The government and ruling class of the United States does not care about the plight of inmates, contributing to the soaring rate of coronavirus infections and deaths in prisons across the country, an African American journalist in Detroit says.
“Something has to be done about this, because in a prison system, you have people coming in and you have people going out all the time, so this is an incubator for even further infection of COVID-19 through the United State and indeed the world,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor at the Pan-African News Wire.
“You have a government and a ruling class that does not care about the plight of people who are in jails and prisons,” Azikiwe said in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday.
“Oftentimes, they're exploited working for slave wages,” he added. “It's also a mechanism for social containment because disproportionately most of the people who are imprisoned in the United States are African Americans and Latinos, and most people in there are poor people, working class people, very few wealthy or rich people are in prison in the United States.”
US authorities’ crackdown on prisoners during the fast-growing COVID-19 pandemic is putting inmates on edge amid concerns that the so-called correctional facilities are acting as “petri dishes” for the novel coronavirus.
Various media reports on Wednesday pointed to little or no efforts made by corrections officials to address the outbreak.
“The conditions are filthy. They are not giving us masks. The only thing they are doing is taking our temperature," inmate Travis Gary told The Baltimore Sun in a recent phone interview from the Baltimore City Correctional Center, where he’s been held on weapons and drug charges since 2017.
US crackdown on prisoners amid COVID-19 pandemic puts inmates on edge
Not taking sufficient steps to protect American inmates appears to be leading to more protests in prisons.
US prison officials thwarted a prison riot triggered by the growing fear among inmates over the spread of the deadly virus at the Lansing correctional facility in Kansas.
With dozens of prisons grappling with rapid COVID-19 spread through overcrowded quarters, the number of cases and deaths officially reported are on the rise.
The United States, with the world’s third-largest population, has now suffered the greatest number of reported fatalities from the coronavirus, ahead of Italy and Spain.
Nearly 638,000 have been infected and almost 31,000 have died in the US as of Thursday morning, according to a Reuters tally.
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