The Judges' Book
Abstract
Agnotology, a term coined by Robert Proctor and Iain Boal, is the study of culturally produced ignorance, which assumes that gaps in knowledge are not coincidental but rather reflect social values and interests. In this Chapter, we apply this context to a domain in which information gaps have life-or-death consequences: healthcare in county jails, and more particularly, the availability, or lack thereof, of COVID-19 data from California’s fifty-eight county jail systems.
Our argument is twofold: First, that public ignorance about jail healthcare conditions is not accidental but is instead the product of weak state oversight and a culture of noncooperation at the county level. Second, that this ignorance actively permits poor healthcare outcomes to persist, unchecked by public accountability, legislative intervention, or litigation.
The article draws on original data compiled by the Covid In-Custody Project, a grassroots effort spearheaded by Aparna Komarla that submitted California Public Records Act (CPRA) requests to all 58 sheriff’s departments, mapped their responses, and built what became the leading public dataset on COVID-19 in California’s county jails.
Recommended Citation
Komarla, Aparna and Aviram, Hadar
(2026)
"Criminal Law: Secretive Sheriffs: Opacity and Variation in California’s Jail Responses to COVID-19,"
The Judges' Book: Vol. 10, Article 8.
Available at:
https://repository.uclawsf.edu/judgesbook/vol10/iss1/8