Speaker: Keith Chen

Title: Prison Connectivity and Disease Transmission in Neighboring Communities

(+ related work using digital-trace data)

Abstract: While it has been recognized that “closed institutions” like prisons pose health risks to residents, the degree to which these risks spread to surrounding communities is not well 15 understood. Analyzing smartphone movements, we document geographic variation in how connected California communities are to neighboring prisons and find that these linkages spread infectious diseases. We study a prisoner-transfer-induced San Quentin COVID-19 outbreak in June of 2020 as a quasi-experiment, and document that zip codes connected through prison- worker contact had 13% more new cases in July and 30% more in August compared to 20 epidemiologically and demographically-matched controls. This suggests that “closed institutions” are—even during lockdowns—epidemiologically porous, highlighting the need for public health interventions to reduce the unintended consequences of such connections on the spread of infectious disease.