COVID has been so fatal because of U. S. policies that see other marginalized people as appropriate sacrifices for capitalism.
Note: This article is adapted from an excerpt from A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice, an eBook that will be published in May via PM Press. You can reserve a copy here.
April 10 will mark one year since President Joe Biden signed a congressional solution that officially ended the COVID-19 “public health emergency. “The week before, more than 1,000 people died from the virus in the United States.
Statements like Biden’s are not only rhetorically frustrating, they have concrete negative effects. The official end of the “public health emergency” meant the end of many health measures implemented on other people due to COVID. For example, Medicare, a public health insurance plan for many other people with disabilities, has stopped covering free at-home tests, and PCR tests are no longer free. Although some health insurance plans still cover testing, many uninsured people will not have access to free testing.
There are so many policies, big and small, that may have been put in place earlier and COVID to make the pandemic less deadly. The government may have simply proposed increased fitness communication and education, prioritized measures that protect the vulnerable, provided a source of income to allow other people to stay at home, and banned the enforcement of pharmaceutical patents.
We haven’t gotten to where we are in a vacuum. COVID did not want to be endemic, and decisions like this to end the emergency will pile illness and death among the most vulnerable. One of the main reasons COVID has been so lethal is to political decisions that see other marginalized disabled people as appropriate sacrifices for capitalism. This attitude is reflected – and amplified – throughout the U. S. criminal justice system.
Disability and incarceration are strongly correlated, and in the book I address some of the tactics in which the criminal formula uses disability as an excuse to take control of the lives of not only other people with disabilities, but also Indigenous, Black, Brown, queer, trans and non-disabled people, and the poor. with the multi-marginalized being the most affected. One of the reasons the pandemic has been devastating among offenders is that most incarcerated people are disabled, putting them at risk. an increased risk of dying or getting a permanent illness from COVID if they get it.
The government’s reaction to EE. UU. al COVID-19 is predictable and unconscionable. The pandemic has highlighted how fitness policies affect everything else, and COVID losses haven’t been felt similarly across communities. When adjusted for age, Indigenous, Latino, Pacific Islander, and Black U. S. communities suffered particularly higher COVID-related death rates than white and Asian communities. It’s also no coincidence that the populations most at risk of incarceration are the same ones who are most at risk of dying from COVID: other people with disabilities of color. resulting from decisions and policies that neglect and monitor other people with disabilities.
Logically, then, when it comes to public, or even individual, health, when COVID first hit, it would have made sense to prioritize protecting those locked up in prisons, nursing homes, and other places with gigantic high-risk numbers. other people live together. However, the opposite has happened.
According to the COVID Prison Project, “most of the largest single-location outbreaks since the start of the pandemic have occurred in prisons. “One of the many arguments in favor of abolition is the way other people “took care of” across the state getting sick and dying. Infections can occur in those institutions because incarcerated people are disposable, a phenomenon I call “prison epidemiology. “
Prison epidemiology is the way the state (i. e. , the government and other formal and informal control bureaucracies, not one of the 50 states) uses communicable diseases as a component of the informal punishment of incarceration. While all congregate settings (places where many other people live together) have a heightened threat from COVID-19 and other communicable diseases, in criminal settings, vulnerability to disease is a characteristic, not a bug. In other words, the threat of ill health is an intentional facet of punishment. It is intended to be in part an incentive for other people to stay out of those places, as if they were locked up if they had the choice.
Prison epidemiology also devalues the lives of other incarcerated and institutionalized people by failing to protect them from infection and by viewing their illness and death as inevitable, even deserved. This, obviously, is illustrated in the way vaccines were prioritized.
Although incarcerated and incarcerated people were at the same, if not greater, risk than those in other congregate settings, they did not have access to the vaccine until much later. Although the specific order of precedence varies by state, one study found that “incarcerated individuals were never prioritized in Phase 1, while other vulnerable groups who shared a similar environmental threat were given this priority. “early. ” When government shirks its duty to remain like others – whether in emergencies or in everyday life – those who are already vulnerable pay the highest price.
When you’re in state custody, your life is literally at the mercy of the decision-makers: other people you’ve probably never met and who (at best) just don’t care about your well-being. The pandemic has proven this.
Writing for the Crunk Feminist Collective, Cara Page and Eesha Pandit explain: “People held in jails, prisons, and detention centers across the country are under serious threat given that they are held in spaces designed to maximize on them, not to maximize their matrix and minimize transmission. “or provide physical care effectively.
As long as the carceral state exists, it will use aptitude and disability as weapons: from access to vaccines to how government neglect leads to “underlying conditions” that make COVID-19 more likely deadly, to being forced to gather in congregants due to legislation that criminalizes poverty, and so on. These policies differentiate between life and death, freedom and captivity, fitness and disease.
Even before the pandemic, the lack of universal fitness insurance in the U. S. The U. S. pandemic, which caused unnecessary illness, death, and incarceration, and COVID-19, had exacerbated this divide. One study found not only that other people without fitness insurance were more likely to take out and die from the virus, but also that network insurance levels also affected the spread of COVID. “Between the start of the pandemic and August 31, 2020, gaps in fitness insurance were linked to approximately 2. 6 million COVID-19 cases and 58,000 COVID-19 cases. deaths,” the study states. Every 10% accumulates in a county’s percentage without health insurance associated with a 70% increase in COVID-19 cases and a 48% increase in COVID-19 deaths. “
These statistics underscore what we already knew before COVID: the communities a user is a part of have a primary effect on their fitness. Even other people with fitness insurance who live in a community where citizens are uninsured (i. e. , poor and black people and brown communities) are at greater risk of death. This is not due to an inherent difference, but to political decisions with which they have nothing to do.
COVID-19 has clearly demonstrated how those who have the strength to make decisions that others – such as who has access to physical care and who gets vaccinated – literally make the decision of which communities will live and die. Obviously, it’s nothing new. The whole criminal formula in the U. S. UU. es a (huge) way for those in power to make a decision about who will be able to live and participate meaningfully in the life of their community.
COVID is a microcosm of how other people with disabilities, especially other people with disabilities of color, are more likely to be in bodies vulnerable to disease and under the control of the state, a fatal combination. COVID politics is just one of many aspects of the criminal formula that disproportionately traps (and kills) many other marginalized people with disabilities.
The pandemic underscores how important it is to understand how those formulas work for other people with disabilities, especially other people with disabilities of color. The way the virus has been treated among criminals is further evidence of something communities of color know all too well: that even brief contact with American justice or the criminal formula can be a death sentence. This is just one of the many reasons why abolition is so necessary.
Katie Tastrom is an editor and former attorney whose work has been published in online publications, as well as in the anthologies Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid, and Burn it Down! Feminist Manifestos for Revolution. Her first book, A People’s Guide to Abolition and Justice for People with Disabilities, will be published in May 2024 via PM Press. He also has an online page on katietastrom. com that he continues to claim he will update.