When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States last spring, advocates immediately warned that catastrophic outbreaks would soon pummel prisons and jails due to poor medical services, unhygienic conditions, and the tightly interwoven routines of incarcerated people and prison staff. An outspoken cohort of lawyers, organizers, journalists, and incarcerated people themselves demanded bold action to mitigate the crisis by reducing prison populations, including through executive measures like commutation and clemency.

In some cases, judges and policymakers heeded the warning, significantly cutting jail populations in a number of counties using a variety of executive and judicial mechanisms. While it denied 98 percent of all compassionate release requests, the Federal Bureau of Prisons still moved almost eight thousand prisoners (or about 5 percent of the federal prison population) to home confinement.

At the state level, however, mass releases to control the spread of coronavirus were never seriously entertained. And the severe consequences were soon apparent: nineteen of the country’s twenty largest COVID-19 clusters at the end of the summer were in correctional facilities. By the end of 2020, researchers estimated that one in five incarcerated people in the United States had been infected. COVID-19 infection rates in state and federal prisons are now four times higher than in the general population, and at least 1,671 incarcerated people have died of the virus.

For the estimated 2.2 million people behind bars in the United States, the pandemic has been a period of intolerable cruelty and uncertainty. The overwhelming majority of prisoners are housed in conditions that make social distancing impossible — those who are not placed in open dormitory-style housing are typically confined in a small cell with at least one other person.

When correctional authorities have attempted to suppress the virus, it has been through chaotic and often inhumane lockdown regimes.

In federal facilities, entire prison populations have been placed periodically in solitary confinement following COVID-19 outbreaks. Some state systems enforce similar isolation routines. In virtually all facilities, outside visitation has been suspended entirely. And in a number of cases, correctional officers have retaliated against those who have voiced medical concerns; in March, for instance, guards at New York City’s Rikers Island jail pepper-sprayed a group of incarcerated people attempting to walk to a medical office.

Given these inhumane conditions, a number of officials have recognized the need for a prompt and effective vaccination program. According to data from the Prison Policy Initiative, eight states now include incarcerated people alongside other “vulnerable populations” in Phase 1 of the vaccination process. (Seven more include corrections officers, but not prisoners.)

Any humane vaccination plan would place incarcerated people high on the list of early vaccine recipients. But predictably, given the perverse power of law-and-order politics in the United States, the suggestion that incarcerated people should receive vaccines before the general public has been met with outrage and moral grandstanding.

Colorado altered its initially sensible vaccination plan after Democratic governor Jared Polis became a target of vitriol online and in conservative media. After days of relentless criticism, Polis testily announced that there was “no way” the vaccine would “go to prisoners before it goes to people who haven’t committed any crime.” In North Carolina, the state scaled back its initial plans to promptly vaccinate prisoners over sixty-five or with preexisting conditions after staff and public pushback.

Yet shouting about law and order can’t change the fact that incarcerated people are connected — intimately and extensively — to the broader society around them. By preventing incarcerated people from immediately getting the vaccine, law-and-order zealots could doom us all.