COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence in Minnesota's Prisons and Jails

The goal of this UMN PRC project is to understand barriers to COVID-19 vaccination and inform intervention strategies to increase COVID-19 vaccine confidence and uptake among people who are incarcerated and corrections staff in Minnesota’s jails and prisons. Dialogue with the community informs every stage.

Each member of the PRC team’s 14-member project advisory board has lived experience with incarceration. And many also have family and friends who are currently incarcerated. 

Dr. Rebecca Shlafer, the project's Principal Investigator, says, “Our advisory board’s partnership is essential to our project's success and to our efforts to document and challenge the ways in which systemic racism perpetuates harm against people involved in the criminal legal system and compromises the health of communities. Addressing COVID-19 within carceral facilities is an issue of health equity.”

The toll of COVID-19 is far greater among the prison population than the overall U.S. population. Congregate living in prisons and jails often precludes physical distancing and barriers to personal hygiene, which increase the risk of contracting COVID-19 for incarcerated people and prison/jail staff. Incarcerated people are also at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease/death, due in part to high rates of chronic conditions and limited staff capacity–in the best of times–for corrections healthcare services to meet their complex health needs. Staff also have the potential to carry COVID-19 into facilities from their communities and back out into their communities from facilities, posing a great public health threat to both people who are incarcerated and people in their nearby communities. 

To date, the team has collected information from hundreds of prison and jail staff members (including information featured in this MPR story, Star Tribune story, and MinnPost commentary), as well as thousands of people currently incarcerated in prison and jail settings. The Advisory Board meets monthly with the project team to discuss what is happening with COVID-19 inside of prisons and jails, share their stories and experiences. 

This collective wisdom, paired with anonymous survey data, guides the creation of trauma-informed, culturally-tailored strategies aimed at increasing vaccine confidence and uptake in prisons and jails, including hosting a vaccine clinic at a local jail, developing tailored educational materials for incarcerated people, and facilitating a discussion with jail staff and health care providers.