Correcting Corrections: Lessons for Prisons and Jails in a Post-COVID World

Abstract

“Correcting Corrections:  Lessons for Prisons and Jails in a Post-COVID World” focuses on the critical lessons driven home by the COVID crisis about a multitude of serious problems in our system of mass incarceration in the US. It examines how the COVID crisis can help us re-envision and transform our corrections system. The article spells out the action steps that governments ought to be taking even after we emerge from the pandemic to help us build a corrections system more worthy of our values, one that can help build resiliency for individuals, families, and communities, and thereby help promote true public safety. The essay was included as part of larger volume, a policy toolkit published by the LBJ School, with contributions from 29 LBJ School authors, that offers resilience-based policy solutions to fix the systemic flaws exposed by the pandemic (Resilience in the Age of COVID-19).