Prison Population Reductions and COVID-19: A Latent Profile Analysis Synthesizing Recent Evidence From the Texas State Prison System

  1. Noel Vest
  2. Oshea Johnson
  3. Kathryn Nowotny
  4. Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein

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Abstract

People in prison are particularly vulnerable to infectious disease due to close living conditions and the lack of protective equipment. As a result, public health professionals and prison administrators seek information to guide best practices and policy recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using latent profile analysis, we sought to characterize Texas prisons on levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths among incarcerated residents, and COVID-19 cases among prison staff. This observational study was a secondary data analysis of publicly available data from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TBDJ) collected from March 1, 2020, until July 24, 2020. This project was completed in collaboration with the COVID Prison Project. We identified relevant profiles from the data: a low-outbreak profile, a high-outbreak profile, and a high-death profile. Additionally, current prison population and level of employee staffing predicted membership in the high-outbreak and high-death profiles when compared with the low-outbreak profile. Housing persons at 85% of prison capacity was associated with lower risk of COVID-19 infection and death. Implementing this 85% standard as an absolute minimum should be prioritized at prisons across the USA.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.08.20190884: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: Ethics: Because the data was publicly available, it did not require approval from the University Institutional Review Board.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Data analysis: We analyzed the data using MPlus version 8.3.5 First, LPA models were evaluated to determine the profile structure.
    MPlus
    suggested: (MPlus, RRID:SCR_015578)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitations: This study has several limitations. First, we did not account or control for other potentially important prison characteristics. Second, the current study only examines Texas prison facilities and may not be generalizable to other state prison systems. Third, data is updated daily, therefore the number of tests, cases, and deaths of incarcerated individuals and staff will change as time progresses and our results only captures data up to July 24, 2020.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1007/s11524-020-00504-z
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.09.08.20190884v1 on medRxiv