Welcome to the Willie Horton playbook: Coronavirus edition. This type of reporting is the doom of any significant criminal justice reform effort. Notice how there's no context presented of why people are being released because of the coronavirus. /1 https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1250243705635778562

Jails and prisons are becoming mega-spreaders of the virus with people dying at higher rates there than almost anywhere else in the US. Both the people incarcerated and the staff. And the staff then spread it to the community. No mention of that here, of course. /2

Instead, "public safety" just means safety from the one alleged homicide this reporter found out of the thousands of people released for coronavirus concerns. There's no mention of public safety in terms of stopping the spread of a deadly virus.

That deadly virus is a far greater risk to public safety by numbers than any homicide risk from release, but you would never know it from this article. Because it just takes one alleged killing for people to say it all needs to be shut down. /4

This encapsulates all that's wrong with how we think about criminal justice policy. This isn't cost/benefit analysis or rational assessment. It's just one case going bad and everything needs to stop even if more lives are saved by sticking with a reform (here, releases). /5

In Horton's case, that furlough program had a 99.9% success rate, but it didn't matter. And now we have the NY Post questioning every jail and prison release (and there have been thousands) b/c of one case. Even though far more lives have undoubtedly been saved by the releases /6

Nor is there any context that most people (95%) are released from prisons and jails, so it's not a question of ever releasing them, but when. Given a pandemic that requires social distancing & allocating limited medical resources, release now makes sense for lots of people. /7

But you'll get none of that context in this piece. Instead, you'll get the same tired rhetoric that everyone needs to be locked up as long as one person committed a crime. This is what killed bail reform in NY, and it's being used here to stop releases for coronavirus. /8

And this rhetoric and the policies it advocates will cost far more lives than the strategy of releasing people will. This is the tragedy of American criminal justice: we pursue ever harsher policies that end up undermining public safety, not improving it. /9

If you want to read more about this dynamic, I wrote a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Politics-Breaking-Cycle-Incarceration/dp/0674919238. We'll never break the cycle of mass incarceration in the US until we get break this dynamic. /end