The ultimate lesson of the COVID crisis in our prisons and jails is this: Addressing the issues it has surfaced is not just a good idea, it is a moral imperative. We need to have the vision and courage to correct corrections and work toward a system that is more worthy of our values and ideals—one that uses a public health lens to help build resiliency. For that is the true underpinning of a safer community.

At the onset of the pandemic, Michele drafted this rapid response paper detailing strategies that sheriffs could implement in order to prevent and respond to the spread of COVID-19 in jails.

In preparation for the conference ―Opening Up a Closed World: What Constitutes Effective Prison Oversight?,‖ held at the University of Texas in 2006, graduate students in my seminar on ―Prisons and Human Rights‖ embarked on a major group effort to compile and review the literature dealing with independent oversight of prisons and to develop an annotated bibliography of this material.