The Oh, Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Two guests today the anthropologist Eric Reinhart

will talk about how people cycling in and out of jail is spreading the coronavirus

and the sociologist Aaron Hatton will talk about chorus labor from

prisoners to surprisingly perhaps college athletes. First how our med carceral

state is helping spread COVID-19.

The role of prisons as Corona hotspots is fairly well known.

Less known, however, is the role of jails.

Prisons are places where people are held after conviction for a major crime.

Jales are where people are caged for short times after arrest and while awaiting trial.

In 2018, almost 11 million people were admitted to jails where they spent an average of 25 days.

That means there's a rapid turnover of a very large number of people.

Eric Reinhart, an anthropologist, and Daniel Chen and economist have a paper in

health affairs that estimates how that

jail turnover has resulted in the spread of COVID-19 in Chicago. That city's Cook County

Jail has achieved notoriety as a major Corona hotspot in itself, but little attention until now has been paid to how

the jail affects the city at large. Reinhart and Chen find that one in six cases of Corona in the

city can be traced to that jail and the role of the jail in spreading

the disease helps explain the disproportionate effect it's had on black people who

are of course disproportionately incarcerated. Here's Eric Reinhart with Moore. He's a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard and a candidate in adult psychoanalysis at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, Eric Reinhart.

We're all aware, or most of us are aware that the count of 2 million

people behind bars in his country. But less well known is how many people get arrested

...