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For My"Who live, who dies, who cares" Final Paper
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Structural Violence in US and Chinese Prisons
COVID-19 is the most recent manifestation of a longstanding global health problem: terrible epidemic management in correctional facilities. Prisons were built to be suffocatingly concentrated, to hold captive the “dangerous criminals”, and this punitive attitude has led to the longtime political neglect of correctional facilities and lack of accountability in the US. It has made possible the overcrowding, poor ventilation and hygiene measures, and shared bathroom and eating facilities that make social distancing impossible--all factors that make prisons the perfect vector for COVID-19 transmission. These poor conditions have already been discussed in length by scholars emphasizing incarceration’s long term effects on mental health and growing inequality, but this paper will extend the conversation to COVID-19 and compare the US’ historically shaped criminal justice systems and health outcomes to those in China. In effect, it will argue that in both countries, for historical reasons, minority prisoners are more susceptible to COVID-19.
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In uncovering the historical context, we overturn the common misconception that these minority populations are genetically or culturally inferior, and realize the necessity of providing them access to the best healthcare, to compensate for decades of structural violence. America’s mass incarceration of young black men best illustrates such structural violence: Legal segregation, redlining, racial zoning ordinances, were all systemic methods to disenfranchise blacks and keep them out of access to good public health resources, education, etc. In China, the imperialist mindset informs the mass incarceration of Uighurs, a muslim turkish ethnic minority concentrated in China’s Xinjiang province. In both countries, the persistent and growing incarceration of women conveys the wage gap between incarcerated men and women leading to what is often described as the revolving door. Women are also more likely to be affected by mental health disorders, which is historically and even today criminalized in both countries. This biosocial analysis importantly clarifies that inmates are oftentimes from the most vulnerable segments of society (mentally ill, women, racial/ ethnic minorities), which is why it is our job to take measures to properly safeguard them from the virus. This rationale is similar to Farmer’s notion of a “preferential option for the poor” (Farmer 2013) in making the vulnerable prisoners’ access to COVID-19 supplies, testing, and vaccination a top priority.
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We must also hold criminal justice systems and policy-makers truly accountable, because as will be explored in the paper, proper allocation of hygienic supplies and accountability are two of the main underlying causes between the difference in COVID-19 outcomes in China and the US.
The numbers are scary. As of December 1st, The Marshall Project reported 225,946 COVID-19 positive prisoners within US jails, an increase of 6 percent from the week before and still likely an undercount due to the limited testing during Thanksgiving weekend. And nationwide, African Americans represent a third of hospitalized COVID-19 patients but make up only 13% of the U.S. population. In Chicago, one of the nation’s hotspots, African American make up 42% of the cases and 56% of the deaths from the virus. These reports of increasing COVID-19 infected prisoners combined with the understanding that black and female Americans are disproportionately represented in jails implore us to explore racist and sexist historical processes that have led to such a reality.
In America today, 1 out of every 3 black boys born will be incarcerated, a product of institutions profiting off of the exploitation of young black men (systemic violence) for more than two centuries.
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In the 1600s to 1800s, Africans were kidnapped and shipped to America through the triangular trade, a process in which European ships delivered manufactured goods and weapons to Africa in exchange for slaves. These African men, women, and children, would then be exploited and forced into labor as indentured servants and later slaves, producing crops such as tobacco and cotton for their white owners to profit off of. The institution of slavery was so prevalent to the fabric of our nation that it is even tacitly acknowledged in our constitution, where each enslaved individual is counted as three-fifths of a person for tax and representation purposes of the slave heavy south, not that blacks could hold office and ever represent themselves, so this policy gave more congressional power to white slave owners of the south. Even after the Civil War, after the formal abolition of slavery (13th amendment), there was reconstruction, in which states still found ways to oppress newly emancipated blacks through “black codes,” prohibiting them from learning to read and write, vote, bear arms. This was followed by legal segregation: ninety years of Jim Crow and sixty years of separate but equal, as well as thirty five years of a racist housing policy that remains the foundation for our modern ghettos.
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After city segregation was deemed illegal, racial deed covenants were used by housing associations and realtors to keep neighborhoods segregated. These were “agreements entered into by a group of property owners, sub-division developers, or real estate operators in a given neighborhood, binding them not to sell, lease, rent or otherwise convoy their property to specified groups because of race, creed or color for a definite period unless all agree to the transaction” (Silva n.d) These contracts were extremely effective because they held an owner financially liable for abiding by these racial restrictions; if these terms were violated, the owner could be sued. In Chicago, whites banned together to not sell their houses and riots led by white residents erupted out of rumors.
The federal government was, in more than one instance, guilty. The courts failed to charge violent white rioters and in 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration to give more people access to buying houses by decreasing the size of the down payment required. Ironically, this effectively barred blacks from being able to receive non predatory loans for a house of secure property value. The FHA adopted a set of maps rating neighborhoods on their “stability”, known as as redlining, where green areas were “stable” or “without a single black.” “Unstable” red areas, on the other hand, were ineligible for FHA mortgage backing. This map system eventually was adopted by the entire mortgage industry, and blacks were excluded from this huge wealth accumulation opportunity. As Ta-Nesi-Coates puts best, “black people were viewed as a contagion” (Coates 2014). Red areas, cut off from new investment, lost value, meaning the few blacks that did own homes or were able to secure loans for houses in red areas, after struggling to pay off the terms of their mortgages, could do nothing but watch helplessly as their property values dropped substantially because of the industry’s evaluation of them as a source of “instability”. In addition, between the 1950s and mid‑1960s, at least 98 percent of all Chicago’s family public-housing units were built in all-black neighborhoods, demonstrating the government’s embrace of segregation.
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This legal segregation kept blacks economically vulnerable and is a perfect example of the structural violence of deep poverty. Racist housing policies, public housing site selection, and the courts handling of the riots that came from them illustrate multiple levels of government being involved in the creation of a sophisticated, coordinated way at creating segregation where segregation hadn’t previously existed. As Jason Purnell writes, “African Americans were blocked at every turn with a comprehensive and perversely creative set of tools and techniques to separate them from opportunity” (Silverstein 2019) ; The effects of these policies are still prevalent today as red areas are unsurprisingly disproportionately black and still neighborhoods of lower income. From a health perspective, black children are also at a greater risk of lead poisoning, from the lead based paint and contaminated soil and water of both “red area” public housing and dilapidated properties, and are generally farther from full-service groceries, retail stores, education, public transportation, and health care. Lack of healthcare and education thus disproportionately disqualifies blacks from work. This systemically reinforced poverty often causes resorting to crime.
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The criminal justice system at large also seems set up to cause this disproportionate incarceration of blacks and of women. According to the NAACP, “1,025 people have been shot and killed by police in the past year” (Criminal Justice Fact Sheet 2020) but courts have only arrested 98 non-federal law enforcement officers in connection on the premise of police brutality since 2005 and to date, only 35 of these officers have actually been convicted, most often of manslaughter or negligent homicide instead of the weightier sentence of murder. Blacks are only 13.4% of the American population, but are 22% of fatal police shootings, and that does not even account for the non-lethal shootings. This can only be partially explained by innate bias, a manifestation of black criminalization and depiction as savage and inferior from America’s colonial era. The other parts can be explained by blatant racism, as in the case with George Floyd and Breonna taylor, and, as stated earlier, can be explained by the repeated a lack of accountability within the criminal justice system, whether it be in holding white rioters accountable, holding officers guilty of police brutality, or holding prison wardens accountable for their lack of proper protocol among staff exposing inmates to the virus and for their lack of extra precautions (proper supplies, social distancing measures, access to tests and first priority for a vaccine when it is supplied) taken to contain the spread in prisons. It is no wonder Black Americans have developed such a distrust of institutions. From government policies rooted in segregation, to creating segregation where it does not already exist, to criminal justice systems that fail to indict white oppressors in power (both those in government and policemen), America has historically failed them and are now continuing to do so in leaving them most at risk of the virus.
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The consequences of blacks being disproportionately represented in COVID-19 outbreak heavy jails do not stop at the jails themselves. Similar to public housing neighborhood selection, correctional facilities are disproportionately placed in low income neighborhoods, which tend to not have strong neighborhood associations and district advocates and whose voices are typically not as loud because of their high low income demographic. This means that prison staff--correctional officers, chaplains, nurses, wardens and other workers--who are at high risk because of their work in these highly contaminated, poorly ventilated, and overcrowded facilities are typically carrying it to the surrounding community, as well as back to their own communities. According to the Marshall Project, “since the start of the pandemic, more than 55,460 prison staff members have tested positive—with new cases at an all-time high the week of Nov. 24” (The Marshall Project 2020) and 105 deaths among staff have been publically reported. In the US, outbreaks in prisons are often traced back to infected staff members “who get sick before the people they oversee” (The Marshall Project 2020), with little accountability of overseers when this happens. This allows poor COVID-19 inducing staff practices to persist and reinforces the ineffective, corrupt management’s authority.
Similarly, in China, it was reported that there were 500+ cases of Coronavirus in five prisons in February. Of these reported cases, 230 were found COVID-19 positive in Wuhan Women’s Prison and 41 at Shayang Hanjin Prison, both in Hubei. In Shandong, 200 prisoners and seven guards were infected at Rencheng Prison and in Zhejiang, another 34 were found infected at Shilifeng Prison. Shayang Hanjin Prison also reported 9 suspected infections, while a single suspected case was reported at a juvenile detention centre in Hubei.
The first evidence of the outbreak at Rencheng Prison appeared on January 29th, when a guard began displaying a cough and other symptoms while on the job. He and a colleague were later confirmed as being infected with the new coronavirus. Over the next 10 days so too were 200 inmates and five more guards. Another police officer in Zhejiang, visited a hotspot in Japan, but concealed this information and kept working, explaining the spike in Shilifeng Prison.
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Unlike in the US, these reports led to a huge crackdown on senior prison officials, a strategy reflective of Xi Jinping’s Corruption Crackdown, and one that proved to be very effective. Determined to hold the former management accountable, an unspecified number of judiciary officials from Shandong were fired for failing to prevent these prison outbreaks and Wu Lei, previously head of public security of Weifang city, was appointed as the new head of its prisons bureau. The warden of the Wuhan Women’s Prison has also been fired and replaced. The community party’s attitude is best illustrated by Guo Shengkun, the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politics and Legal Affairs Commission, who states “Those in charge must plug management loopholes...The biggest risk … in the penal system is from outside, and the most effective prevention and control measure is a strictly closed management” (Rui 2020). This strategy makes sense given the fact that in both the US and China, many outbreaks are being traced back to careless jail staff, concealing information about their symptoms or travel. From the information currently available, this seems to be the root of the difference between Coronavirus containment outcomes in prisons since late February to the present in the China and the US, with China’s daily infection rate dropping steeply compared to the infection rate in US state and federal prisons, which remain on the incline.
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Although these official reports of COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons were eventually released in late February, China seems to have initially tried to be concealing the information and is still concealing information about a few other prisons gone unreported, which gives us the authority to cast doubt on their reporting, especially in regards to Xinjiang. According to Business Insider, conversation of clusters of infections in Shandong's prisons had already been swirling on social media for a few weeks when WeChat groups were banned to halt this online discussion. And according to the South China Morning Post, Tony Tang, a Jining native turned New York resident apparently learned about the spread of COVID-19 cases to Huxi Prison in Jining, in January through hometown friends. After tweeting about a potential coronavirus outbreak just south of Jining, within hours, security officials knocked at his parents' door and asked them to delete the message. “The speed of their response shows that they knew this was serious and [I felt something] was not normal," he states (Mahbubani 2020). But when this news outlet then asked the Jining Disease Prevention and Control Center, they stated they had no such information. China seems to be supplying much effort into deliberately shutting down any speculation of potential COVID-19 outbreaks, beyond the ones it is willing and ready to report. Almost too much effort, to the point at which it seems more like concealment.
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According to the China’s National Health Commission, China has dealt with three smaller outbreaks in the Xinjiang province, one on October 28th, November 19th, and another November 23rd , although the true size may be being concealed to avoid mass media publication. What is extremely interesting is that the local garment factory closely linked to the first outbreak in Xinjiang, where 183 positive cases and another 137 asymptomatic cases were discovered in Shufu county, has been linked to Uighur forced labor. Although these allegations have been denied by local Chinese authorities, this would not be the first time Chinese authorities have denied their oppressive procedures towards Uighers. The Chinese government denied the existence of more than 85 identified re-education or concentration camps in Xinjiang until images of the camps construction appeared in 2018 from which watch towers and barbed wire fences could be identified. More than 1 million Uighers were detained in such camps where they were interrogated and not “re-educated” but beaten because of their religion. After the linkage was made by western media outlets such as BBC, it makes sense that China would be extremely cautious in their press releases of COVID-19 cases in Xinjiang. Survivor reports detail physical torture, extremely unhygenic conditions, and poor medical facilities to recuperate from the abuse.
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To truly understand China’s repression of Uighurs and the government’s present speculated treatment of them, we must understand the history that informs their attitudes. In the mid 18th century, the Qing government, supported by Mongolian allies and Han Chinese officials, was able to conquer muslim eastern Turkestan, which would be known as xin jiang or “the new frontier” under the chinese empire. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Xinjiang remained a province of china’s and the muslim minority were allowed to keep their religion as a ode of respect to Mongolian allies. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, turkish people in Central Asia were able to form their own independent states: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan causing China, unwilling to lose Xinjiang and its abundance of rich oil and mineral supplies to show its imperialist nature. They enforced the “Strike Hard” campaign, in which Uighurs suspicious of supporting separatism or involved in “illegal religious activities” could be detained without trial by armed patrolling troops. Thousands of Uighurs were sent to jail, some executed in these jails, which a huge reason why Uighurs, as an oppressed minority have ended up disproportionately represented in China’s prison system. In 2017, Xinjiang government continued on this path of structural violence, making it illegal for women to wear veils and men to grow long beards and thus incriminating Uighurs for their appearance and religion. Dozens of mosques were also demolished.
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After the global condemnation of such repression at the U.N. General Assembly, China’s government recently claimed to have released all of the one million arbitrarily held Uighurs in these concentration camps, but evidence has now suggested that the majority are being subjected to forced labor or have disappeared into Xinjiang’s prisons. Many relatives living abroad still cannot reach the former detainees. The combined effects of concealment, strict censorship laws, and few but telling reports of COVID-19 outbreaks in reported forced labor factories and prisons where Uighurs are disproportionately represented by discriminatory post colonialist laws, convey the increased vulnerability of Uighurs, and would also explain the sporadic reports of small outbreaks in Xinjiang in November. In this way, Uighurs are definitely an ethnic minority comparable to the black racial minority in the US, in the government’s structural oppression and criminalization of them. Thus, this paper’s proposed solution for them will be similar.
Another important vulnerable demographic, disproportionately and unsurprisingly represented in the jails of both countries are women! Women are the proportion of society with the fastest growing incarceration rate in the US due to the more rigid drug sentencing laws. Today’s female incarcerated population is over seven times higher than it was in 1980, mostly for property and drug offenses. It is important to note than more than 60% of women in state prisons have a child under the age of 18 and serve as the sole caregivers of their children. The growing rates of female imprisonment in the US show also convey the structural violence of deep poverty as women are more likely to face poverty across all races and ethnic groups. This is due in part by parental status as single mom’s not only face stigma in the job market but also incur more expenses from supporting the child and by sexist occupation segregation of women into low paying jobs, such as housekeeping, tipping reliant jobs, and caregiving. The gender wage gap and wealth gap are still largely persistent with women, on average, making 82 cents for every $1 earned by their male counterparts. Other factors include domestic violence which causes women to lose, on average, 8 million days of paid work per year, and gender based violence that can lead to mental health conditions or using drugs as a coping mechanism.
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Female prisoners are also on the rise in China, up 46% in the last decade in comparison to the 10% rise over the same time frame for male prisoners, not even including those in juvenile detention, mandatory drug rehabilitation and forced education camps. Most of them also in for non violent crimes such as drug trafficking and taking bribes. The sexism in Chinese culture is also more pervasive because its collectivism increases the harm of stigma, as demonstrated by the concept of the leftover woman, women who are over 27 years old and are still single, often because they have chosen to be career driven instead of settling for families, and resulting in social death (Hsin 2008). The social pressure for women to prioritize their families and be entirely responsible for the social, emotional, and physical wellbeing of these families make them more likely to stop working, be dependent on the male as the breadwinner, and similarly fall prey to poverty, mental health illnesses, or domestic violence.
These vulnerabilities are only exacerbated by correctional facilities as female inmates report higher than average rates of physical and sexual victimization both by fellow inmates and correctional officers, without the extremely necessary rehabilitation or treatment services victims typically need. This gives them increased stress, which only serves to increase their vulnerability to COVID-19.
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The disproportionate imprisonment of black males in the US, comparable to the high Uigher imprisonment, and increasing rates of female incarceration convey disturbing social trends: the present criminal justice systems’ criminalizing mental illnesses instead of treating them, exploiting the poor instead of empowering them with fair wages and sustained employment, and inability of current programs to equip former inmates with enough resources to avoid re-arrest. These disproportionalities, created by centuries of systemic oppression, suggest that inmates are the most vulnerable segments of society and do not deserve the COVID-19 outbreak inducing conditions in the prisons governments have strategically placed them in. In accordance with Weber’s understanding of bureaucracy, systemic violence makes it hard to place the blame on any one person as each person is just a single cog in a machine (Weber 1946). But we can start by making sure our governments more decisively hold heads of justice (wardens, senior officers, and judges) accountable for outcomes under their authority, which from this examination of US versus China’s responses to reports of COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons and their outcomes, is a strategy we know to be effective.
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We must likewise prepare a “preferential option for the poor”, making the inmates’ access to COVID-19 supplies, testing, and vaccination a top priority because these prisoners are largely comprised of our vulnerable. 20 states still fail to require correctional staff to use masks and most of them do not require inmates to wear them. Reports by former inmates on parole also claim that their jails lacked toilet paper, prohibited alcohol-based hand sanitizer, had shared bathrooms that are not regularly cleaned, and no access to soap. If you were found not wearing a mask, that went unpunished, but if you were found with alcohol based hand sanitizer, your phone privileges and recreational time could be immediately taken away for a week. A great visualization of the government’s lack of coronavirus protection is ironically how in New York, a COVID-19 outbreak was discovered in the prison where Cuomo had inmates making hand sanitizer. After the basics, ventilation increases and access to critical supplies like soap and toilet paper that many jails faced shortages of, mental health support, and access to clean bathrooms and eating facilities are covered, then we can tackle the elimination of unaffordable parole policies, job placement, and social destigmatization, especially important in China.
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Jails are profitable industries in both countries, as inmates can be subjected to labor and even after carrying out your sentence, you must follow stringent parole terms that include paying your parole officer a monthly fee. The only difference is that in China, if your sentence is greater than 10 years, you are not even eligible for parole. In NYC and many other states, hundreds are currently still incarcerated for technical parole violations, causing decarceration to not be able to catch up to the growing correctional facility infection rates. These terms, such as sustaining employment or having a permanent address, are often unable to be fulfilled considering that the inmates are generally from low income, high crime, and already highly stigmatized against demographics by employers, which having a criminal record only aggravates. This creates a well known revolving door effect, in which released former inmates find their way back into the jail or prison system in 3 to 6 months, and are not given the support to escape it.
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This suggests that there must be far more accompaniment or support throughout the entire transition of former inmates back into society, paired with community/ government enforced destigmatization of criminal records. Transition for Jail to Community (TJC) provides some of this needed support with community based programs and track based referrals for inmates given by police departments, the courts, mental health services, and other community agencies. TJC found much success since 2008 but is still not the standard for federal prisons. It is also definitely a start, but does not rid the parole system of its monthly fee system and while providing job training, does not provide job placement and federally funded destigmatization programs for local businesses to take part in.
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