Covid and Cages: GC Researchers Map How Prisoners Responded to the Pandemic

Ph.D. student Olivia Ildefonso (left) and alumna Celeste Wilson

EES student and GC Digital Fellow, Olivia Ildefonso and EES Alum, Celeste Winston, now an assistant professor at Temple University, are featured on the GC website for their recent research that visualizes data about prison releases related to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the “COVID-19 and Cages Mapping Project”.
The incarcerated are among the most vulnerable to the coronavirus, and scholars interested in social justice see this as a convergence of two public-health issues — both the illness itself and the crisis represented by the United States’ prison population, which is the highest in the world.

“My inspiration around this project was to try to figure out how to extend the question of how do we keep people who are incarcerated safe from COVID-19, and expand that into a larger question of how to think about incarceration and police and prison abolition more broadly.”

Read more about the project here.