People in detention are forgotten or ignored in COVID-19 responses
William Garrison is one of the many people who passed away from COVID-19 in 2020 while in detention. He died aged 60 on 13 April 2020 in a prison in Wayne County, Michigan, in the United States of America. He had been watching the Black Lives Matter protests unfolding on the prison’s television, having spent 44 years in detention for involvement in a crime when he was 16 years old. After initially refusing parole, preferring to wait for unconditional release in September, Garrison took up the offer given the outbreaks of coronavirus. However, his liberation came too late — five days after he accepted the parole offer but before the mandatory 28-day waiting period for his release, he died. His name will be remembered, not least because of his namesake, the abolitionist and suffragist, William Lloyd Garrison, founder of The Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The fate of people deprived of their liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic attracted increased attention from mid-March 2020. As we wrote in PRI’s initial briefing, Coronavirus: Healthcare and human rights of people in prison, ‘people detained are vulnerable for several reasons, but especially due to the proximity of living (or working) so closely to others — in many cases in overcrowded, cramped conditions with little fresh air’.
Media attention was high at a time when some countries announced massive releases from prisons and images of prison riots were being shown on television. In March, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called for swift action to protect persons in detention, including through releases, alongside similar calls from the World Health Organization. Since then, at least 102,537 people deprived of their liberty were infected in 88 countries, and at least 1,569 prisoners died in 36 countries due to COVID-19 — that we know of.
We publish this new briefing, Coronavirus: Preventing harm and human rights violations in criminal justice systems, to ensure that people who too often remain invisible to society at the hands of the state, and at risk of infection or in need of medical care, are not forgotten. We reaffirm the duty of care that states have for people in detention, and we document the responsibility of states to provide healthcare and take proactive measures to prevent harm of people deprived of liberty.
An infectious disease can be a disaster for a closed facility. Risks of infections are obviously much higher where people in poorer health than the general population are held, where women, men and children are kept in poor or even filthy unsanitary conditions, where individuals are cramped together in overcrowded facilities and where authorities lack resources and training to use protective equipment. Even in countries with high standards for places of detention, people in prisons, including staff, have been infected and died of COVID-19.
