1700 seems very low.
Napkin math:
Let’s use 300,000 dead in the US (fucking piece of shit joke of a country).
Per this website, the US jail/prison population is about 2.2 million (for real, garbage ass country).
Using 330 million total US pop, the death rate is about 0.9% for the US population at large
If we use that 0.9% death rate among the US at large, we’d expect 2000 deaths from the 2.2 million incarcerated.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that the death rate is lower among incarcerated people than the general population—especially considering the infection rate is 4x as high
Actually that doesn't seem so unbelievable - thanks for doing the math. The average age of the imprisoned population is much lower than that of the general population. Most people enter prison young and get out before old age. (Age is the best predictor of breaking the law - the young are dumb and reckless, the old are weary.) Since age is such a huge factor in Covid mortality, the fact that it's 1700 instead of the expected 2000 is unsurprising.
I had thought about that, but I figured the younger age would be made up for by poorer living conditions and possibly restricted access to care, but i guess that’s not necessarily the case.
Truthfully I havent paid too much attention to covid comorbidities and stuff, so I’ll take your word that the younger age could plausibly skew the mortality rate like this
I tried looking up the average population age vs. average inmate age - but it turns out it's a much harder question because they're actually both around 39, except that there's almost no one under 18 in prison (while ~24% of the US population is under 18) and the age distribution in general is different...
If you're curious download this PDF (it's actually about the increasingly older US prison population) - figure 5 on page 4 compares the incarcerated vs. free population pyramids. And here's mortality from Covid by age in Italy and in China. (And since the PDF is about state prisons, here's federal prison data - it's similar.)
In short, Covid mortality under 65 is ~0.1-1.5%. Over 65 it's 5-15%. 19% of Americans are over 65, while only 2% of imprisoned Americans are . Put another way, among US Covid deaths, 20% are under 65, 80% are 65 or older. So the people most at risk just aren't in prison.
I figured the younger age would be made up for by poorer living conditions and possibly restricted access to care
Yeah, good point - I have no idea how much of an impact that has. There's probably a whole paper you could publish on this. Inmate population mortality minus average population mortality, corrected by age = size of prison conditions effect on health.
“There’s no way it’s going to go to prisoners ... before it goes to the people who haven’t committed any crime,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis told reporters earlier this month after his state’s initial vaccine priority plans put prisoners before the general public.
Fuck this piece of shit. Goddamn.
This is the preferred neoliberal method for exterminating its undesirable populations (genocide, but modulated by economic class). It's not cattlecars and zyklon B but first instead social labyrinths which distribute racial bias over a number of steps so that, viewed individually, each of the steps appears to be biased by a seemingly small percentage. Kinks in the system to be worked out over decades. Class bias is there as well, but doesn't really need to be hidden since it's ostensibly not inborn.
This gauntlet of hundreds of weighted dice rolls function to, in aggregate, sort racial minorities (but also a "fair" number of poor whites!) into positions of severe vulnerability. And then, all the neoliberal order needs to do is wait... until.... the next disaster hits to cull these deftly filtered and maneuvered populations in the prisons, in the ghettoes, in the homeless encampments, in the meatpacking plants, and so on.
In communist North Korea, the government has the largest prison population on earth and essentially engages in what amounts to biological warfare against prisoners.
I hate this stupid fucking country so fucking much :amerikkka:
shouldn't American prisoners just be called convict slaves, since they legally are
Just another form of extrajudicial punishment in police state USA
