Abstract
Data from a unique survey of court-involved New Yorkers collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 provides evidence for a cycle of disadvantage involving penal control, material hardship, and health risk. We find evidence of chaotic jail conditions from March to May 2020 in the early phase of the pandemic, and high levels of housing and food insecurity, and joblessness for those leaving jail or with current criminal cases. The highest levels of material hardship—measured by housing insecurity, unemployment, shelter stays, and poor self-reported health—were experienced by those with mental illness and substance use problems who had been incarcerated.
- © 2023 Russell Sage Foundation. Plummer, Samantha, Timothy Ittner, Angie Monreal, Jasmin Sandelson, and Bruce Western. 2023. “Life During COVID for Court-Involved People.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 9(3): 232–51. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2023.9.3.10. This research was supported by grants from the William T. Grant Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the J.C. Flowers Foundation, and the Tiger Foundation. We thank the New York City Departments of Social Services and of Corrections for providing data used in this research and our study participants for sharing their stories with us. Direct correspondence to: Bruce Western at bruce.western{at}columbia.edu, Department of Sociology at Columbia University, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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