About 220,000 men and women are in federal prison, and nearly everyone who enters the prison system eventually gets out.
So with the coronavirus crisis, let’s make sure that these inmates get out alive.
Coronavirus poses a disproportionate threat to the elderly. Our prisons, as it happens, are full of men and women over 60 years of age. Many of these pose very little threat and are nonviolent offenders. Many of these inmates are in minimum-security camps that don’t even have fences.
I was housed for more than eight years in such a federal prison camp, with no fence and no razor wire. I observed hundreds of inmates over that period, and I can say from experience that a common cold or flu would spread like wildfire in just a few days time, because of the close proximity of beds, showers, toilets, and the chow hall.
Take Rikers Island in New York as an example. It announced on March 23 that 38 inmates and staff had tested positive for the coronavirus. You might think of prison as a perfect place for isolation, but it is, in fact, the opposite. Staff come and go daily; new inmates enter and leave constantly. Prisons and jails, with their close quarters, are an ideal environment for spreading contagious diseases.
The prison system is not much different from a nursing home in terms of its high density. Social distancing is not possible, and prison staff are not trained nor equipped to care for elderly inmates.
In that light, consider what happened very recently at a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, where the illness spread rapidly, infecting 59 of the 72 residents and more than a quarter of the staff. Twenty-nine have died so far. And this was at a location where the staff was well trained in taking care of the elderly, unlike the prison system.
President Trump has done a remarkable job with Criminal Justice Reform with the historic First Step Act. With this current health crisis, it is now important for him to send elderly, nonviolent federal inmates to home confinement. Many state prison systems are already doing this.
A bill to this effect, HR 4018, passed the House by unanimous consent. It would reduce the amount of time elderly inmates must serve. It is time to fast track HR 4018 because of the current crisis and for Trump to even go one step further in releasing all nonviolent, elderly inmates immediately by using his clemency power or by executive order.
The Bureau of Prisons would determine who gets released to ensure that we are not putting violent offenders back into society. With these elderly inmates being sent to home confinement, BOP would still have overall responsibility for their supervision.
Let’s get these elderly federal prisoners home. Their sentences were meant to be several months or years, not death sentences.
Mark Whitacre (@markewhitacre) is a criminal justice reform advocate. He served more than eight years in federal prison for white-collar crime. He was released in 2006.
