Calls for help at Chicago’s Cook County jail, where hundreds of inmates and staff have COVID-19, April 9, 2020. Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images

Prisons and jails are coronavirus epicenters – but they were once designed to prevent disease outbreaks

In the 1790s, penal reformers rebuilt America’s squalid jails as airy, hygienic places meant to keep residents – and by extension society – healthy. Now they’re hotbeds of COVID-19. What went wrong?

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