COVID-19 highlights the need to protect health for all by ending mass incarceration

The last epidemic in America wasn’t just dramatically more lethal than COVID-19. At its outset, it targeted one group of people with alarming precision and unrelenting ferocity.

Before AIDS struck the gay community in the early 1980s, gay men were often viewed as a pernicious group of inhuman outcasts. AIDS made all that even worse. Gay men became disease carriers: feared and ostracized, not just sneered upon.

Instead of retreating from the shadows into the dark, gay men fought back. They organized and became activists. They took on a willfully negligent president, discrimination and a medical and research establishment that was moving in slow motion.

Partnering with the lesbian community, which often provided the chief caregivers for people with AIDS, they founded advocacy organizations like the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

They learned how to fight on the streets with bold protests, but also learned about lobbying and sophisticated public relations strategies. And some in Hollywood did their part by humanizing people with AIDS. Stigma subsided, funding and resources flowed and the American people got behind a truly potent effort against HIV/AIDS.

By the time the American AIDS crisis subsided in the late 1990s, this newly found infrastructure of grassroots advocates and institutional heft shifted and adapted its work to the burgeoning mainstream LGBT movement that today is heralded as a model of advocacy, and for its wins in the courts, in statehouses and even in Congress.

In a way, it took an epidemic to find the antidote for one kind of discrimination.

A different yet related phenomenon may be emerging with COVID-19.

It’s widely reported that incarcerated populations are at acute risk for mass infection. It’s pretty simple. People in jails and prisons can’t social distance and they can’t self-isolate. They don’t have hand sanitizer, Clorox or even enough soap and water in many cases.

Incarcerated people live on top of each other, sharing common bathrooms and eating facilities. It doesn’t take much of a leap to figure out why prisons are called coronavirus “Petri dishes.”

Just as bad, many of the 2.3 million people in lock-up – not to mention the staff in facilities – move in and out of incarceration, putting their families and local communities at heightened risk for further infection.

To prevent an incarceration-driven element to the pandemic, governors and mayors have taken what are viewed as extraordinary steps, like releasing elderly, low-risk and near-release prisoners, as well as having police officers reduce unnecessary arrests.

These are steps that should have been taken years ago.

Mass incarceration is a uniquely American phenomenon, borne from a toxic mix of racism and poverty, creating a brutal legal and penal system that targets black and brown people at disproportionate rates and with immoral cruelty.

This sentiment is the force behind a burgeoning cross-ideological criminal justice reform movement that’s successfully changed laws in dozens of cities and states. Even the First Step Act, a new federal law signed by President Trump, includes some modest steps forward.

And this is where the AIDS lesson comes in. With a spotlight on the spread of disease because of a willfully defective and failed status quo on incarceration, many Americans are learning some hard truths about mass incarceration for the first time.

Mass incarceration is dangerous and literally sickening to the people it touches. It undermines the health and safety of all of society, not just some particular undeserving few. And the people who are its victims are, well, people. Just like AIDS educated us on the humanity and connection of LGBTQ people, COVID-19 is educating us on the humanity and connection of people trapped in the justice system.

Now, we need a newly reinvigorated movement to seize on public awareness, and newfound creativity from elected officials, to end to mass incarceration and create a new era of public health and safety.

The criminal justice movement, thus far, has moved incrementally, which is a proven approach for change in the United States. Start with the small stuff, and you’ll have room to move to the big kahuna. We see the same thing with health care. Whether Medicare for All is the best way forward or not, we probably wouldn’t be asking the question if Obamacare hadn’t happened.

One big difference between LGBTQ discrimination and mass incarceration is that there’s already a significant infrastructure in place around criminal justice reform. Some in the philanthropic world are funding public education. Advocates, including formerly incarcerated people, have led the charge and made it possible for this moment of reckoning to arrive.

What we need now is a vision check: no more looking just a few feet ahead. The COVID-19 prison crisis shows we need to look to the horizon – to an end of mass incarceration, but also far beyond.

We need to look to the creation of new ways to protect the physical, mental and economic health of all – not just for the next few months until we have a vaccine, but for the next generation and the ones after that.

We need a determined commitment not to return to the “business as usual” of a justice system that imparts sickness and isolation at huge costs in dollars and lives.

And we need to recognize that our shared human dignity can turn this moment of crisis into a permanent step towards justice and safety for all.