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1/ April 2020 is the month when mass incarceration becomes mass murder in America: large-scale, foreseeable, preventable. Governors could have saved 1000s of lives among inmates & staff. Their failure to act makes them criminally culpable. Here’s why. https://medium.com/@TarenSK/when-mass-incarceration-becomes-mass-murder-e089e852d61e
2/ Murder requires intent, so let me be clear: These will not be accidental or even incidental deaths. They will be the result of deliberate and informed choices to allow a despised subgroup to sicken and die when other choices could have been made to save them.
3/ If you cannot control the virus on a cruise ship with separate cabins & plenty of soap, or on an aircraft carrier with military discipline, you cannot control it in a prison. Almost every single person who lives OR works in prisons & jails will be exposed in the next month.
4/ Although inmates tend to be younger than the adult population outside, they also include a much lower percentage of children, and they have a much higher baseline of chronic disease than the general population. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/03/06/pandemic/
5/ Even worse: The higher the viral dose you are exposed to, the sicker you will get. Prisoners may be exposed to the highest viral doses of anyone, even doctors. Overcrowded cells; no soap or masks; shared toilets without lids... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/coronavirus-viral-dose.html
6/ As an already under-resourced health care system breaks down, inmates will be faced with an untenable choice: They can either abandon their sick friends to die with no care — or care for them themselves without soap and PPE, thus increasing their own viral dose.
7/ I had to dig hard to find the data to calculate this figure. But based on a new study out in @PNAS, in the general public, around 1-2% of all people with COVID-19 require intensive care. I assume most would die without that care. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11cPpTF884R2is1XaFGq-BfCfCuGdbQOSAZMqNV_mAog/edit#gid=0
8/ The brutal truth is that prisoners with COVID-19 largely won’t get necessary intensive care. Already-scarce medical resources inside a prison or jail will be exhausted in a matter of days as the infection curve spikes.
9/ Prisoners would soon overwhelm outside hospitals, too -- but many will already be full. Imagine a doctor having to decide who gets the sole remaining ventilator: A “criminal” or a “free person.” Once triage begins, most hospitals will deny admission to prisoners.
10/ Under these conditions, I estimate that 1-5% of all prisoners in America will require ICU care in the coming months. Most won’t get that care and will die. With 2.3 million incarcerated, that means roughly 23,000-115,000 COVID-19 deaths.
11/ Meanwhile, the 750K staff who work in prisons & jails will be infected at the same time as prisoners. On Rikers Island, almost as many staff as inmates have tested positive. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/rikers-coronavirus-cases-increase.html
12/ As staff go home, contagious but not yet symptomatic, they will infect their families. At peak, a majority of custodial staff in many prisons and jails may be too sick, too scared, or too preoccupied with caring for or burying their own loved ones to come to work.
13/ Whether due to desperation, or rage, or perhaps the stench of rotting corpses, men and women trapped inside will eventually revolt. In many prisons, revolts will be met with deadly force that may kill more people in prison than the virus itself. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51999594
14/ It didn’t have to be this way. Journalists like @MarshallProj, @cjciaramella, @ConnorASheets, @DrRJKavanaghhave have made it completely clear to governors and the BOP what will happen. @theappeal’s coverage has been particularly outstanding: https://theappeal.org/tag/covid-19/
15/ Advocates like @vanitaguptaCR, @UdiACLU, @PrisonUProject, @PrisonPolicy have also been sounding the alarm. Throughout March, governors received increasingly fervent requests to release those serving short sentences and those who are at the highest risk of dying.
16/ I myself helped write a proposal last week to the Indiana DOC, detailing how to safely release the 25% of Indiana’s prisoners with <1 year left to serve, by putting them in quarantine in hotels for 14 days before re-entering society. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OsTXmCiCDDHZBnwYq1ywXHYIa5xzzLfw/view
17/ Releasing these prisoners would not only have saved many of those individual lives, but would also free up space for quarantines, allow more social distancing, and make prisons much more manageable when the officer corps is depleted.
18/ Mitigating the catastrophe was possible. But the vast majority of governors, judges, sheriffs, prosecutors, and legislators in this nation have willfully refused to take action — even though it would be relatively easy and effective to do so.
19/ The ruthless math of the exponential curve means that it is now largely too late. Across the country, many if not most prisons and jails already have someone working or living inside who is infected, even if no one has as yet tested positive.
20/ The definition of second-degree murder is “when a victim dies as a result of the perpetrator’s extreme indifference to the value of human life…. extreme indifference means an utter disregard of the possibility that an act will kill someone.” https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/second-degree-murder-overview.html
21/ While I am under no illusions that these officials will ever be held accountable by the very criminal “justice” system that they lead, I believe that the inaction of our governors, commissioners of correction, and federal BOP meet that bar for murder.
22/ Amidst all the tragedy that COVID-19 will inflict upon us, the reckless and avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of people in prisons, jails, and detention centers may be our nation’s greatest source of shame.
23/ You might wonder: Why am I writing this? Neither I nor any of my family have been in prison. I don’t work in CJ. justice. But my mother, Kelsey Kauffman, does. She is author of “Prison Officers and their World”, & former head of college ed at the Indiana Women’s Prison.
24/ Through her, I’ve visited IWP and met some of her brilliant students. They are poets and mathematicians, grandmothers and daughters, people with hopes and dreams just as real as yours and ours. They are my friends.
25/ Too often, our country looks the other way when prisoners are exploited or abused. We must not let that happen this time. The very least we can do for the incarcerated people who will die in this pandemic is to bear unflinching witness.
