The mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in California’s prisons stands out as the state’s worst-ever medical catastrophe in a carceral setting.
Fester offers a cultural history of this correctional disaster through first-person accounts, courtroom observations, policy documents, and years of carefully collected quantitative data. Bearing witness to the immense suffering wrought on people behind bars through dehumanization, fear, and ignorance,
Fester explains how carceral cruelty also threatens the health and well-being of all Californians. This book stands as a monument to the brave coalition of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, along with activists, doctors, journalists, and lawyers, who fought to shed light on one of the darkest times in the Golden State’s correctional system.
Table of Content
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 • Triggers and Vulnerabilities
2 • Petri Dish
3 • Bottleneck
4 • Elixir
5 • Incubator
6 • The House Always Wins
7 • Fear and Loathing
8 • The Next Plague
Notes
Index
About the author
Hadar Aviram is Thomas E. Miller Professor at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She is author of Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment and Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole and coeditor of The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice. Chad Goerzen is a Senior Research Scientist with the US Army Rotorcraft Project.