A mother of a newborn just died from the coronavirus. But in reality, it was the government, not the virus, that killed her.
Thirty-year-old Andrea Circle Bear was pregnant and also had a preexisting condition, yet criminal justice authorities tossed her into a federal prison in mid-March amid a pandemic no less, according to the New York Times. The expecting mother was serving a 28-month sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. She would go on to contract the coronavirus in prison, give birth to her child while on a ventilator, and die shortly thereafter.
The government could have prevented Circle Bear’s death with a sensible approach to criminal justice during a pandemic. Instead, the harsh brutality of state overreach has left a newborn without a mother and condemned a young woman to an awful death.
Many of our prisons are coronavirus hot spots, with cramped conditions and constant traffic in and out making sanitation, let alone social distancing, a challenge. Unsurprisingly, data shows that many of the worst coronavirus outbreaks have emerged from our criminal justice system, with thousands of cases directly tracing back to various prisons and jails.
With this in mind, the decision to continue the mass incarceration of nonviolent offenders is cruel and foolish. Can anyone honestly argue that sentencing Circle Bear to home confinement rather than continued imprisonment would have endangered public safety? Yet, if government officials had used the authority granted to them under the CARES Act to release Circle Bear to house arrest, she would probably still be alive to care for her newborn.
Yes, of course, even during a pandemic, we must lock away violent criminals and sex offenders alike to keep the public safe. But given the well-documented nature of our prisons as petri dishes for viral disease, it is negligent beyond belief to continue to lock away so many nonviolent, at-risk people. If anything, now is the perfect time to walk back America’s unfortunate infatuation with mass incarceration and reevaluate whom we lock up and why.
“It’s too late to save Andrea Circle Bear, but there is still time to protect thousands of prisoners in federal custody, the corrections officers and other employees who work inside prisons and the countless Americans who live in the nearby communities,” Justice Action Network Executive Director Holly Harris wrote in a compelling New York Times op-ed. “[Congress should force] the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons to immediately release to home confinement individuals who are not a threat to public safety, starting with those who are pregnant or elderly, who have compromised immune systems or are otherwise at high risk for COVID-19.”
Let’s hope our leaders heed these calls, and no more innocents are doomed to die a painful coronavirus death behind bars.
