One prison has been the source for a staggering amount of the coronavirus cases in Arkansas.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Tuesday that Cummins Prison has had 850 inmates infected with COVID-19, accounting for about 38% of the state’s 2,227 confirmed infections. The prison has a capacity of about 1,200 inmates.
Between Monday and Tuesday, Arkansas had an additional 304 cases, 260 of which are inmates at Cummins Prison.
“These are really some escalating high numbers we have seen,” Hutchinson said.
“We’re trying to curtail it, we’re trying to know exactly where we stand in that prison environment,” the governor reportedly said.
Prisons in other parts of the country have also been hit hard by the pandemic. In some states, inmates that are deemed to have a high coronavirus risk have been released to serve out their sentences from home.
Chicago’s county jail has had more than 600 confirmed COVID-19 cases among both staff and inmates, according to the New York Times. At least 784 inmates in the federal prison system have contracted the virus, of whom 21 inmates have died.
