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1. I have been looking to see whether corrections officer/staff unions might stand up to the dangerous conditions at jails and prisons and call for what every public health expert says is necessary to protect inmates, guards and the broader public: Decarceration.
2. For the most part, even as dozens and often 100s of corrections staff have become infected in various facilities, the unions have mostly stayed silent or fought for smaller measures, like masks for the staff. https://www.wsj.com/articles/rikers-island-jail-guards-are-dying-in-one-of-the-worst-coronavirus-outbreaks-11587547801
3. In other words, corrections unions have sought to preserve the ideology of mass incarceration even at the risk of infecting their members at massive rates, endangering the lives of their members and their families.
4. So that's why this strikes me as important.
"Unions that represent 1000s of workers at Philadelphia jails have taken the unusual step of calling for judges to reduce the jail population." https://www.inquirer.com/jobs/labor/coronavirus-philadelphia-prisons-reduce-jail-population-unions-20200422.html
"Unions that represent 1000s of workers at Philadelphia jails have taken the unusual step of calling for judges to reduce the jail population." https://www.inquirer.com/jobs/labor/coronavirus-philadelphia-prisons-reduce-jail-population-unions-20200422.html
5. Apparently something similar happened with a union that represents nurses at Chicago's Cook County Jail. https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/unions-demand-decisive-action-cook-county-criminal-justice-system-protect-workers-against
6. This strikes me as a misunderstanding of the issue:
"The unions’ calls for reducing the jail population is surprising because unions traditionally want to increase the amount of work in their sectors... To take a moral position... is actually quite significant."
"The unions’ calls for reducing the jail population is surprising because unions traditionally want to increase the amount of work in their sectors... To take a moral position... is actually quite significant."
7. It's not that unions are/should be calling for decarceration because it is the moral position. It's that the pandemic shows that the fate of inmates and staff are intertwined. Decarceration is in the staff's interest. Their lives/those of their family may depend on it.
8. What's so striking to me is the degree to which most unions can't see this. They are so blinded by the "lock-em-up" ideology and have fought for mass incarceration for so long, that they cannot relax it, even if it ends up killing large numbers of their members.
9. I mean this is wild, at one prison in Ohio, 154 of its 295 staff are infected – the infection rate is 52%! That's 400x the infection rate for the state as a whole. Yet the union has not called for decarceration. https://www.courthousenews.com/3700-sick-with-covid-19-in-ohio-prisons/?utm_source=The+Marshall+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8d638060bd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_23_11_44&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5e02cdad9d-8d638060bd-174547865
10. Again, this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat the virus poses. The virus cares not for our culturally constructed categories, like prisoner and guard. It threatens everyone and in ways that cannot be addressed by corrections' typical warrior techniques.
