It should come as little surprise that America’s prisons and jails are particularly vulnerable to outbreaks of disease. As a former New York City corrections commissioner recently put it to ABC News: “People refer to cruise ships as petri dishes, but nobody has invented a more effective vector for transmitting disease than a city jail.”

Predictably enough, local, state, and federal jails were quick to report cases of COVID-19, and inaction has produced a terrifying rate of infection. It took less than two weeks, for example, for cases at New York’s Riker’s Island facility to multiply from one to nearly two hundred.

While every country’s carceral system is probably especially prone to seeing a rapid spread of infectious diseases, America’s uniquely punitive approach to criminal justice puts the emerging health crisis in its prisons on another level. In 2018, for example, there were more than 2.1 million prisoners in the United States, compared to 1.65 million in China, 690,000 in Brazil, and 583,000 in Russia — the United States topping all other countries with an incarceration rate of 655 per 100,000 people, according to numbers released that year by the World Prison Brief database.