Why Haven't We Run Out Of Food During the Coronavirus Lockdown? Our food system has proven to be robust and resilient and shortages are demand-based rather than supply-based. by Michael von Massow and Alfons Weersink

We are living through a period in which many jurisdictions have shut down virtually all non-essential commerce. People are working from home or have been temporarily laid off.

We have seen rushes on food and grocery items like toilet paper and hand sanitizer that have resulted in some short-term shortages in stores.

Some have questioned the resilience of our food system and whether we could run out of food. The easy answer is we are not running out of food. Our food system has proven to be robust and resilient and shortages are demand-based rather than supply-based.

We have cheap food. It doesn’t always feel like it, but Canadians spend among the lowest proportion of our income on food in the world. Canadians who don’t live in remote communities have an abundance of safe and affordable food. We also have an incredible diversity of food products available.

Stores are restocking

Yes, we have seen some shortages on grocery store shelves. But we have seen stores restocking regularly, and the expectation is that the system will catch up.

The just-in-time process used in our food system, in fact, is not unique to food supply chains. It is based on producing and shipping product to meet expected demands. It depends on accurate forecasts and smooth delivery.

We have seen a significant surge in demand as people buy large quantities in anticipation of being at home for long periods of time. This was exacerbated by panic buying, when people saw shortages in the store or heard of shortages in news reports. Products are being quickly restocked, even though they’re often snapped up quickly.

We will see a return to some semblance of normality reasonably soon — at least with respect to food stocks in stores. This is supported by policies at stores that are limiting quantities that people can purchase.

Demand for things like hand sanitizer continue to be high. Demand for other food products will probably stabilize relatively quickly, even if people continue to hold extra stock at home. Grocery stores have seen an increase in demand for food as restaurants are closed, but that simply shifts demand from food service distribution to supermarket distribution, and isn’t leading to food supply shortages.

We are also seeing larger individual shopping orders as consumers minimize the number of times they have to go to the grocery store.

Milk dumping

While there have been some shortages at grocery stores, we’ve also seen reports of farmers dumping milk or plowing down crops.

This is caused by the requirement for adjustments in the food system. As demand has decreased in food services, it’s increased in retail. So why is milk being dumped and why are crops being mowed down?

It’s because raw product needs to be diverted to new processors and products, and other products need to be diverted to different processors. Some products require packaging changes. Professional bakers buy industrial-sized bags of flour, for example, but most retailers won’t normally carry that size.

These adjustments take time, and for perishable products like milk and produce, storage isn’t available. These adjustments are now under way and products are beginning to flow through supply chains more normally.

No border closures

Food supply chains have been protected from border closures this far, and that’s expected to continue. The most important border for Canada’s food supply chain, and that of the United States too, is the Canada-U.S. border. More than half of our food imports come from the U.S.

During the winter months, we import more. But fresh local produce is available to most Canadians in the warmer months.

Even if the border closed, we would still not go hungry. We would have less fresh produce, but we’d still have Canadian apples and root vegetables in storage. We would also have frozen products available.

Given the sales forecasts for these items, we probably wouldn’t begin to run short until the Canadian growing season had kicked in. But there would be bread, milk, meat and cheese readily available. We might see a decrease in variety, but we wouldn’t run out of food. And there’s no indication that there’s any risk of the border closing in the short run.

Food processing could be impacted

One area of concern is the processing sector. There are fewer processing plants than there are both farmers and retail stores.

If plants close, production stops. We have seen the temporary closure of a pork processor in Québec due to COVID-19 and a big beef plant in Alberta has temporarily closed.

The Québec plant is reopening and the Alberta plant has shut down to mitigate the risk of employees getting sick. While there is not yet a fixed date for the Cargill plant in Alberta to re-open, it is expected to be soon. These short-term closures can cause hardships, particularly for farmers, but shouldn’t significantly affect availability on grocery shelves.

While the Cargill represents almost 40 per cent of the beef processing capacity in Canada, our beef industry is highly integrated with the American industry with both livestock and beef products flowing in both directions.

Plant closures would cause losses for perishable products like milk or produce. But for meat producers, livestock can be diverted or held until processors reopen. This can cause significant losses for farmers. Prices go down with extra supply and if livestock has to be shipped further and costs go up if animals have to be held. But unless the number of closures increases dramatically and closures are enduring, we will continue to see food on grocery shelves.

Coronavirus Is A Chance For Boris Johnson To Show A New Style Of Leadership Call it 'post-heroic.' by Jon Stokes and Stefan Stern

As the British prime minister returns to work following his hospitalisation with COVID-19, the public will wish him well. Boris Johnson was clearly seriously ill but to judge by his statement outside No.10 on Monday morning his health has recovered. Whether there has been a change in his outlook or understanding of the difficulties facing him is much less clear. 

The pre-illness Johnson exuded over-confidence. At a Downing Street press conference on March 3 he said: “I’m shaking hands continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients, and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know. I continue to shake hands.”

Two and a half weeks later, when doubts were growing fast about the UK’s slow and confused response to the COVID-19 crisis, Johnson still felt able to declare: “I’m absolutely confident that we can send coronavirus packing in this country.” Even now the prime minister speaks of physically combatting the coronavirus as though it were an assailant.

This is the epitome of the heroic leader, going into battle bravely, even recklessly, with a belief that he is both all-powerful and invulnerable. But continuing to work while suffering from COVID-19, and downplaying his ailments, was an attitude which ultimately led Johnson to hospital, and an intensive care unit at that.

Sometimes situations call for heroic leadership, but the current predicament is not one of these. Research on leadership identifies a more relevant style, known as post-heroic leadership). This places an emphasis on inspiring through empowerment and collective action: that is, “power with” (Hannah Arendt) rather than “power over” (Max Weber).

Voters sometimes choose political leaders as a talismanic protection against apparently insurmountable problems, when we believe only superhuman powers will suffice. The cult of Johnson as charismatic hero is supported by some commentators and newspapers.

There is a difference between inspirational and charismatic leadership. The problem with charismatic leadership is that it inevitably ends in disappointment and demonisation when the leader predictably fails to live up to the followers’ unrealistic expectations. Many of those attracted to leadership roles do so from a desire to be heroic and to make a difference. These may be laudable goals but leadership styles need to be appropriate to the situation.

A different kind of problem

In the COVID-19 pandemic we are facing a “wicked problem”. Unlike a puzzle with an answer, wicked problems, like reducing poverty or drug addiction, are qualitatively different. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong, but only more or less effective. And one heroic leader is not going to be able to find solutions on his or her own. As Keith Grint, professor emeritus at Warwick University, has written:

Wicked problems require the transfer of authority from individual to collective because only collective engagement can hope to address the problem … The leader’s role with a wicked problem, therefore, is to ask the right questions rather than provide the right answers, because the answers may not be self-evident and will require a collaborative process to make any kind of progress.

Solving wicked problems requires a post-heroic mindset. Heroic leadership of single-minded dogged determination inevitably fails to develop and enlist the collaborative and empowered response required for their solution at the local level. Recent research on leadership at Said Business School contrasts the heroic ego leadership of the charismatic leader with the post-heroic eco leadership practised by the most effective post-heroic leaders today.

So what should a post-heroic, practical leader returning to Number 10 do? Here are a few suggestions:

• Support people in engaging with the problem and coming up with their own innovative solutions.
• • Listen to what others are thinking and develop hypotheses. Talk to others before deciding or acting, be open to challenge.
  • Work iteratively using experimentation, trial and error. Resist the temptation to think there is “an answer”. Learn from failure and disappointment rather than dismissing the experience.
  • • Be conscious of the dangers of groupthink and group polarisation in pushing groups to take up rigid extreme positions.
    • Create optionality – if this does not work, what might be tried next, have a series of options before acting.
    • • Avoid blame and criticism since negative thinking leads to pessimism and defeatism.
      Perhaps we will now see more of this kind of pragmatic leadership from the prime minister, with less braggadocio, and fewer glib phrases. (“Operation Last Gasp”, anyone?). Comparing COVID-19 to a mugger during his first press conference back at work was not encouraging.

Coronavirus Face Masks Shows How Hypocritical Burka Bans Are If Canadians, Americans and Europeans can get used to the new ubiquitous face masks, will they also get used to niqabs? by Katherine Bullock

Grey’s Anatomy, the longest running prime-time medical drama on U.S. television, contains many scenes of doctors and nurses in full gear (hospital scrubs, surgical caps, face masks) around the operating table. As they talk, laugh and argue, close-ups of the actors’ eyes convey concentration and emotion. 

These scenes contradict one of the common arguments against face coverings — or more accurately, niqabs worn by some Muslim women — that they are a barrier to communication.

Now that face masks are being used to help fight against the spread of COVID-19, it has caused some to look anew at general discrimination against Muslim women wearing niqabs. And it has got me wondering about Québec’s face-covering ban, which came into law in October 2017 as well as France’s ban which came into law in 2011.

If Canadians, Americans and Europeans can get used to the new ubiquitous face masks, will they also get used to niqabs? Will discrimination against the few women in the West who wear it stop?

History of face politics

The European disapproval of the face veil has a long history, as I learned while researching for my book on Canadian Muslim women and the veil.

Niqab has been seen as both a symbol of cultural threat and also of the silencing of Muslim women. In her book, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman, Moja Kahf traces one of the first discussions of the veil in western fiction to the novel Don Quixote. One of the novel’s characters, Dorotea, asks about a veiled woman who walks into an inn: “Is this lady a Christian or a Moor?” The answer came: “Her dress and her silence make us think she is what we hope she is not.” As this scene from Don Quixote indicates, European women sometimes also covered their faces or hair but when they did so, it was not associated with something negative.

Eventually, the rise of western liberalism, with its prioritization of the individual, capitalism and consumerism led to a new “face politics.” Jenny Edkins, professor of politics at the University of Manchester, studied the rise of a politics centred around this new meaning of the “face,” including the idea that the face “if it can be ‘read’ correctly, may be seen to display the essential nature of the person within.”

The flip side of this new face politics became true as well: concealing the face became something suspicious, as if the person had something they wanted to hide, and prevent others from knowing the real them.

At the same time, we grow up learning our face is something to be manipulated, in the same way actors manipulate their faces to entertain viewers. We learn about “putting on one’s face” with makeup; “facing the world” through our education and personal grit; cultivating “poker face” to deceive people in cards or lying to parents and teachers. We learn how to compose our face so as not to show emotion in the wrong places, like crying at work.

The face is often a mask of our real selves.

Anti-niqab attitudes and hate crimes

Generally, hate crimes are on the rise in Canada with the highest increases in Ontario and Québec. In Ontario, the increase was tied to hate crimes against Muslims, Black and Jewish populations. In Québec, the increase was the result of crimes against Muslims. According to a recent peer-reviewed study by Sidrah Ahmad, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, a tally of hate crimes in Canada released by Statistics Canada in 2015 noted that Muslim populations had the highest percentage of hate crime victims who were female.

The rise in hate crimes mirrors the opinion of many public leaders who have loudly proclaimed their anti-niqab attitudes. Jason Kenney, the former Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, tried — and failed — to ban niqab in citizenship ceremonies. In 2015 he called the niqab “a tribal cultural practice where women are treated like property and not like human beings.” In the same year, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper called it a dress “rooted in a culture that is anti-women … [and] offensive that someone would hide their identity.”

A 2018 Angus Reid poll found that the majority of Canadians support a ban of niqabs on public employees. These contemporary attempts to unveil Muslim women echo British and French attempts to the same in both colonial and current times.

Medical face veils

In a recent op-ed for the Toronto Star, University of Windsor law student Tasha Stansbury, pointed out that in Montréal hospitals, people are being asked to wear surgical masks. They walk in and interact with medical staff without being asked to remove their mask for identity or security purposes.

But a woman wearing a niqab walking into the same hospital would be forced by law to remove it.

A decade ago, U.S. philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum brilliantly exposed the hypocrisy of face veil bans, in an opinion for the New York Times. If it is security, she asked, why can we walk into a public building bundled up against the cold with our faces covered in scarves? Why are woolly scarves not seen to hamper reciprocity and good communication between citizens in liberal democracies? She wrote:

“Moreover, many beloved, trusted professionals cover their faces all year round: surgeons, dentists, (American) football players, skiers and skaters … what inspires fear and mistrust in Europe … is not covering per se, but Muslim covering.”

Is a face mask used to help block coronavirus really that different from a niqab?

Both are garments worn for a specific purpose, in a specific place and for a specific time only. It is not worn 24/7. Once the purpose is over, the mask and niqab come off.

The calling of the sacred motivates some to wear the niqab. A highly infectious disease propels many to wear face masks.

How Churches Become Makeshift Hospitals During Times of Crises There is a long history of churches serving as hospitals, particularly during times of crisis such as war or plague. by Adam J. Davis

Churches are looking to open up their doors to groups beyond their usual congregants during the coronavirus crisis: doctors, nurses and patients. 

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the seat of the Episcopal diocese of New York, and one of the largest churches in the world, started a process of converting its premises into an emergency field hospital, earlier this April. The plans were later shelved in response to shifting needs and amid reported concerns over the involvement of a group criticized as anti-LGBT, but not before tents had been set up for 400 beds inside the cathedral’s vast interior.

Meanwhile, in Homer, a small city in Alaska, a church’s pastor preached from the parking lot during a drive-in Easter service, while the interior of the church was being used as an alternate hospital site to manage the overflow of COVID-19 patients.

The last time churches in the U.S. were turned into temporary hospitals was during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. But there is a much longer history of churches serving as hospitals, particularly during times of crisis such as war or plague.

The origins of hospitals

The first Christian hospitals, or “xenodocheia,” a Greek word denoting “houses for strangers,” cared for pilgrims, the poor and those with infirmities. Bishops founded these hospitals during the fourth and fifth centuries, particularly in the Byzantine Empire. During the early ninth century, Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, ordered that every cathedral have an attached hospital, underscoring the bishop’s central role as protector and healer of his flock.

Monasteries were also key providers of medical care during this period. The influential Rule of St. Benedict, written in the fifth century to provide directives for the daily communal living of monks, affirmed the Christian duty to care for the sick as if they were Christ.

Throughout the Middle Ages, infirmaries were spaces run by monasteries for the healing and convalescence of those who were ill. Monastic infirmaries not only treated monks, but also sick guests coming from outside a monastery’s walls. Monasteries were also centers of medical learning.

A recent archaeological excavation of the monastery of Thornton, located in Lincolnshire, England, found that a hospital inside the monastery was caring for dozens of men, women and children afflicted with plague during the 14th-century Black Death. When they died within a short time span, they were placed in a mass burial outside the monastery due to the lack of time for individual burials, a prospect that was recently raised in New York City.

Likewise, convents were frequently built next to hospitals, or were even turned into hospitals, so that nuns could care for the sick. For certain medieval religious women, palliative caregiving was a key feature of their spiritual identities.

Many of the saints canonized by the Church during the late Middle Ages were lay women and men who had provided assistance for those stricken with plague, leprosy and other infirmities.

Medieval surge

From A.D. 1050 to A.D. 1300, thousands of new hospitals were built across Europe, catering for those afflicted with leprosy, poverty and other illnesses.

As I show in my new book, the emergence of this “hospital movement” was part of a broader charitable revolution that saw the creation of new institutions to care for medieval Europe’s sick, poor and vulnerable.

Founded in the 11th century to care for wounded pilgrims in Jerusalem, the Order of St. John, or Knights Hospitaller, quickly became militarized during the Crusades, regularly engaging in military combat. However, the order continued to maintain its large hospital in Jerusalem, and during the 12th and 13th centuries, it also set up a large network of hospitals both in the eastern Mediterranean and across Europe.

Architecturally and in design, many medieval hospitals looked like churches, and some can still be seen in places like Tonnerre, France, and Norwich,, England. The central ward of these hospitals resembled a nave, or the central, rectangular part of a church.

There was often a chapel at the east end of the central ward where patients were housed, thereby making it possible for the sick to participate in the Mass from their beds.

In late medieval and early modern Europe, plague hospitals were frequently staffed by physicians, priests, members of religious orders, and lay religious women and men. Like the workers on the front lines of treating COVID-19 today, these premodern health care workers faced great dangers. Priests working in plague hospitals used a special tool to administer the Eucharist so as not to get infected by patients. The priests heard confessions from a distance, enforced quarantines and created an area outside plague hospitals for disinfecting household goods and slaughtering household pets that belonged to plague victims.

Although the image of the interior of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine being set up as a hospital ward for treating COVID-19 may be jarring to some, it harks back to the many centuries when religious spaces were regularly used not only for prayer, preaching and religious ritual, but for caring for the sick, giving aid to the needy, and burying the dead.

Quarantine Could Change How Americans Think of Incarceration Nationwide forced isolation, along with media coverage of the pandemic’s toll in U.S. jails and prisons, could shift public perceptions of carceral punishment.by HANNAH GIORGIS

Earlier this month, Ellen DeGeneres attracted public ire for something she said during the first “at home” edition of her show. Sitting in one of her palatial houses, the 62-year-old comedian joked that self-isolation is “like being in jail … mostly because I’ve been wearing the same clothes for 10 days and everyone in here is gay.” The video was removed from her YouTube channel following swift backlash, but DeGeneres isn’t the only entertainer who has made glib remarks about quarantining during the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, the Game of Thrones actor Sophie Turner told Conan O’Brien that quarantine is “prison” for her husband, the singer Joe Jonas, because he’s “a real social butterfly.”
In some other climate, these hyperbolic comparisons might simply register as thoughtless. Now, after months of reports chronicling the harrowing conditions in jails and prisons, they come off as particularly callous. Being restricted from public gatherings may be frustrating, but even Turner and DeGeneres would admit that it’s nothing like what correctional facilities face. In Colorado and Louisiana, Illinois and New York, incarcerated people are dying of the virus—sometimes while handcuffed—because jails and prisons are incompatible with the measures required to keep them safe. Social distancing is impossible. Even on a normal day, accessing medical care is a Sisyphean task. Crowded and unhygienic conditions are common. As a result, the infection rates in these institutions far outpace those of even the hardest-hit American cities.

But although the oppressiveness of quarantine and the dangers of incarceration during a pandemic aren’t the same, they’re more related than many might think. The media have widely covered the devastating effects of COVID-19 in jails and prisons, as well as the risks that an outbreak among inmates poses to the surrounding communities. When taken alongside Americans’ experiences with nationwide forced isolation, these facts could change how the public thinks of carceral punishment. Because the coronavirus’s lethality is unprecedented, so, too, are the social-distancing and lockdown measures that are forcing many Americans to experience prolonged confinement for the first time. Following several years of slow, sometimes bipartisan, attempts to reform the criminal-justice system and its reliance on mass incarceration, these powerful new realities could challenge entrenched beliefs about the efficacy—and ethics—of sending people “away.”

While invoking prison to describe quarantining in one’s own home is excessive, such comparisons are often rooted in a desire to express the real pains of isolation. Craig Haney, a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz, and the author of Criminality in Context: The Psychological Foundations of Criminal Justice Reform, has spent much of his career studying the toll of mandatory social separation—an experience that far more people are beginning to understand, in some small way. When we spoke, Haney emphasized that humans are both socialized and neurologically wired to connect with one another; being deprived of the opportunity to do so has profound consequences. When people complain about quarantine, Haney told me, they’re often alluding to “the inconvenience of it: You can’t go out to bars with your friends, you can’t see your family, you can’t go and do all the fun things.” But, he said, “in addition to being deprived of activities, we’re being deprived of social contact, which is essential to our mental and physical well-being. It’s almost like breathing. You have contact with people all the time, and you only notice it when you don’t have it.”

Even some formerly incarcerated people are drawing parallels between prison and quarantine, albeit in nuanced ways, referencing feelings of anxiety, a lack of control, and scarcity. “At one level, I think [the comparison] is pointing to how painful, actually, the deprivation of liberty can be,” Bruce Western, a sociology professor at Columbia University, told me. “We can think about references to ‘country-club prisons’ and so on, as if the deprivation of liberty was not a ‘real’ punishment. And now we’re all sheltering inside and a lot of people are experiencing this as very, very difficult … But then, of course, the real conditions of incarceration regularly and routinely go well beyond the deprivation of liberty,” he added. “On top of what sociologists have called ‘the pains of imprisonment,’ [incarcerated people are also] facing intense health risks now.” (In addition, adequate psychological services are rarely available for the staggering population of mentally ill people who are routed into the criminal-justice system.)

Of course, social distancing still allows for ample opportunities to connect with others remotely despite physical isolation. In jails and prisons, where visitors are always under heavy monitoring and virtual communication is prohibitively expensive, those options don’t exist. June Tangney, a psychology professor at George Mason University, noted that the disappearance of normal social contact could be a chance for Americans to seriously consider the painful effects that more stringent measures have on incarcerated people: “Maybe that gets us to rethink about the sheer number of people that we’re incarcerating who have either a primary substance-use problem or a primary problem with mental illness,” she said. “And having experienced a little piece of [isolation] ourselves, maybe we’ll be more sympathetic.”

In addition to undergoing quarantine, many Americans are coming to view incarceration through the lens of public health. Even before the virus spread across the country, professionals as disparate as doctors, activists, corrections officers, and health reporters were enumerating the ways that jail, prisons, and detention centers could play host to a “public-health disaster.” This framing acknowledges that inmates’ well-being can directly affect those on the outside, which may prompt people to ask weighty ethical questions about how the penal system treats those behind bars: Does anyone deserve to die because they failed to report to their parole officer or were unable to pay a $500 bond? Does any crime justify a potentially painful, gasping death?

Such considerations are made more urgent by recent developments at jails and prisons. New York City’s Hart Island has long been a public cemetery for the poor or unclaimed. But until earlier this month, the people digging the mass graves for virus victims were bused in from the Rikers Island jail; national media covered their macabre assignment. This burial practice was halted after officials decided that bus rides to Hart, during which inmates sat next to one another, presented too great a viral-transmission risk. (Scientists are still trying to determine whether COVID-19 can be spread by a dead body.)

That grim labor is just one element of the wide-ranging risks facing those incarcerated at Rikers, where the infection rate far outpaces that of New York City writ large. “The last couple of weeks have obviously pressed forward in a very hypercritical way the need for us to decarcerate our jails and prisons—and [to] recognize that even before COVID, health and sanitary conditions in our jails and prisons were abysmal,” says Tina Luongo, the attorney in charge of the criminal-defense practice at the Legal Aid Society in New York, which provides free representation to low-income people. “The fact that [incarcerated people] can’t socially distance—your bathroom facilities are shared by 20, 30 people … Your underlying vulnerabilities [had always been] present, but now they’re life-threatening.”

In growing numbers, people not affiliated with traditional advocacy circles are calling for decarceration, whether through reducing jail and prison populations or easing punitive measures to protect public safety. A couple of weeks ago, dozens of doctors and public-health professionals sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demanding decarceration and expanded access to health care for those who are released. Other doctors signed an open letter to death-penalty states asking them to relinquish the sedatives used during executions, because the supply needed to treat COVID-19 patients is rapidly dwindling. (The letter noted that medical professionals have long criticized states’ practice of stockpiling such drugs, which weren’t developed to help end lives.) These efforts join campaigns such as Free Them All for Public Health and Release Aging People in Prison, as well as writing from legal scholars and city officials, in framing decarceration as necessary for public health and safety. Though often aimed at achieving concrete goals rather than changing public opinion, these efforts may nonetheless sway newly attentive readers.

Jails and prisons aren’t self-contained entities. Though corrections officers are more protected than incarcerated people, they’re at risk too, along with their families and communities. This month, on her free Apple TV+ show about COVID-19, Oprah Winfrey discussed the public-health need for criminal-justice reform, because infections inside prisons can find a way outside as well. “This is why people need to care,” she said, pointing to that link. “’Cause I know a lot of people listen and they go, Well, they’re in jail, and so forget about them.” The coronavirus crisis has brought into sharp relief how interconnected we all are; it’s never been clearer that the country’s fate is bound up in that of its most vulnerable people. COVID-19 is disproportionately killing people in demographics already at greater risk for disease and criminalization: low-income communities, southerners, and black people. (These are also groups most likely to be targeted by discriminatory policing.) Fittingly, “mutual aid” networks, through which communities come together to share resources, have sprung up to address the needs of those hurt both within correctional institutions and outside them.

For the broader American public, the dismissal of incarcerated people’s experiences has really begun shifting—ever so slowly—only in recent years, Haney said. In decades prior, most Americans weren’t critical of such institutions, or of joking references to them. “From the mid-1970s ... until I would say the early 2000s, there was really only one point of view about incarceration, which was The more of it, the better,” Haney said. People outside the system’s grip had “very little awareness of the costs, even the economic costs but certainly not the psychological and the social costs.” That began to change in the early aughts, first with more people expressing ambivalence toward the death penalty and then outright opposition to it. Noting that criminal-justice efforts have become ever more bipartisan, Haney said that he’s seen “people as different as Cory Booker and Newt Gingrich” at related conferences. “There’s now a different kind of awareness, an openness to thinking about incarceration in ways that we didn’t before,” he said.

Consider, for example, the public response to DeGeneres’s remarks about jail. As recently as the early 2000s or the ’90s, “people would've taken that as a joke and treated it as such,” Luongo notes, adding that “the more we talk about the inhumanity of jails and prisons, the more people are becoming aware that that is not the answer.” Some of that recent change in social attitudes is the direct result of various social movements, organizing campaigns, artistic productions, legal battles, and more, sometimes led by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The pandemic, and its attendant social-distancing requirements, follows decades of efforts to shift public perceptions about criminal justice—and the legal precedents that shape it.

It’s possible, then, that this widespread isolation might also contribute to different views. Those shifts likely won’t result in the widespread belief that prisons be abolished altogether, and it remains reasonable to ask how we might protect society from grievous crimes. But reducing the country’s reliance on incarceration can take many forms: Already, people new to the decarceration issue are calling for the “compassionate release” of elderly inmates, and those with serious health conditions, for whom COVID-19 would pose the greatest risk. Still others are decrying the institutions’ usage of solitary confinement, sometimes even for children, to slow the virus’s spread. “One of the things that has been so problematic about the era of mass incarceration is that, for most people, prison … is nothing more than an abstraction. It’s a hidden world,” Haney said. “Even if you have a loved one in prison, it’s not something you see directly … I’ve always felt that legislatures who bandy about [sentences of] 10 years or 15 years or 20, who’ve never spent a week in a penal institution, might have a very different perspective if indeed they experienced it directly.”

Quarantine, especially for financially stable households, isn’t a direct counterpart to incarceration: On one side are people who find social distancing tedious or emotionally taxing, and on the other are those for whom the coronavirus is among the most deadly risks. As Western told me, the United States’ response to the pandemic is “really a story about inequality.” Yet there’s something cautiously optimistic about this moment, and what it means for how we all relate to one another. Or, as Haney said, “There’s some reason to be hopeful that if people experience at least a tiny bit of what it is like … to have your day-to-day actions and interactions significantly restricted, that they might get some glimpse of what it is like to be incarcerated, what it is like for people whom we subject to much, much greater deprivations of liberty. Just maybe.”