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COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Considering the restricted and enclosed nature of prisons and closed environments and the prolonged and close contact between individuals, COVID-19 is more likely to have a higher incidence in these settings. This study aims to assess the prevalence of COVID-19 among prisoners.

Papers published in English from 2019 to July 7, 2023, were identified using relevant keywords such as prevalence, COVID-19 and prisoner in the following databases: PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus and Google Scholar. For the meta-analysis of the prevalence, Cochrane’s Q statistics were calculated. A random effect model was used due to the heterogeneity in COVID-19 prevalence across included studies in the meta-analysis. All analyses were performed in STATA-13.

The pooled data presented a COVID-19 prevalence of 20% [95%CI: 0.13, 0.26] and 24% [95%CI: 0.07, 0.41], respectively, in studies that used PCR and antibody tests. Furthermore, two study designs, cross-sectional and cohort, were used. The results of the meta-analysis showed studies with cross-sectional and cohort designs reported 20% [95%CI: 0.11, 0.29] and 25% [95%CI: 0.13, 0.38], respectively.

Through more meticulous planning, it is feasible to reduce the number of individuals in prison cells, thereby preventing the further spread of COVID-19.

The impact of extreme heat on prisons and carceral facilities is becoming increasingly visible, yet remains overlooked by scholars, practitioners and policymakers. Prisons are a unique type of infrastructure designed to severely limit and control the movement of hundreds and even thousands of individuals as a form of punishment. This leads to many significant challenges to mitigating the risk of heat-related illness in prisons and other carceral spaces that have remained overlooked across many disciplines including emergency management, disasters, corrections and public health.

For this study, we analyzed 192 surveys from incarcerated persons in state prisons throughout Texas to understand how incarceration and the punitive prison environment create challenges to managing extreme heat in prisons.

We found that characteristics of modern incarceration, including communal distribution of resources, crowded conditions and a lack of agency for incarcerated people, create barriers to accessing resources during periods of extreme heat. Furthermore, the punitive nature of the prison environment as manifested in the relationship between staff and incarcerated persons and certain prison policies also create barriers to incarcerated persons accessing resources to reduce their risk of heat-related illness and death.

These issues are particularly relevant to the health and safety of incarcerated persons during periods of extreme temperatures but also speak broadly to the implications of incarceration, disaster risk, and the advancement of human rights for incarcerated people.

This article addresses a gap in the literature by including the perspectives of persons incarcerated in Texas prisons experiencing extreme heat and implicates the characteristics of incarceration and punishment in the production of disaster risk.

Public health measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea of essential work into the public discourse, as the public reflected upon what types of work are essential for society to function, who performs that work, and how the labour of essential workers is rewarded. This chapter focusses on the rewards associated with essential work. The authors develop an intersectional lens on work that was officially deemed essential in 2020 to highlight longstanding patterns of devaluation among essential workers, including those undergirded by systemic racism in employment and labour law. The authors use quantitative data from the CPS-MORG to examine earnings differences between essential and non-essential workers and investigate whether the essential worker wage gap changed from month to month in 2020. The authors find that patterns of valuation among essential workers cannot be explained by human capital or other standard labour market characteristics. Rather, intersectional wage inequalities in 2020 reflect historical patterns that are highly durable and did not abate in the first year of the global pandemic.

The study aims to estimate the short- and long-run effects of monetary policy on residential property prices in South Africa. Over the past decades, there has been a monetary policy shift, from targeting money supply and exchange rate to inflation. The shifts have affected residential property market dynamics.

The Johansen cointegration approach was used to estimate the effects of changes in monetary policy proxies on residential property prices using quarterly data from 1980 to 2022.

Mortgage finance and economic growth have a significant positive long-run effect on residential property prices. The consumer price index, the inflation targeting framework, interest rates and exchange rates have a significant negative long-run effect on residential property prices. The Granger causality test has depicted that exchange rate significantly influences residential property prices in the short run, and interest rates, inflation targeting framework, gross domestic product, money supply consumer price index and exchange rate can quickly return to equilibrium when they are in disequilibrium.

There are limited arguments whether the inflation targeting monetary policy framework in South Africa has prevented residential property market boom and bust scenarios. The study has found that the implementation of inflation targeting framework has successfully reduced booms in residential property prices in South Africa.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

Employees facing challenges in their careers – i.e. female, migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees – might expect job searches to have a low likelihood of success and might therefore more often stay in unsatisfactory positions. The goal of this study is to discover inequalities in job mobility for these employees.

We rely on a large sample of Dutch public sector employees (N = 30,709) and study whether employees with challenges in their careers are hampered in translating job dissatisfaction into job searches. Additionally, we assess whether this is due to their perceptions of labor market alternatives.

Findings show that non-Western migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction than their advantaged counterparts, whereas women are more likely than men to do so. Additionally, we find that although they perceive labor market opportunities as limited, this does not affect their propensity to search for different jobs.

This paper is novel in discovering inequalities in job mobility by analyzing whether employees facing challenges in their careers are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction and therefore more likely to remain in unsatisfactory positions.