As of early March, officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) say 287 federal inmates have died from COVID-19, a count that does not include deaths in privately managed prisons. Bureau officials have been saying since the beginning of the pandemic that they have a plan to keep the situation under control, but an NPR analysis of federal prison death records suggests a far different story.

The federal prison system has seen a significant rise in deaths during the pandemic years. In 2020, the death rate in prisons run by the BOP was 50% higher than the five years before the pandemic. Last year, it was 20% higher, according to the NPR analysis of age-adjusted death rates.

Of those who died from COVID-19, nearly all were elderly or had a medical condition that put them at a higher risk of dying from the virus, NPR found. Many of them seemed to sense their fate — and had tried to get out. And those who made their case in court often faced a slow and complicated process that was unable to meet the pace of a rapidly spreading virus.

"All you heard was just coughing all night, all night"

The Federal Bureau of Prisons had a problem from the day the coronavirus arrived in the U.S.: Prisons were likely to be a petri dish for COVID-19. Because staying away from others is nearly impossible inside a prison, health experts said the most effective way to deal with that problem was to make the prison population much smaller — and quickly.

To read more of Meg Anderson and Huo Jingnan's article, please click here.