Containment and Contagion: Quantifying the COVID-19 Crisis in U.S. Correctional Facilities
SDS 192 Final Project
The two datasets at the center of this investigation (representing individual facilities and state systems, respectively) were collected by The New York Times from March 2020 to March 2021. To be more precise, The Times gathered information about infections, deaths, facility populations, locations, and tests administered to inmates and correctional officers in 2,805 U.S. prisons. Due to the absence of a standardized national reporting system for COVID-19 within U.S. correctional systems, The New York Times compiled its own datasets using a combination of direct inquiries, public records requests, press conferences, and meetings with county and state officials. According to the Times, the goal was to assess the impact of COVID-19 in prisons and to make this information publicly available in order to support researchers, public health experts, and the broader public in understanding the scope and consequences of these outbreaks (Times 2020). The following analysis builds on these datasets to investigate a key question: Which state prison systems experienced the highest number of inmate deaths due to COVID-19 between March 2020 and March 2021? To explore this, three visualizations are presented to illustrate both the magnitude and geographic distribution of these fatalities.
The first visualization is an interactive map highlighting the 20 U.S. prisons with the highest number of reported inmate and officer deaths due to COVID-19. Each icon on the map represents a facility and displays a coronavirus symbol to indicate a COVID-19 hotspot. Users can click each icon to reveal the facility’s name. The distribution of these facilities suggests that California and Texas experienced particularly high numbers of inmate deaths, with California accounting for 5 of the top 20 and Texas for 3 Most other states appear only once or twice on the list, if they appear at all.
This second graph aggregates COVID-19-related inmate deaths by state prison system, adjusting for population by calculating the number of deaths per 100,000 incarcerated individuals. This population-adjusted metric offers a more equitable basis for comparison across states. However, a limitation of this visualization is that it only includes the continental United States. According to this analysis, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Michigan report the highest death rates, indicated in dark red.
The third set of plots shifts the focus to total COVID-19 deaths within state prison systems, without adjusting for inmate population size. Under this metric, Florida, California, and Texas rank highest (which isn’t surprising, since these are also the states that have the largest overall prison populations). This alignment emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between raw counts and population-adjusted rates when interpreting public health data. As noted by Rozzelle (Rozzelle 2023), larger prison populations may face greater challenges in implementing widespread testing and effective quarantine procedures.
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Taken together, these visualizations demonstrate how inmate population size influences the apparent impact of COVID-19 across state prison systems. While raw totals initially suggest that California and Texas experienced the most severe outbreaks, a more nuanced view emerges when accounting for population size, revealing higher relative death rates in states such as New Mexico, Tennessee, and Michigan.
This analysis also raises important ethical considerations. The perspectives of incarcerated individuals and advocacy organizations representing them appear largely absent from the data collection process. Ensuring inclusive representation—particularly from those most directly affected—is vital for accurate, just, and equitable public health reporting. Questions about who was excluded from the data and whose voices were overlooked point to broader concerns about transparency, fairness, and accountability in pandemic-era prison reporting.
References
Rozzelle, Josephine. 2023. “These Are the 10 Most Populated States in the u.s.” U.S. News. U.S. News. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/most-populated-states-in-the-us.
Times, The New York. 2020. “Nytimes/COVID-19-Data: A Repository of Data on Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the u.s.” GitHub. https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.