Resources

A letter on the criminalization of COVID-19 response and recommendations for Congress to address the issue.

Every day, new policies stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic are making it far easier for government and private companies to collect and share vast amounts of personal and private health information. While this data is critically important from a public health standpoint, there are many unknowns around its future use. We must be aware and informed to ensure that public health emergencies are not misused to increase deportation, criminalization, and further harm to the health of immigrant, Black, and Brown communities.

A policy proposal letter co-signed by a variety of organizations that provides recommendations to Los Angeles county law enforcement on how to handle the COVID-19 crisis.

In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Black people we fight to prepare and save ourselves and our communities. We know, like in all other crisis, that Black people will be hit hardest. We often suffer the worst because of the state’s failure to protect us and oftentimes the states targeting of us—like during Hurricane Katrina and many other atrocities. Everyday, we are still recovering from the tragic and unnecessary theft and loss of Black life. These demands are a product of collective work and reflect demands made by numerous other groups.

Many jurisdictions across the United States have issued COVID-19-related stay-at-home directives that include a variety of enforcement measures, from warnings to civil enforcement to criminal punishment. This list provides examples of how various jurisdictions are enforcing these social distancing orders. Please note that this list is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather to provide an overview of the variety of approaches to enforcement taking place across the country.

A collection of recommendations for law enforcement made by the Justice Collaborative for prevention and containment of COVID-19.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, local and state governments are key actors in protecting the United States’s most vulnerable residents. They run jails and state prisons, which are key to “flattening the curve,” they oversee court systems, they provide homelessness services, they decide whether to enforce evictions and utility shutoffs, and more. This interactive tool tracks developments of the coronavirus response in local and state governments, with a focus on what is being done — and what’s not done — to protect vulnerable populations.

The coronavirus, or COVID-19, has already been declared by the World Health Organization as a global pandemic. As the number of people infected in the United States grows exponentially, we must focus on prevention and containment in the criminal and immigration legal systems. The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) and Community Oriented Correctional Health Services (COCHS) have created the guidance in this document to protect people who interact with these systems and for the staff and personnel who work with them.

The global spread of COVID-19 has highlighted a longstanding public health emergency. Due to the lack of a public health infrastructure or social safety net in the United States, vulnerable, structurally marginalized, and oppressed people are (and will continue to be) disproportionately harmed during this crisis. This is nowhere more evident than the country’s treatment of criminalized and imprisoned people, who come from communities already subjected to state disinvestment and poor health conditions, and who are put in further danger through their contact with the criminal legal system. These demands, developed by a coalition of organizers across New York, provide a clear and urgent path to free them all and bring our loved ones home from jail, prison, and immigration detention.