According to some of the most recent data, Black Americans are 2.4 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than their white counterparts, and 2.2 times as likely as Asian Americans and Latin Americans. Other studies have also suggested that Black communities, followed by Latinx communities, are being hit the hardest by the pandemic.

Through a series of Special Features and interviews, Medical News Today have been trying to untangle some of the mechanisms behind these racial disparities. 

In our previous interview on COVID-19 race-related health inequalities, Prof. Tiffany Green quoted the work of John Eason, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — to point out one such potential mechanism.

Prof. Eason’s ongoing research shows that Black and Latinx people are overrepresented as corrections officers in county jails and suggests that these workers may be inadvertently spreading the new coronavirus.

Prof. Eason’s expertise focuses on imprisonment, healthcare access, and health disparities across the rural-urban continuum. He is also the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Justice Lab. 

We’ve paid a lot of attention to the disproportionate rate of incarceration for Black and Latinx people in the U.S. — it’s more so for Black people. So, while over 60% of Americans know someone or have a family member in prison, it’s more like 90% for African Americans, so the scale of mass incarceration is unprecedented. 

What’s also quite unprecedented in the U.S. compared to any other country is prison building, or what I’ve labeled as the “prison boom,” where we built over 1,100 prisons in about 35 years, and we’ve expanded the footprint [of these facilities].

Just the landmass is more than 600 square miles in terms of the number of prisons and how big they are.

There’s also a lot of conjecture and a lack of understanding about the empirical reality of where prisons are built.