A new analysis of U.S. prison mortality released Friday revealed that overall death rates in 2020 increased 77% from the previous year …. Lead author Naomi Sugie, an associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California Irvine, explained that before the study, nobody understood the actual toll of the pandemic on U.S. prisons systematically and nationally. … “We staffed a hotline and started this archival project hearing what people were going through in California prisons,” Sugie said in an interview. “And the conditions that people were describing were so dire and upsetting and really just violations of their health and, some may argue, human rights.”

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