Third Way: The Prison Pandemic
Mongkol Nitirojsakul / EyeEm
As Covid-19 began to spread quickly through the country in March of 2020, Trump and Congress initiated the CARES ACT, a bill focused on public health and the economic crises that would continue to unfold throughout the pandemic. Under this CARES Act, Attorney General William Bar mandated that some inmates be released from prison and sent home to serve their sentence under home confinement. Home confinement is a practice that is already used commonly within the system for inmates who only have 10% or 6 months of their sentence remaining, which typically means that they wear an ankle monitor, are usually only able to leave their house without explicit permission to go to work, and must check in with authorities or take drug tests.
While Barr’s mandate provided discretion to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to simply allow those who did not pose a great risk to society to serve their sentence under home confinement – such as minimum and low security inmates – the Acting Assistant Director of Correctional Programs of the BOP Andre Matevousian issued separate guidelines internally as to who could be released. His memo stated that inmates must have served a certain amount of their sentence already in order to be granted home confinement, even though Barr’s mandate had not given any such rules. This meant that many of the inmates who should have been considered eligible to go home were not. While the BOP stated that 25,000 inmates had been placed on home confinement since March 2020, the vast majority of these inmates would have been released to home confinement anyways in a typical year due to the time remaining on their sentence. In reality, only 4,400 inmates were released under the provisions of the CARES Act. This meant that there was hardly a decrease in the number of inmates in federal prisons, which allowed for Covid-19 to run rampant within.
COVID-19 In Prisons
As of August 6, 2021, the Bureau of Prison’s website states that only 242 federal inmates have died from Covid-19. In reality, more than 2,700 people connected with federal prisons and detention centers have died from Covid-19. There is a massive disparity between these two numbers, which can only be attributed to the BOP attempting to hide how poorly they handled the pandemic within their institution. Many of these uncounted deaths are from inmates who were released from their sentences before they died, so the prison says they are not to blame and cannot be responsible for keeping track of them, although they caught coronavirus while they were still in prison. Sometimes, when inmates become seriously ill and it is likely that they will not survive, the prison will drop their charges or sign for an early release. This was the case for many of the severe Covid-19 cases. When these (former) inmates then died just days or weeks later, the prison could claim that they had had zero deaths within their facility.
Even if we ignore the issue at play that the BOP was attempting to cover up Covid-19 deaths, the sheer number of inmates who died from coronavirus after catching it within the prison speaks to a larger issue at hand – the way that the federal prison system handled the pandemic. The Marshall Project found that at least 398,627 inmates tested positive for coronavirus from March of 2020 until June 2021, although this number is likely lower than the actual number as testing in the first couple of months of the pandemic was not widely used. This means about 1 in 5 federal prisoners contracted coronavirus, a rate more than four times as high than the proportion of the general US population that tested positive.
The Problems Within Prisons
One of the reasons this number is so high is because of the extreme overcrowding in federal prisons, an issue that is prominent even when there is not a pandemic spreading between the cells. The number of deaths also showcases the lack of medical resources within the prisons, as well as deficient protocols and a lack of qualified staffers. The BOP runs their institutions like a business, forgetting that they are in charge of ensuring the safety and wellbeing of the people who live within their prisons. For instance, the BOP pressured guards to come to work during the pandemic even if they had tested positive for Covid-19. Not only does this harm the guards, who likely needed time off to recover from their illness, but it helped to spread the pandemic throughout the prisons.
One of the largest issues within federal prisons that became noticeable during the pandemic is the healthcare system of the prisons. The assistant director of the Health Services Division of the BOP, who is responsible for overseeing health care and safety of inmates, has no medical education or knowledge. This role has been held by two people during the pandemic, Nicole English and Michael Smith, neither of whom had any qualifications to be in charge of a health services division. Prisons also do not require their medical staffers to have the same credentials as those who work in hospitals. Many of the doctors and other medical workers within prisons have restricted licenses, are barred from working in hospitals and private practices, or have had their licenses suspended – a fact which even the inmates know, leading many of them to refuse medical treatment within the prison because they simply do not trust the doctors.
Prison Reform
Covid-19 showcased many clear problems within the prison system, some of which Democrats have been calling to fix for years. Biden has released his Plan for Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice, which is meant to reduce crime, address the systemic racism within the prison system, and focus on rehabilitation and prevention instead of punishment. Many aspects of the plan are focused on the criminalization of drugs, laws that have often affected people of color at a much greater rate. Biden’s plan will end the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, as that disproportionately affects people of color. It will also decriminalize cannabis, applying this decriminalization retroactively as well, and incentivize states to send individuals convicted on drug use alone to drug courts and rehab instead of prison. These changes would serve both to address the racial inequality that plagues the prison system as well as reduce the number of people in federal prisons.
One of the simplest ways for Biden to start his prison reform plan would be to repeal the policy Trump set that those inmates released to home confinement under the CARES Act must be returned to prison once the pandemic had ended. However, Biden has yet to repeal this policy and is remaining silent on the matter. These inmates have reunited with their families and gotten jobs, and some have even enrolled in college classes. As only 21 people in home confinement were sent back to prison due to rule violations, it is clear that the home confinement program works well and also provides a way for these inmates to be reintroduced back into society. It would be harmful and unnecessary to return them to prison, especially as Biden’s plan states that “our criminal justice system must be focused on redemption and rehabilitation [and] making sure formerly incarcerated individuals have the opportunity to be productive members of our society”. If Biden is truly on the side of prison reform, his first step would be to repeal this policy and allow those under home confinement to remain released.
