A massive pandemic risk factor has been hiding in plain sight across the United States, growing exponentially in scale over the last four decades with the support of trillions of dollars spent by federal, state, and local governments. But, inexplicably, the current national policy conversation about rebuilding public health, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity has entirely ignored it.

What is this epidemic engine that multiplies harm and then distributes it to every corner of the country? In a cruel irony, it is the very system that both Republicans and Democrats have built and defended for decades as the centerpiece of a misleading concept of “public safety“: mass incarceration.

Evidence has long shown that America’s unparalleled system of human caging does not effectively deter crime, and that US residents are no safer than peer nations, whose governments on average incarcerate at only 15 percent the US rate. Abundant data indicate that policing and incarceration are symptoms and reinforcers of our poor collective safety, not solutions for it. Now during a pandemic, the harm that this system — which houses nearly 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people despite representing only 4 percent of the global population — inflicts on the US public at large has been illustrated with unprecedented clarity.