Btw: I realized today that mass incarceration has been a big part of the US coronavirus problem, but not for the reason we expected. It’s not that prisons have turned into “tinderboxes of death,” as hysterics like @nsbarsky predicted when they begged for criminals to be freed...

All the recent “decarceration” has done is provide a useful real-world test of whether freeing criminals increases crime (spoiler alert: the answer appears to be yes). And the coronavirus death rate in US prisons is actually lower than the overall US rate...

But what mass incarceration does provide is a pool of communally housed people who can be mass tested for coronavirus - driving up the counts of “cases” nationally for weeks, while the media rarely reports that most of said cases are asymptomatic.

Btw: technically, bailing someone out is not freeing a criminal, since these people have not been convicted - but the same people asking for bailing out arrestees have also been demanding (and winning) early release of prisoners who have been convicted.