New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he plans to release inmates in the city who are “vulnerable” to contracting the coronavirus.
“In the next 48 hours, we will identify any inmates who need to be brought out because of either their own health conditions — if they have any preexisting conditions, etc. — or because the charges were minor and we think it’s appropriate to bring them out in this context,” de Blasio said on WCBS radio Wednesday.
“That said, we still need our criminal justice system to function,” he added.
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Los Angeles and Ohio have already begun releasing inmates amid the coronavirus crisis, and the Board of Corrections, which oversees prisons, said New York City should be no different.
“The City must begin this process now,” the BOC said in a statement Tuesday. “The City’s jails have particular challenges to preventing disease transmissions on a normal day and even more so during a public health crisis.”
A correction officer and an inmate within the city’s prison system have both tested positive. New York state has suffered a total of 20 confirmed deaths due to the virus, according to Johns Hopkins.
De Blasio warned Wednesday night that the number of coronavirus cases keeps jumping in the Big Apple.
“Yesterday we saw a jump of 100 cases. Today we saw a jump of hundreds of cases, almost a doubling overnight over 1,800 now pushing 2,000 cases in just this city and at this rate it’s just going to keep increasing,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
