoing supervision, and resisted collective discharge—limiting such relief to vulnerable subpopulations. The most successful litigants were detainees in custody pending immigration proceedings, and the least successful were those convicted of crimes , 

110 California L. Rev 117 (2022)   

By Matt Ford and Roger Grimshaw

This report presents the raw data from a set questions asked to representatives from institutions in a selection of European countries about how the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons in their respective jurisdictions was being managed. The questions were based on a checklist developed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to help support policy-makers and prison administrators implement the WHO’s interim guidance on preparedness, prevention and control of COVID-19 in prisons and other places of detention. The interim guidance contained measures recommended to prevent the virus entering prisons, to limit its spread in prisons, and to prevent transmission from within prisons to the outside community. It was published on 15 March 2020, and is based on the evidence about COVID-19 available at that time. Whilst prison services will use a variety of sources of guidance to develop their strategies to deal with COVID-19, we have assumed that the WHO guidance is the international standard and therefore is appropriate for international research such as this. The WHO do make clear that their checklist is not exhaustive. The WHO questions formed one module of a larger survey that the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (from here on in referred to as 'the Centre') circulated to members of the European Prison Observatory, an international coalition of non-governmental organisations and educational institutes, to complete. The survey also contained questions about the prison populations, prison healthcare arrangements, incidence and prevalence of COVID-19 infection in prisons, and emerging problems and responses in prisons as a result of COVID-19.

London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2020/ 39p.