Abolition and the Pandemic w/ Dan Berger
Dan Berger 0:01
Early in the pandemic, I think the focus was really like how do we make sure that society like figures out how, you know, as people push for, you know, elites and established institutions to respond in the way that they should, how do we make sure that incarcerated people are not excluded?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:19
Right.
Dan Berger 0:19
You know, I was hoping in the early days of the pandemic that we will get a public health approach to prison, and instead we got a prison approach to public health.
[intro theme music playing] 0:27
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:53
Welcome to the Death Panel, to support the show and get access to all of our weekly bonus episodes like our interview with Nate Holdren, author of injury impoverished, which was unlocked last week become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pre order Health Communism, and follow us @deathpanel_ So I am thrilled to welcome our guest today, Dan Berger, who is an interdisciplinary historian focusing on critical race theory, 20th century social movements, and critical prison studies, as well as a coordinator of the Washington Prison History Project. Dan, it is so nice to have you, welcome to the Death Panel.
Dan Berger 1:33
Thanks so much. I'm really excited to be here.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:34
So many have recently declared that they have decided to be quote, done with COVID. But that is a choice that is not afforded to many people. And since COVID is bad everywhere right now it means that COVID is especially bad in prisons, jails, and other congregate institutional settings. So Dan is joining us today for a COVID vibe check on carcerality because it's overdue that we have a conversation checking in with a sort of Bird's Eye overview of the politics that are going on with COVID infections, mitigation and people who are incarcerated. So I want us to start not by talking about the current landscape so much, but by looking back to a policy demand that came into play very early on in the pandemic, which Dan, you were very vocal about. This was the idea to free incarcerated people, not just because of political, moral, social and economic reasons, but to free people for the purposes of public health. So Dan, you know, as I said, you were one of the many people calling for this strategy really early on, as you phrased in a March 25 2020 research brief, quote, everything about incarceration runs counter to public health. Can you talk a little bit about your background here, and how that really brought you to make this demand so early on into COVID?
Dan Berger 2:53
Sure, thanks for that. So I've been doing different kinds of activism and work in solidarity with incarcerated people. And really, I think the correct way of framing it is I've been learning from incarcerated people first, since I was in high school. And that was one kind of early entry point into activism for me and ultimately led me to go to grad school. And I was sort of engaged in a lot of learning with and from incarcerated people that also led me to think about the history of incarceration itself. And I think now, people, to the extent people know who I am, it's often like that I'm a prison guy. But actually, to me, like I got interested in studying incarceration and understanding incarceration, both because of that personal connection, but also because I viewed myself and still view myself as a social movement historian. And I think there's no way to tell or understand the history of social movements, particularly in this country, without understanding and reckoning with the carceral state. And, and so you know, that that's been a sort of formative focus of my work.
And I've written a couple of books and a number of articles about incarcerated people, the activism of incarcerated people, you know, particularly in the civil rights and the Black Power era on into the present. And so I was by no means someone who initiated that call about freeing people, free them all for public health. But, you know, I live in Seattle, which was obviously where the first cases in the US were in the Seattle area. When first cases of COVID were discovered, and so I felt like we had kind of like a one week headstart on the pandemic response, and just as a parent of a young kid, like I just still right now, like, can remember the feeling of like the world closing in, like in early March, well, in February into early March, as like things started to close and just that sense of like, dread at a terrifying unknown that we were entering. And it was clear immediately from my own sense of dread about what was happening, like, where the, like stable jobs that could move online, like with, you know, without loss of income, you know, in a house so I could go outside if I wanted to. And, like, just think about, like, how panicked I was, despite and amidst relatively, a lot of economic stability. And I thought immediately about incarcerated people who obviously are denied all of those simple pleasures that I mentioned. And for whom social distancing, one of the main guidance of the early days of the pandemic was impossible.
There's an artist Mona Chalabi. My apologies, if I'm mispronouncing her last name, but who did a graphic for the Prison Policy Initiative, about, about social distancing, right, where she did the graphic of like, a person in a circle and said, like, this is the recommended social distancing guidelines. And then she did, here's the space available in a nursing home. And you see two people in circles that are overlapping. And then here's the space on a cruise ship. And you see two people in circles that are overlapping closer. And then here's, here's prison, and you see two people that are overlapping, like, almost touching,
Artie Vierkant 6:17
Right.
Dan Berger 6:18
There's just not the physical infrastructure to handle a pandemic. And in fact, there's the physical infrastructure to accelerate a pandemic inside of prison. And so it was just clear, immediately, and in a terrifying way like that this was going to, like, prisons, and jails and detention centers, were going to be a major vector for disease, and that it could only come into prison from the outside. And as prisons closed, closed off visiting, closed off programming, right, the only people coming in from the outside were guards.
And so it was just like, the most terrifying situation, which is a move to lockdown, cutting off from in person contact with everyone but guards. And, and that's it. And so, you know, I was, certainly felt a lot of urgency to join a large number of comrades around the country who were pushing this idea that that decarceration was urgently, necessary feels like too polite a word to say.
And like there's that without decarceration. We were courting mass death, inviting mass death. And I just want to pause for a second to say, you know, before I moved to Washington, I lived in Philadelphia for about a decade and my last couple of years, there was part of starting a group called decarcerate PA. Like the strategy of decarceration is not one that emerged with the pandemic. There have been a number of efforts for many years, both focusing on individual cases, but also focusing on state prison systems writ large about how to close prisons and how to get people out. And obviously, this was, you know, a strategy based in a politics that understood the US prison system as fundamentally and irredeemably violent, racist, ableist and oppressive.
But I think what the pandemic created, that the conditions of the pandemic created a moment where these ideas that abolitionists and other anti-prison activists have been saying for a long time, that we have too many people in prison and the way to solve that is not with more prisons, but with fewer prisoners. And, and it created just the context in which to make a very clear, very immediate claim that like this is killing us. And it was killing us before February and March 2020. But it's really going to be an accelerant of death and devastation.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:55
Right? Because I mean, one one thing that I think you and I have talked about a lot, just between the two of us is just the fact that this sort of decision about what to do in terms of like how to handle the pandemic and for people who are incarcerated was to just completely like close off contact to the outside so that all that became sort of the in and out of jail and prison facilities became the guards, right, which obviously, as we've seen, you know, throughout this pandemic, like police unions and correctional unions are, you know, some of where a lot of the, like institutional opposition to vaccine mandates come from. So, you know, it's this kind of like, you're already working with trying to free people from a situation that is a terrible place to go if you want to try and be a healthy person, right, like it is very difficult to live in the conditions of prison and not end up sicker or disabled as a result, right? Can you talk about like what some of the conditions are, that are in prison that we're already pushing? You know, these moves towards like releasing in particular, like elderly prisoners, or people who were there for like decades on non-violent offenses, and are now for example, like in their 60s, 70s. People who are particularly high risk for COVID.
Dan Berger 10:12
Yeah. So kind of thinking of how to summarize my history of mass incarceration class in one minute. But you know, I think, as many listeners probably know, right, the US has the largest prison population in the world. And there was more than 2.1. And I think more than at this point, more than 2.2 million people who are incarcerated in jails, prisons and detention centers, and that the US went on the biggest prison building boom, in world history in the 1980s and 90s, sparked by the growing rise in the prison population, beginning in the early 1970s. So, you know, when you look at like, someone like Angela Davis, and George Jackson, people that I've written a lot about, George Jackson was a radical prisoner, member of the Black Panther Party and famous author who was killed in San Quentin Prison in 1971. And Angela Davis is, remains a leading theorist of abolition, and was briefly a political prisoner herself in their early 70s. When they were writing in the early 70s, they were talking about the prison system as a sign of incipient fascism. And when they were writing that, those essays, they were about 200,000 people in prison. So in a span of, you know, less than half a century, right, because really, in the span of about 30 years, the US went from 200,000 people in prison to 2 million people in prison. And so there are lots of ways that that happened. But one of the ways that that happened was by enhancing sentences, so that's lengthening sentences for people who are incarcerated, and removing or diminishing the opportunities for parole. So both of those, right, like giving longer sentences and making it harder for people to get out, created this sort of log jam, that meant that the incarcerated population grew significantly older, relatively quicker, right. And the majority of people who are incarcerated are incarcerated as young people, right. So the vast majority get incarcerated between 18 and 25, people are going to prison as young people, but they're staying there much longer. So that's one issue. And the other issue is the cultural and political and social and economic expectations of who's in prison are such that it's people who are undeserving of freedom, which means they're undeserving of personhood, which is borne out by a terrible health care system. It's a notoriously terrible health care system. So you have all kinds of reports of, you know, people having very serious ailments from you know, appendicitis to cancer being treated with, you know, a couple of Tylenol. And there are, those are extreme, which is not to say, rare cases. But it's just a daily aspect of denying people health and of viewing people's concerns about their health, with suspicion, right, that people are just trying to get over on the state or something like that. So I knew someone who, you know, had a tooth infection and went to the dentist, and they pulled the wrong tooth, someone who's incarcerated. And by the time they took him to the dentist they pulled the wrong tooth, and he was already older when that happened, which you know, losing your teeth at any point, but particularly when you're older is a concern. And so then he lost two teeth. And so it's just like, even the basic stuff like that was not life threatening is still awful. And then the last point that I'll say for now is the food, both quality and quantity is terrible. Very high salt, very high sugar, very low on fresh nutrients, on fresh fruit, fresh vegetables. So all of that, right, causes high stress, and creates the conditions for a number of comorbidities that become, you know, again, in the context of a pandemic, that really become accelerants of death and disability.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:42
And it becomes a further way of like, devaluing the death of people who are already so stigmatized.
Dan Berger 14:48
Exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:49
Yeah. So it's like, oh, you know, oh they're all these people dying in prison, but like, oh, they had comorbidities, so you know, like ignoring the fact that obviously like prison is contributing to that significantly.
Dan Berger 15:00
Exactly
Phil Rocco 15:01
Yeah, I mean, it occurs to me that the situation with COVID in prisons is symptomatic of broader ways in which the working class is disorganised. I mean, prisons are an amazing way of disorganizing the working class and dividing them and separating them and literally locking them up. But it also seems symptomatic, that when we talk about deaths from COVID, if there's any focus on specificity beyond sort of the geographic location, it tends to be in terms of generically stated comorbidities, deaths pulled from the future that we talk about. Far less often, I think we and we've noted this in the beginning is actually what the context is in which people die, and what, you know, how we house people and where they are, and even where they work. Data about that, as far, you know, and even in states like Wisconsin, literally suppressed workplace data about COVID deaths. So I'm wondering, and so, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, one of the things that we, pretty early on there was this study about Cook County Jail, and just the sheer volume of COVID cases that had just emerged from Cook County Jail, like in the state of Illinois, like a huge percentage of them. So I'm wondering if you could, you know, sort of talk about the way that this, this issue is, like, we have, there are many different ways of like it, as they used to say in 2020, bending the curve. And, you know, but some of them, were sort of like on the table, others were off. I'm wondering if you could talk about how, you know, being part of this movement, the issue of the fact that like, we just have institutions in society that are, that consign people to a fate of early death...
Dan Berger 16:51
That's right.
Phil Rocco 16:51
And disease.
Artie Vierkant 16:54
Perfectly constructed as pandemic tinder boxes.
Phil Rocco 16:58
Yeah, they're calibrated to do it. Yeah, they're tinderboxes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:01
Especially in a viral pandemic, not to mention all the other pandemics that have been a problem within the walls of prisons.
Dan Berger 17:05
Right, exactly.
Phil Rocco 17:07
So, you know, I'm just like curious how it's something that like, I think, was maybe obvious to us, but I think prison deaths and prison infections from COVID, is barely mentioned, you read it in the kind of publication like ProPublica. Not, it's nowhere near the top of any sort of media agenda. So like, how did you guys? Or how do people in the abolition movements, begin sort of talking about this and sort of bringing this, trying to make this an issue for sort of more immediate urgent action?
Dan Berger 17:38
Yeah, great question. And there's a few different things I want to say in response, one, about you mentioned Cook County Jail, and I think there was, you know, rightly and urgently, a lot of attention to both Cook County Jail and Rikers Island jail, early in the pandemic, and in some ways to the extent carceral institutions come up like those two continue to be, continue to come up because they are such massive jails and have been such massive vectors of disease. And it's worth just acknowledging the difference between prisons and jails for a second.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:38
Yeah.
Dan Berger 18:13
In case folks aren't thinking about that, because I was talking a lot about prisons in terms of people being, you know, being senior citizens and spending, you know, 50 60, 500 years in prison, having these kind of lengthy sentences, and that's prison, right. Prison is about stasis that you're stuck in that place for however many years, even if it's five years, but you're stuck. You may be transferred between prisons, but you're still stuck. Jails are much more about churn, right, that people move in and out of jail. And jails are largely for people who have not yet been convicted. And, or they've been sentenced to short sentences. So that's how you end up in jail. And so jail has everything to do with who was most like precarious in society, like who's most exposed to the violence of law enforcement, and who's granted the least benefit of the doubt in any of those encounters. And so precisely because places like Cook County Jail and Rikers are so massive, you know, coming, are just the kind of Vanguard sites where racist urban inequality manifests. But people are still moving in and out, they became just profound and well, and they're more crowded than prisons, because the idea is people are here for a short time and so there's, you know, they're, they're crowded in cells together like there's even less attention to programming and things like that. And so they just became such profound disease transmission tinderboxes as Artie was saying. That was really shocking. Not surprising, if you think about jails or public health or both or their intersection. But still quite shocking, right. I don't have it in front of me. But by late March, April, there were, you know, very high percentages of particularly Cook County Jail and Rikers were testing positive for COVID. And for a while, you know, the New York Times was tracking like COVID clusters and COVID outbreaks, like the, what were the sites of concentrated COVID outbreaks. And as late as August of 2020, it was something like 85% of the top 50 places were jails, prisons, or detention centers.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:38
Right.
Dan Berger 20:39
And the remaining were meatpacking plants.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:42
Which is again, you know, conditions of like effected environment, right.
Dan Berger 20:47
Exactly
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:47
Because in the meat packing plant. You also have people like really close together, you have the like, the temperature turned low, you have people who are like working for very, very low wages, this is like the same kind of situation where if you have people in these settings that are unsafe, right, and you either hold them for a long time with no way to protect themselves, no way to get out and like no recourse there, right? And no space, that's a problem, right? But as we like put people into these scenarios in the like, other forms that they exist, right? Because like carcerality is this big spectrum of like, beautiful, different iterations of horrible shit, right? And, and it's like you, you put people in this powder keg of infection, right? It's basically a space that if you were trying to design a space to get people infected with a respiratory disease, it would be the perfect space, right? You don't have a lot of ventilation, there's not a lot of personal room, people don't have access to personal private space, they don't have access to places to really sleep and rest, they are stressed. They have like no personal hygiene tools given to them, right? This is, this is really like you're asking for disease to spread in these circumstances. It's a like, proactive form of like biological punishment, right? This deprivation. And what that does is we cycle people in and out because we have this propensity for liking to, you know, round people up, catch them for whatever reason, and put them in jail, right? For pretrial detention, to hold people until they're even judged guilty or not, when people are released back into the community for whatever reason, right? They like bring whatever they've been exposed to home, right, if they've been exposed recently. And so it's become this sort of great avenue of watching the carceral state's impact sort of flow from jails, which is something that like we all know, happens, but is harder to see when it doesn't come connected to the sort of epidemiological trace of how these infections like move from these facilities into like the broader, you know, free world, so to speak.
Dan Berger 22:46
Exactly. And we've had like, this is not the first rodeo with this kind of thing. Like I know you all had Steven Thrasher on recently, like there's a lot of research about jails and prisons being vectors for the spread of HIV, and particularly in the 80s and 90s. There's other histories of jails and prisons, spreading tuberculosis. And in fact, that's come back recently in Washington, and there's a TB outbreak at a prison, as well as a COVID outbreak. And everything you were just saying Bea about, you know, you couldn't design a more perfect incubator of, you know, a transmissible respiratory virus, just to add one more point to it is that the prison systems, really, throughout the pandemic, were still transferring people, between institutions. And, you know, any, as bad as the test and trace kind of dynamics have been on the outside, I mean, just non existent inside. There was one other thing I want to say, which is, I think early in the pandemic, I think the focus was really, for me, anyway was like, how do we make sure that society like, figures out how as people push for, you know, elites and established institutions to respond in the way that they should. How do we make sure that incarcerated people are not excluded?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:06
Right.
Dan Berger 24:06
As that's usually like, has been at least one of the work of abolitionists, right is that there's all there's, you know, there's work around Medicare for All there's work around, voting rights, there's work around... fill in the blank. And usually people don't think about incarcerated, detained and confined people. So like we have voting rights, but like, well, not if you're in prison, obviously. But there are all these kinds of ways that even like some people on the left, and certainly within the sort of mush of mainstream sort of political parties, that people just accept these sort of carceral exclusions, and so I think that strategy early on was like, making sure that incarcerated people were included in any kind of reasonable public health approach that happened. So that meant, you know, incarcerated people needed to be given masks, they need to be given hand sanitizer, like basic things that were such the like messaging of how to keep yourself safe from the pandemic that were major fights. And I think some of the ways that those fights happened were through protests and demonstrations and petitions on the outside. I think a lot of how it happened was lots of people who are in prison went on strike, they tore up their units, they did engage in different kinds of protests and uprising inside the prison. And then there was a third approach, which were lawsuits, and there are a number of lawsuits that happened, including one here in Washington, that, you know, was virtual, because the courts were virtual. And that the attorney from Columbia legal services, who brought the case on behalf of people incarcerated in Washington, demanding decarceration said, like, in his opening statement was like, the reason for this case, is the reason why we are meeting virtually.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:01
Right.
Dan Berger 26:02
Like a very clear, very simple point. And they lost, and part of why it lost, it was close, you know, State Supreme Court, and I forget how many justices are on it, but it was like three to two. You know, it was one vote difference. But still, they lost, and part of why they lost is that the state's perspective was well, to honor this request would mean releasing most people in prison.
Artie Vierkant 26:32
Right.
Dan Berger 26:35
And so it just like, it was very clear.
Artie Vierkant 26:38
Makes you think.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:39
Yeah.
Dan Berger 26:41
Exactly, like, and this has been what has been the most, like, just emotionally devastating part of it. Even though it's not surprising, but just like, they just wanted to defend the status quo. Like they just, like it wasn't a we can keep people safe this way and that way, it was like, yeah, like to do that would mean like this whole system is wrong.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 27:06
Right.
Dan Berger 27:06
Like, it's not about nonviolent offenders or violent offenders. Like it's just this thing is wrong, like, and it's unsustainable, and it's unsustainably wrong. It's like catastrophically wrong. And that was the argument to keep so many people locked up, and it won, right? I mean, I think, you know, lots of states engaged in some very targeted small scale releases, but they were targeted and small scale, and even then it was defending the cruelest aspects of the system. So in Washington where, you know, I'm using just because I lived here and I live here and paid close attention to these things. And it's not any more or less shocking than anywhere else, in some cases, less shocking than other states. But in Washington, when the state did release a couple of hundred people, you know, it, the governor issued a resolution with the like, you know, whereas whereas, therefore, so it was whereas COVID-19 particularly affects people who are older, whereas it affect people who are close together, whereas it affects people who have all these comorbidities.
Artie Vierkant 28:13
Right.
Dan Berger 28:14
Therefore we are releasing this group of people who are within, you know, I forget three months of release...
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:21
Oh My God.
Dan Berger 28:22
.... who were convicted of nonviolent crime.
Phil Rocco 28:25
And were gonna own a small business...
Artie Vierkant 28:26
Operate in a disadvantaged community and receive a Pell Grant.
Dan Berger 28:32
Exactly, exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:34
They have to have never applied for welfare before they went to prison.
Dan Berger 28:36
It's like even on your own stupid, like your own understanding of the dangers this disease poses, like you're not meeting that because the prison population has been so punitive to target people who, you know, I've been in events in the Washington prison system where like they asked, like, everyone who's over 65 to stand up, and you see this like, group of, you know, 10 to 15 men like on dialysis, like in wheelchairs, on walkers. Like, it's just devastating. And like, and those are people who are not within three months of release and do not have, were not convicted of a non violent offense. And so from the state's perspective, like, forget about it. it's just very, very bleak. But surprisingly open. Like there wasn't a safety argument. To release people would call into question the system itself.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:38
Right. I mean, I think that's tremendously telling, right? Because you have this situation where even in their acknowledgement, like of okay, whereas like COVID is a threat to older people. They're still saying, you know, we have to make these sort of categorical slices of only releasing, you know, the most unimpeachable nonviolent offenders and this sort of frame of like, you know, what's called the, quote, non non nons. Right? The people that are the most sympathetic cases, right? Like that's sort of been where any relief has been targeted at all that actually came through, correct?
Dan Berger 30:13
Yeah, I mean, there have been some exceptions to that. But in terms of any sort of collective relief, that is absolutely correct. That is absolutely right.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:23
So for people who might not know, what is what is a non non non?
Dan Berger 30:27
Yeah, this is what the political scientist Marie Gottschalk has termed the kind of dominant framework of prison reform in the last decade or so, which is that it targets the non violent, non serious, non sexual offenses. So that the idea of who is available to benefit from any kind of, quote unquote, prison reform needs to meet those categories. And it is the sort of lowest common denominator response of what Republicans and Democrats will agree, you know, constitutes an excess in the carceral system. And there are many problems with this. Among them, is that you could release everyone who meets that non non non criteria tomorrow, and the US still has the biggest, most punitive prison system in the world. Like, there are lots of people who are in prison who were convicted of a violent offense. In some cases no harm may have happened. It could be gun possession, it could be whatever. Like, there are lots of things that might be, you know, prosecuted as some form of violence. Much more violence occurred. But to be frank, in the vast majority, some violence occurred, like some harm happened. And that doesn't mean people should be allowed to be just sacrificed to a pandemic.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 31:54
It doesn't mean that they also like deserve to be exposed with no protections. Right?
Dan Berger 31:58
Exactly. I mean, you know, I would argue it doesn't mean that they deserve to be in prison.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:02
Exactly, agree.
Dan Berger 32:02
There are other forms of responding to harm, and I think a lot of abolitionists have been really focused on that for a long time. And I think, I mean, just, you know, my earlier point about like, making sure that incarcerated people were included in any kind of public health, like this, I think has been the work of abolitionists, right, that like, we can't carve out this like, some people are undeserving of health care or economic security, because they are irredeemably bad. Like, the reason why people engage in violence often is a result of economic and social deprivation. And so we need to understand things like Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal and any kind of emancipatory framework as also an abolitionist, or at least a decarceral framework, right? That like when we provide for everybody people are not precarious. When people are not like feeling like they are being sacrificed. The wonderful scholar and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore summarizes this by saying where life is precious, life is precious. And what the carceral system is fundamentally premised on is where life is disposable, life is disposable. And that's why I think the abolitionist demand has always been about yoking the kind of world that we are building, you know, sort of universal social goods, and you know, as well as like, you know, anti racist, disability justice, feminist and queer radical approaches with a reckoning that the carceral system is fundamentally incompatible with those things.
Artie Vierkant 33:53
And I'm glad that you bring it back to this because I think this gets to something kind of fundamental about something that we talk about all the time on the show with regards to like vulnerability and how vulnerability is produced by these systems specifically. I mean, we've obviously been talking over the course of this conversation about the fact that carceral institutions and congregate facilities and all of this stuff are specifically drivers of the pandemic or create the perfect conditions, also create these vulnerabilities. I think it's important to cite just a couple of like, pull out a couple of really specific, I guess, data points on that or something. Since everyone loves to say, I don't know I'm just thinking about how pedants like David Leonhardt or something operate on this register of like, oh well here's this like statistic about like a vulnerability index, therefore, like children are invulnerable to COVID, or whatever. It says a lot about the role of prisons and jails, the role of carceral settings in society, that for example, this is citing from an Eric Reinhart piece in health affairs, that over the course of the pandemic incarcerated people have faced 5.5 times higher risk of contracting COVID than those in the general US population. And after adjusting for age, sex and race or ethnicity they have three times the COVID mortality rate. I mean, you mentioned before, even how, you know, centers of greatest outbreak, things like, I think as of September 2021, like 90 out of the top 100, highest traced outbreak settings were carceral institutions. You know, and I think this is important to highlight, because, again, to kind of get back to this idea of sort of producing vulnerability, but also being the sort of like engine prolonging and exacerbating the pandemic itself. I think one of the reasons we wanted to have this conversation is I think that like, even us for all that we talk about how like, well, you know, obviously, there are so many other things that we need to do in this country to actually combat the pandemic, like increasing, you know, layering more NPIs on top of things, doing things like paying people to stay home, even those things also, like can only go so far without prison abolition, because...
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:06
Yeah.
Dan Berger 36:06
Exactly.
Artie Vierkant 36:07
Even as people might want to think that like, prisons and jails or carceral settings of any kind are like these things that exist out of society or whatever, that like people are totally cast out of society or something, there is no such thing as like, not living in a society, if you will.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:26
Especially if you're being held captive.
Artie Vierkant 36:30
Right and if you're being held captive by that society. And it this, what I mean by that is, I think, really well illustrated by just a couple of key things. One is that, for example, you know, you talked about the difference between prisons and jails. Jails, where people are sort of, it's constructed so that people are basically, you know, churned in and out of them. The scale of that jail cycling, the scale of jail churn is pretty staggering. It's something like 55% of the US jail population turns over every week.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:58
Which like that, in and of itself, could drive a viral respiratory pandemic, right? If we continue to treat people like in this way, like they're an Amazon package?
Dan Berger 37:08
Yeah. I said 2 million people are incarcerated, that's on any given day. And that's prisons and jails. But just looking at jails, 10 million people get in and out of jails in the US every year.
Artie Vierkant 37:21
Exactly. And you know, and that's also not to count all of the many people for whom this is like their site of employment, where it's, there's a population of at least like 400,000, people who work as guards in carceral institutions.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:37
Right. Who go home at the end of the day.
Artie Vierkant 37:38
They go home at the end of the day, there's a profound amount of movement in and out of these spaces that we like to think of as just like... or that, you know, certain parts of society like to at least portray as this sort of like black box that people funnel into.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:51
Right, like it's static or whatever. Yeah, I mean, I think people like to think that if there's like scientific and policy consensus behind an idea, or behind some sort of obvious vector of COVID transmission, right, that we would rise to the occasion and do something about it, in theory, because the fact of the matter is, like, it's pretty clear, you know, regardless of like, what you think about whether somebody deserves to be in prison like, which, like I disagree with, like, categorically, like, you cannot have a COVID response without freeing people from sites of mass incarceration, you cannot actually mitigate the pandemic without also seeking to mitigate and address the needs of incarcerated people, right, and making those people like socially disposable doesn't make it go away. Right, like the fact that we are like, condemning people to slow death and then depriving them of like further resources during like a plague.
Dan Berger 38:43
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, just time and again, right. Everything about the pandemic response in this country has underscored, highlighted, bolded, italicized the idea that you can't pick and choose Public Health, like it's for everybody, or it doesn't work. And just like last week, I think I saw some headline about you know, Biden administration are once again, weighing whether to vaccinate asylum seekers. Like just all of this like triangulation about deservingness and disposability is like literally killing us. And the us certainly includes people who are incarcerated, it includes asylum seekers, it includes everyone, but even just from a self interested, like perspective, like if you're a terrible person, you still need not just want, like you still need for incarcerated people, and detained people to be safe. Otherwise, there's nothing like you can't get away from it. Right? I mean, I think the pandemic like started in urban areas and has been more [inaudible]. And first, you know, Seattle than New York, right? Of the density of these urban spaces. And so it was further, easier to sort of write off incarcerated people since at least those in prison are mostly in rural areas, rather than those in jail more in urban areas. And now we see the pandemic like decimating rural areas, because, of course, that's like, that's how viruses work. And just very, you know, the mantra of the Trump administration, the mantra of the resistance to the Trump administration, and the critique of the Trump administration on the pandemic was like, trust the science, trust the science. And it was like, well, abolition is a science, or at least decarceration. Like that is a science. And the attempt to just pick and choose was and is so both maddening and at such a high human cost
Phil Rocco 40:53
Trust the science. I mean, there was always a caveat. It was trust, the science that...
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:58
Trust our science.
Phil Rocco 41:01
Well not even that. It was like trust the science in as much as it doesn't interfere with the institutions that we really don't want to change. And that's not just prisons, obviously. It's like, don't trust the science, as long as that doesn't interfere with like, middle class professionals being able to go, you know, like, go and have fun and get their treats. And trust the science, as long as it doesn't interfere with the productive capacity or the interest, or even just the perceived productive capacity as perceived by the US Chamber of Commerce.
Artie Vierkant 41:37
Yeah. That's why you have to fill out a three page form to get reimbursed for a COVID test by your private health insurance.
Phil Rocco 41:45
But I mean, and when it comes to prisons it's trust the science but this population is somehow this is a, you don't have to think about this population as somehow part of the overall problem. That's not, it's not even like in the numerator.
Artie Vierkant 41:59
Well, and I think it's important to actually pause there and mention how, I think, one of the ways that this can work. And one of the tactics for frankly making it harder for people to make abolitionist claims is the fact that like it is very difficult to even get a lot of basic information out of these places. Like the last best estimate for how many people had gotten COVID-19 in carceral facilities was like 600,000. And it was from like, April 2021, or something.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:31
Right and then of course, we know that it's like, that's also like a definitely smaller number, because access to testing is like non existent as well.
Artie Vierkant 42:39
Well and then on top of that, we also don't know, I know that like some people listening, I don't know, frankly, might not think about carceral settings a lot. But like, I think if you asked kind of a random Biden voter, they might think like, oh, yeah, everyone who's like, incarcerated has gotten like a vaccine and a booster dose offered to them. Right or something. And that's like, we absolutely, there's actually like a lot that we just do not know about that. I think there are also even there's, for example, recent, I think, in December, a report from the Prison Policy Initiative, a briefing from them. That said, they have no evidence that over 40 states are providing booster doses, to incarcerated people at all. And just in general, and that, you know, that's probably one of the biggest figures out of a much bigger report that is about how little we actually know about both incarcerated people being given vaccines and vaccine uptake among people who work in carceral settings.
Dan Berger 43:43
Exactly. I'm glad that you mentioned Prison Policy Initiative. I think that's one of the organizations that's been doing a lot of really great work and data collection. I also want to call people's attention to the UCLA COVID Behind Bars data project, and which has been another really impressive site for both gathering data. And then more recently, they've been doing a lot of data visualization that's helpful. But the fact that it is incumbent on these, you know, like academic centers that form or on nonprofit organizations, like Prison Policy Initiative to do that kind of data work really speaks to, like a fundamental disregard for understanding carceral settings as sites of disease transmission. And the thing about vaccines and prison I mean, there was like a two month long debate about should states and should the federal government prioritize people in prisons and jails, and just like a very, just grim times for again basic, it's not even decency, like just basic self preservation. But the result of that, particularly following after months and months of, again, you know, fights over access to PPE and hand sanitizer, and so many other things in prison. Like there's also a lot of distrust among people who are in prison about should they get the vaccine because they didn't want to give it to us and now they do want to give it to us and like, should we trust this, if it's okay? And, you know, the people that I know who are incarcerated all got vaccinated, but certainly reported a lot of people who were hesitant at first, precisely because they had been so disregarded the whole time. And it seemed like the state didn't want to give them the vaccine. So why the change of heart? You know, just all the ways that like, when you treat people as disposable, like it doesn't endear them to you, to thinking that you have their best interests at heart at any moment.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:46
Yeah, I mean, if all we do is punish people, if you turn around and hand them a vaccine, they're not going to believe you that it's not punishment.
Dan Berger 45:52
Exactly. And because the only way that prisons really have, to do COVID mitigation is lockdown. People are really reluctant to get tested, or are really reluctant to report symptoms because they don't want to get thrown in solitary for being like exposed to a disease not of their own volition. And so just again, everything about that institution is working against public health.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:21
I mean when we say lockdown too, I want to be very clear, that we're not talking about like what you know people like talk about when they say oh, you know, the US is doing lockdown.
Artie Vierkant 46:29
Draconian lockdown.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:31
Draconian lockdown.
Artie Vierkant 46:32
Draconian mitigation measures.
Phil Rocco 46:33
I have to talk to the person at Panera through a plexiglass.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:39
Yeah, yeah, no, that's like, absolutely not what's been happening. It's been like depriving people of the opportunity to contact and see their loved ones, right? Like some prisons ended like video visits as part of their lockdowns, which is just absurd, right?
Artie Vierkant 46:54
Yeah huge site of COVID transmission, video calls. That's why Zoom did so well over the course of the pandemic.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 47:02
Lockdowns are involving, you know, taking people that are suspected to be sick and putting them all in one tiny room. Right? You know, it's, it's kind of like prison mitigation, like tools, right, which are actually actual draconian lockdown strategies, right, that do more actually to make people unsafe, because they're like not giving people medical care. There have been like, reports of people who are sick with COVID. And then instead of being transferred to like a hospital unit, they're just transferred to a different prison. Or they're released from jail if they're like, they're sick, like people have just been, like, released back into the community so that it's like, not on the police. And this is not like a fringe view. I mean, the, I loved this statement from like, October 24 2020. It's a policy statement from the American Public Health Association, where they say also, you know, in terms of like advancing real public health interventions to COVID, we need to address like the carceral system and beyond like the sort of immediate locales of prisons and jails, we need to like limit police contact with the public. Right? Like, and this is a huge component of it, too, because as we were talking about early in the episode, you know, a lot of guards are unvaccinated, and they're bringing things in asymptomatically. And breakthrough infections do happen. And when you have a captive population, where any mitigation is throwing people into a room together, and not giving them access to like anything to get well, or better or rest, right, you're not going to have a very good time if you get sick while you're inside.
Artie Vierkant 48:32
Well and outside, also, as we've said many times, because you brought up policing, I mean, the especially the fact that clearly it is a you know, a big thing that police officers have remained unmasked throughout the country as sort of like a political and ideological statement, that entire institution, obviously, is, has been over the course of the pandemic, itself acting as this increased vector of spread, and is like, you know, even more like, obviously, you know, we've made I think, no bones about saying on Death Panel before, that, like obviously, even outside of the context of the pandemic, police are a public health threat, but like, in yet another way, police are a public health threat.
Dan Berger 49:15
Yeah, and same, you know, in prison, like they're supposed to wear masks, but you know, if you are incarcerated, and you're not wearing your mask correctly, you might get put in lockdown. You might get sent to solitary. You might like get in trouble in some way. But if you are a guard, and not wearing your mask correctly, or at all, like whatever.
Artie Vierkant 49:34
Yeah. That's just Tuesday.
Dan Berger 49:35
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:35
Yeah.
Dan Berger 49:36
Exactly.
Phil Rocco 49:37
Call that Tuesday.
Dan Berger 49:38
Exactly. And, you know, there's one other thing that I was thinking about since you all invited me on that it reminded me of, well, I said this to Bea, and I said this on Twitter, like, you know, I was hoping in the early days of the pandemic that we would get a public health approach to prison, and instead we got to prison approach to public health. But as I was thinking about this episode I was reminded that early in the pandemic prison systems, at least ones that I was paying close attention to, because of where I knew people, were actually doing better than usual in some amount of data transparency about the infection rate, like on their websites for listing things. And I have a very dear friend in New York who has since been released, thankfully, but he was calling me to ask me to look at the website about how many infections are at his facility.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:30
Because why would you give it, access to people inside, right? They don't need that. Like they don't deserve that data.
Dan Berger 50:37
Yeah, I mean, it's just It actually took me a minute to realize what was happening because I, you know, I had done other research for him in the past, like I, you know, anything I could do to help, of course, blah, blah, blah, like, I just didn't realize how twisted it was that like I had better information about his context than he did. And I think we see that, you know, again, like the attempts to limit testing, the attempts to like not, like, not report what results, and like all of the stuff. I really think was done in prisons and jails and detention centers first, and just like the ability to like get away with mass disposability, in a targeted sense with regards to people who are confined, and then becomes our larger public health strategy. And, you know, always there were dimensions of that, of course, throughout, but just in the, like, the sort of collective giving up among elite institutions, just seems to flow from like, well, we already know, like, we can just disregard people. So we might as well like do that for everybody.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 51:50
Right. No, and I think it's also important too, because like, while, you know, I'm like very adamant that I think you cannot like actually advocate for like a COVID strategy that works, right without doing something to seriously address and like decarcerate our prison system and our entire, you know, sort of shut down our entire, like, jail cycling practice, right, because these are not like things that are necessary for health, for safety, per se. And what they're doing actually is making us more unsafe, but I thought that that example of like the court ruling from early on, that said, basically, you know, we can't release people, because then we'd have to admit that mass incarceration is wrong, and we can't do that. So, you know, it's like, these are the kinds of things it's like, letting people go has become like a lost NPI. It's become this sort of forgotten NPI that I would love to see folks advocating for more now, because, you know, Dan, you sent me this great study that came out, it's a preprint, the COVID 19 pandemic amplified long standing racial disparities in the United States criminal justice system. And the study was looking at, you know, the releases that did happen, because as we've talked about, some releases did happen from long term, you know, prison confinement scenarios. But in the releases that did happen in response to COVID, like these disproportionately did not benefit people of color. And the study found that quote, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of incarcerated people in the United States decreased by at least 16%, the largest, fastest reduction in prison population in American history. But as I say, there was this distinct statistical bias in the data regarding who was actually released. So they write, quote, using an original dataset curated from public sources on prison demographics across all 50 states, and the District of Columbia, we show that incarcerated white people benefited disproportionately from this decrease in the US prison population. And the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino people sharply increased. This pattern deviates from a decade long trend before 2020 and the onset of COVID-19, during which the proportion of incarcerated Black people was declining. So you know, as we're seeing, even these sort of targeted interventions, because of our limited imaginary of like, who we can even allow to be released, if we're not like willing to publicly admit that mass incarceration is a fucking failure.
Artie Vierkant 54:13
Also, I just want to say that study that you're talking about, the figure that it puts with that statement that you're reading is pretty dramatic, because it shows this basically, you know, over time, the percentage of incarcerated people who are Black dropping and dropping and dropping and dropping, and then just suddenly, as the pandemic hits, there is a dramatic spike up. And I do want to say, you know, it's not actually, maybe I'll put that study and I'll host it in the Death Panel server, because it's interesting to look at, it's not quite just as simple as who was released. It's also about things like, because so much of the process with the court system stalled in different states and obviously, you know, every state has a different approach to this, because in our lovely federal system there's a high amount of variability around all of these things. But in some states, they look at a couple of case studies, for example, they do highlight a couple of states, like Arkansas, for example, where disproportionately when they did allow people to be released early, it was disproportionately white people who did get released relative to the overall percentage of white people in the, like incarcerated in Arkansas itself. And so the specific number on that is 72% of those who are incarcerated, who are eligible for release were white. That's of a overall like, 57% of the prison population was white. So it's like...
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:40
It's pretty staggering.
Artie Vierkant 55:41
It's clearly not representative simply of, you know, who's in the prison system.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:46
Yeah, it's biased who's in there. It's biased who's staying in there.
Dan Berger 55:49
Right. And, you know, that was one of the most depressing things about the article. The other most depressing thing about it to me was that most of the decrease owed more to the backlog of the court system shutting down than it did to actual decarceration. Right. So like we had a decrease, because, in part because some people were like, oh, but in part because the expected growth of like normal functioning incarceration in the US slowed due to the court systems moving to virtual and closing for, and lo and behold, like, we've seen the prison systems, the numbers of people incarcerated in the last year, like rise, both at federal levels and at local levels. It's just very, it's just very grim. And that you know it reminds me of what, you know, Phil, you were saying earlier about the ways in the prison system as one of the larger carceral system is like, serves to disorganize, you know, particularly those who are already disorganized, and more precarious, but certainly, with regards to class, but also equally race. And, you know, we had to fight so much to like get to make sure that incarcerated people were eligible for vaccines that like, the attention to like the decarceration went by the wayside, right? Like we had to fight so much like to get Biden to, like, not re-incarcerate the federal prisoners who were released to home confinement under Trump, to not send them back to prison, when the quote unquote, emergency ended, that we lost sight of like, well, why are they on home confinement? Like just let them go. And let more people go. And it's not that there aren't still people making those demands? Like there absolutely are. But I think the kind of, you know, attention economy to the danger the carceral systems pose, and to the demands like, you know, where people were saying, like, vaccinate and release, like, give people the shot and then let them go.
Artie Vierkant 57:55
Yeah.
Dan Berger 57:55
And that's like, the best thing you could do for public health, not one or the other. And so yeah, just the kind of zero sum thinking that, you know, that's so pervasive and so dangerous, but also, then it leaves us like fighting for the bare minimum. Again, I think the value of the abolitionist approach is refusing the bare minimum, actually, often for what we really need. But I think the kind of capacities to do that work and the infrastructure to do that work, you know, is not as robust as it was in the early days of the pandemic.
Phil Rocco 58:32
But also recognizing, I think the value of that approach is that, unlike the, I think, 20th century liberal approach to public policy, which is, you know, you use sympathy for unforeseen events or emergencies as a way of justifying public policy. Here, you say, Look, this is a system that was already by its design, the problem here is not that this is like, relief from some emergency the system that needs to change the system that needs to be abolished is the thing that helped produce the emergency. It was not this temporary kind of relief thing that ends when the emergency ends. It's the thing is, this created the crisis, or certainly helped to make the crisis worse than it otherwise would have been.
Dan Berger 59:26
Exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:27
And I think part of the thing too, is that because of the way these locales are, you know, engineered, right, the perspectives of people who actually like have to live inside of these facilities are often like very easily overlooked. I mean, this was the entire strategy in the United States for many years. There were things called ugly laws where you couldn't be like visibly disabled in public and there were laws against vagrancy and begging more than anything else. And so the sort of idea was that really like it was okay to sort of exist as one of these people, but that we really didn't want to like have to, like see people that made us visually uncomfortable, right as part of the member of the body politic. And like, in very much the same way, when people are taken to prison, like the intent is to invisiblize those people, it's to like discount their perspectives, it's to like stigmatize their advocacy, and their perspectives, so their political beliefs, and it like not only takes away their freedom, but like literally makes them, you know, makes any communication that they have with anyone completely surveilled, and sort of subject to mediation by the state. And it's an incredibly powerful force. But, you know, as you mentioned early on at the top, like you, you do have friends who are inside right now you have been in contact with them. And you have a statement from your friend, Stevie, that I was wondering if you'd be down to read and sort of explain and give sort of a little context for this?
Dan Berger 1:00:53
Yeah. Thanks for that. You know, I think one of the things that's so concerning about the fact that, you know, we've gone from this moment where, like, The New York Times, and all these other places were like, at least sort of starting to recognize or at least give voice to people who did recognize the dangers that carceral systems pose in a pandemic, to now just going back to the usual, prisons are bad, prisons are for bad people, and so we just shouldn't talk about them. So, and but of course, the pandemic still rages within these institutions as it does everywhere. And so what that means is that the kind of pandemic management strategies that prison systems have unravelled, or you know, the pandemic management strategies that prison systems are using, are being entrenched, right? It's that classic state of exception becomes the norm. While attention moves on, so that means, you know, visits in many places either aren't happening or are only happening remotely, you know, there's not educational programming, there's like, there's not any of the thing, or there's not many of the things that made life bearable for people incarcerated, combined with an increase in censorship, isolation, you know, people still being attacked and sprayed with pepper spray for disobedience, in the middle of a respiratory virus. So all of the, like, the censorship by people, mail being censored, there's been this whole move before the pandemic that's accelerated under the pandemic, to not have people get mail directly and they need to buy a tablet, and it can only come electronically. And, you know, it's just, and they can't get physical books, they can only get them on tablets. You know, this varies from state to state, but you just see a lot of censorship and isolation and abuse that has, predates the pandemic, but has been vastly exacerbated in the pandemic, that has largely escaped a lot of public attention. And I think it's very concerning that this is becoming the new normal, where people have far less than the already limited contact with the outside that they once had, while abuse continues.
And so this is a letter from Stevie Wilson, who is incarcerated in Pennsylvania. And if folks are interested in him, they can check out a project that he's been involved with, it's an abolitionist study group that he has been running inside of prison. So there's a website for it: abolitioniststudy.wordpress.com And through some supporters, he tweets @agitateorganize - one word. So this letter he sent me January 26th 2022.
[Dan Berger reads the letter from Stevie Wilson, currently incarcerated in Pennsylvania]
Stevie Wilson (read by Dan Berger): "As we all continue to struggle with COVID, it is important that people out there become and stay aware of what measures the departments of corrections around the country are implementing to protect imprisoned folks. Do not depend upon newsclips and press releases. Get connected to people inside. It is the only way you will really know what is happening or not happening behind these walls. In PA, we are still dealing with recalcitrant officers and their union. They have rejected every health and safety measure the administration puts forth. From masking to vaccination, they refuse to get on board. This puts every prisoner in harm's way. The only avenue for COVID to enter the prisons is through the DOC employees. Recently, we received a memo from acting secretary of corrections George Little in which he acknowledges that we are experiencing pre-vaccine levels of infection behind the walls. How? The overwhelming majority of PA prisoners are vaccinated and many have taken the booster. The employees of the DOC are the ones refusing vaccination and masking. We need the public to know that the DOC has a legal obligation to protect us from COVID. Prisoners have died. The DOC is obligated to take whatever steps needed to keep us safe. Instead, it continues to compromise with the officers' union and put prisoners in danger. Currently, they can work behind the walls unvaccinated as long as they do a temperature check upon entry to the prison. How is that protecting us? They could be asymptomatic. As a matter of fact, we know that they have infected many prisoners while being asymptomatic. This is how we are seeing pre-vaccination numbers. We need the public to pressure the DOC to take real steps to protect prisoners. We need the public to pressure the DOC and the Governor to release people. Because they won't take steps to protect us. Always, Stevie"
Artie Vierkant 1:05:36
well said.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:36
Yeah.
Dan Berger 1:05:37
And I'll just add that a lot of the dynamics that he's saying are here in Washington. We're just about to print a series of letters on the Washington Prison History Project, waprisonhistory.org, from people inside prison describing very similar dynamics. And I think wherever you are, if you talk to people incarcerated in your state, and you talk to the folks doing the on the ground organizing, you know, you'll hear the exact same kinds of things going on.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:06:07
Because it's, you know, it might not be easy to see from like, you know, combing through the New York Times, as we're saying, but there is a way to actually, like, get eyes on what's going on. And I think if you're, you know, what I'd like to see from folks is like, if you are advocating for like COVID NPI's, you need to really also be thinking of incarcerated people when you're trying to like make your demands. And I think also like, it shows the value of not compromising because there are certain moments, right where reformism fuels situations like mass incarceration for decades, right, allowing it to get so bad that when we hit the, like the context of the the crisis that we're in now, right, it becomes absolutely just magnitudes more brutal than you could have ever imagined it being after, like, just the history of how brutal this has already been.
Dan Berger 1:06:57
Exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:06:59
Well, I, Dan, I really, really appreciate you coming on today and sitting down to talk with us.
Artie Vierkant 1:07:04
Yeah, thank you.
Phil Rocco 1:07:04
Yeah, this was great.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:05
Thank you for sharing this from Stevie. And thank you to Stevie obviously, as well.
Dan Berger 1:07:09
Yeah, thank you all for having us, well having me [inaudible]. Thank you all for having me. I really appreciate it. And I really appreciate the opportunity to share Stevie's words as well.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:20
And if people want to follow you online, your Twitter handle is?
Dan Berger 1:07:26
is @dnbrgr
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:30
Well, Dan, thank you so much. I think we'll leave it there for today. As always, you can support the show by becoming a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. We do two episodes a week. And for patrons we will catch you Monday in the patron feed for everyone else we will see you late next week. As always, Medicare for All Now. Solidarity Forever. Stay Alive Another Week.
Transcript by Scott McKenzie