With the coronavirus subsuming nearly every apparatus of our government, state and federal prison systems have begun releasing prisoners they deem low-risk in the hopes of mitigating the spread of the pandemic.
The first federal inmate to die as a result of the coronavirus was a nonviolent drug offender, a 49-year-old just halfway through a 27-year sentence for attempting to distribute crack cocaine. Such a death doesn’t just highlight the unique need to save those rehabilitating in prison from the pandemic but also the extraordinary injustice of a sentencing system that grants a nonviolent offender two more years behind bars than a convicted rapist such as Harvey Weinstein. Some state prisons, however, have learned the wrong lesson.
Per an order from the New York Department of Corrections and Community Services, the Monroe County Jail released more than 50 prisoners out of preparation for the coronavirus, including eight registered sex offenders. Three are convicted of raping minors and registered as level three, deemed by state courts as most likely to re-offend.
In the city, two men involved in the inadvertent killing of a cop were almost released with other violent offenders serving in the Rikers Island jail. Unlike the upstate case, prosecutors reportedly intervened.
Attorney General William Barr has prevented such a catastrophe from happening on a federal level, directing federal prisons to release some elderly and at-risk inmates but excluding violent criminals and sex offenders.
Ordinarily, the happenings at an upstate New York jail wouldn’t be much cause for national concern, but in a time where paychecks are diminishing, law enforcement is stretched, and self-defense is hard to come by, safety can probably be taken less for granted than usual. If cops can’t defend us, few have the ammunition to protect themselves, and tensions are already high, state governments rankling confidence in public safety with at-risk, violent criminal releases is hardly sound.
Sure, let’s release those nonviolent susceptible to coronavirus, and a pandemic ought to make us rethink the sentences we impose. But a time of mass panic is simply not the time to flirt with some Utopian notion of a prison abolition system that simply hopes the public can stomach child rapists and murderers returning to the streets.
