Stop letting rapists out of prison

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.