Prison inmates and workers will be vaccinated in the second phase of the rollout in Australia slated to begin within weeks, amid ongoing concerns of a jail outbreak.
There have been widespread ongoing concerns around the potential for the outbreak of COVID-19 in an Australian prison or other place of detention, due to the inability to socially distance in these facilities and the vulnerability individuals who are placed there.
Australia has so far avoided such an outcome, while in the US about one in five prisoners have had COVID-19, and at least 1700 people have died.
The Department of Health has confirmed that people in prison and prison workers will be included in Phase 1b of the vaccine rollout, estimated to begin within weeks.
This is despite these individuals not being included on the department’s public list of those who will be vaccinated in this phase.
“The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) has identified detention and correctional facilities staff and residents as at increased risk of virus transmission,” a Department of Health spokesperson told Inkl.
“The Australian government will continue to take advice from ATAGI on the priority of these groups. Vaccination of prisons will be administered by the states and territories as part of Phase 1b.”
Phase 1a of the Australian vaccination rollout began last week, with quarantine, border and frontline healthcare workers, aged care and disability care staff, and aged care and disability care residents to receive the first dose. Up to 1.4 million doses will be administered as part of this phase.
The department’s public website lists who will be eligible to receive the vaccine in Phase 1b: adults aged 70 and over, healthcare workers, Indigenous people aged over 55, adults with underlying medical conditions and critical and high risk workers including defence, police, fire, emergency services and meat processing.
Up to 14.8 million doses will be administered in this phase, the government has said.
The list features on the department’s website does not feature prison “residents” or workers.
ATAGI advice issued late last year recommended people in settings where the risk of virus transmission is increased should be prioritised in the rollout, with this including correctional and detention facilities, where there is an “increased risk of disease acquisition and transmission”.
There has been a slight decrease in the number of people incarcerated in Australia due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a drop of 5 percent from June 2019 to June 2020. As of June last year there were more than 41,000 people in prisons around the country.
Last year the Human Rights Law Centre said that Australian prisons were hugely risky in terms of a COVID-19 outbreak as they are “overcrowded, unhygienic and unhealthy”.
“The consequences of an outbreak of COVID-19 in Australian prisons will be devastating,” the HRLC said. “People in prison are at great risk of harm and even death should they contract COVID-19.
“Almost one-third of people entering prison have a chronic medical condition like asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes or live with disability.”
In July last year an officer employed by private prison company GEO tested positive for COVID-19, leading to six prisons around the state being placed into lockdown.
Research in the US has found that there had been over 275,000 cases of COVID-19 in prisons around the country, with nearly 2000 deaths, as of December last year. A study by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice found that the infection rate in prisons is three times higher than in the general public, and the mortality rate is twice as high.
As of December, at least one in five prisoners in the US had contracted COVID-19.
In February over 39,000 inmates became the first prisoners in the US to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in the country. There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in the country, and reports have said that it will depend on where they are detained, and whether they are in federal, state or county facilities for when they will receive the vaccine.
Denham Sadler is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne. He covers politics and technology regularly for InnovationAus, and writes about other issues, including criminal justice, for publications including The Guardian and The Saturday Paper. He is also the senior editor of The Justice Map, a project to strengthen advocacy for criminal justice reform in Australia. You can follow him on Twitter.
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