Pandemic & Prison

The coronavirus pandemic poses particular risk to people incarcerated in jails, prisons, and detention centers. These institutions are too crowded to practice social distancing and suffer from substandard medical care, among other problems.

This time-lapse map by Professor John Eason of the Prison Proliferation Project highlights the dramatic rate of infection in prisons between March 1 and April 5, 2020. The situation has only worsened since then.

As this March 2020 open letter to Governor Jay Inslee demonstrated, these conditions are dire in Washington prisons, jails, and detention centers. This page will gather some of the resources relevant to and generated by incarcerated people in Washington. To locate where the different prison facilities referenced are located, consult this map.

This page gathers several relevant resources, including (click the header below to go to the relevant page):
+ Testimonials from incarcerated people
+ March 2022 letters from Washington State Reformatory
+ Articles and resources

Updates from the University of Washington Bothell's Project on Mass Incarceration in Washington State