Wednesday, April 01, 2020

Group that favors prison, jail and bail reform advises rural prisons and jails on how to respond to the pandemic

Rural jails and prisons require special consideration in preventing and responding to coronavirus infections, according to The Vera Institute of Justice, which favors reform of prisons, jails and bail: "Responding to the coronavirus poses particular challenges for many rural counties, where people are incarcerated at the highest rates in the United States, and residents have only a fragile or fragmented public-health safety net. Since 2013, the rural jail population has grown 27 percent," while rural hospital closures are accelerating.

"Public health and corrections officials have issued dire warnings that cramped and unsanitary conditions could turn prisons into a haven for the virus, endangering not just inmates but also corrections officers and prison health-care workers as well as their families and communities," The Washington Post reports. Counties and states have been releasing thousands of inmates in the past week, and the federal prison system is under increasing pressure to take action.

Some of Vera's recommendations include releasing as many people as possible to reduce infections, and ensuring that the justice system partners with community health care providers to make sure that people leaving custody can access medical care. Read the rest of the recommendations here.

Rural areas have driven the increase in jail and prison capacity over the past decade, with many rural areas building prisons to create jobs. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been an increasingly good customer in recent years, paying jails and prisons to incarcerate undocumented detainees. Such detainees are often first held in crowded detention camps on the border, and experts warn that the cramped conditions there (not to mention in prisons and jails overall) makes the spread of disease more likely, Silvia Foster-Frau reports for the San Antonio Express-News.

At a county jail in Alabama last week, two inmates threatened to kill themselves if visibly sick new ICE detainees were allowed in. "According to video live-streamed on an inmate’s Facebook page, the two detainees stood on a ledge over a common area, nooses fashioned from sheets wrapped around their necks, and threatened to jump," the Post reports. Another inmate said in the video, "We’re not trying to put no more lives at risk."

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons announced Tuesday that federal inmates will be confined to their cells for the next two weeks to help combat the spread of covid-19, Josh Gerstein reports for Politico. But the isolation won't be complete; prisoners will be allowed to go to commissaries, laundries, showers, telephones and computers.

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