Fester: Carceral Permeability and California's Covid-19 Correctional Disaster - Paperback

by Hadar Aviram (Author), Chad Goerzen (Author)

Winner of the American Society of Criminology's Michael J. Hindelang Book Award

The mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in California's prisons stands out as the state's worst-ever medical catastrophe in a carceral setting. Fester offers a cultural history of this correctional disaster through first-person accounts, courtroom observations, policy documents, and years of carefully collected quantitative data. Bearing witness to the immense suffering wrought on people behind bars through dehumanization, fear, and ignorance, Fester explains how carceral cruelty also threatens the health and well-being of all Californians. This book stands as a monument to the brave coalition of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, along with activists, doctors, journalists, and lawyers, who fought to shed light on one of the darkest times in the Golden State's correctional system.

Back Jacket

Myths can kill, and Fester dissects a vicious one: the idea that prisons are worlds apart, isolated from their surrounding communities. With passion, rigor, and a flair for storytelling, Aviram and Goerzen show how California's fealty to this myth placed whole cities at risk during the coronavirus pandemic, transforming the state's overcrowded prisons into virus bombs that exploded outward. An indictment of a failed system and the politicians and judges who prop it up, this stunning book is also a call to action, laying out reforms that could save lives the next time a deadly virus proves that we're all connected.--Jason Fagone, author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

"Fester is a searing indictment of how COVID-19 and the state's deliberate indifference led to the worst humanitarian disaster in California prison history and a compelling obituary to the myth that prisons contain and keep us safe from risk. A triumph of sociolegal research."--Jonathan Simon, author of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America

"This poignant and convincing cautionary tale of the pandemic experience inside California's prisons exposes the permeability of prison walls as well as the folly of contemporary public health and criminal legal priorities. Beginning with prison downsizing to counter the crowding of carceral spaces, the authors propose entirely wise and attainable remedies."--Terry Kupers, author of Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It

"Aviram, with Goerzen, has produced another tour de force unpacking a new legitimation crisis in California's punishment infrastructure. Marshaling evidence from litigation, first-person narratives, administrative data compilations, and their own advocacy work, Aviram and Goerzen meticulously analyze how COVID-19 outbreaks in California prisons and jails cruelly terrorized incarcerated people and also exacerbated health risks in the surrounding communities. Impressively, the book reads like a true-crime thriller about the horrors wrought not by the people inside prisons but by the people running and overseeing those prisons. Poignant details of everyday life in prisons in crisis make vivid the book's pointed policy critiques: information gaps about criminal legal system practices, in combination with dangerously inaccurate assumptions about the impermeability of prisons and jails, produce dangerous incarceration conditions. And dangerous incarceration conditions put us all at risk."--Keramet Reiter, author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

Author Biography

Hadar Aviram is Thomas E. Miller Professor at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She is author of Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment and Yesterday's Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole and coeditor of The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice.

Chad Goerzen is a Senior Research Scientist with the US Army Rotorcraft Project.