Browsing: COVID-19

“Crowded, inhumane, poorly ventilated jails and prisons and detention centers are incubators – taxpayer-funded, I should add – for the virus,” said Amanda Klonsky, the report’s author. The rate of infection highlights many structural issues within jails, the report also details.

In what is thought to be the first ruling of its kind in the nation, a federal judge has signed off on prisoners suing for damages over a state’s pandemic response and opened the door to a potentially massive liability that could cost Oregon millions of dollars to resolve,

As the country marks the two-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, the innovations in criminal justice developed during the emergency should not be abandoned by policymakers, writes the director of the Illinois Justice Project.

The Department of Justice has appointed Kevin Chambers director of a new task force after uncovering a vast level of criminal activities tied to the federal COVID-19 aid. The massive influx of cash provided by Congress in an effort to bolster families and businesses, particularly in the health care sector, has been a prime target for fraud.

At the height of the pandemic, in 2020, the number of outdoor street crimes initially rose by more than 40 percent and was consistently between 10-15 percent higher than it had been in 2019, even though the overall number of crimes was falling during that time, according to researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Pennsylvania.