Bree Barton is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.
My uncle’s release was not unique. Many jails, facing intense scrutiny and growing concern over incarcerated people’s risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus, have released some nonviolent offenders. This move has evoked strong, often angry responses from governors, judges and police officers concerned about the effects on prison populations and society at large. Not to mention the more personal implications: A recent New York Times article highlighted a woman’s outrage after the man accused of the hit-and-run that killed her daughter had been released from a virus-threatened St. Louis jail.
On the surface, the early release of incarcerated people may look like humanity, like clemency — at least for those inmates who have homes to go to. Look deeper, though, and the motivations become less clear and the consequences less benign. Research shows that formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public, and predicts that “homeless individuals infected by COVID-19 would be twice as likely to be hospitalized, two to four times as likely to require critical care, and two to three times as likely to die than the general population.”
To release a vulnerable population (incarcerated people) into a vulnerable situation (homelessness) is, at best, misguided; at worst, dangerous. Though incarcerated Americans lack some of the rights held by most citizens, they are protected by the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, a term that can include “deliberate indifference.” A few days after my uncle’s release, for example, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered a D.C. jail to overhaul its medical care, cleaning and social distancing measures to reverse what appeared to be the city’s “deliberate indifference” to the health of its incarcerated population.
When my uncle and his fellow inmates were led out on a chain and handed their modified probation papers, did the jail take into account that, six days earlier, 22 inmates in Dallas County and 12 sheriff’s office employees tested positive for the virus? Were the men told where they could be tested for covid-19? Were they directed to area shelters — the ones that hadn’t already closed their doors? Not that we know. In the current global circumstances, the failure to do those things would look very much like “deliberate indifference.”
My uncle was released, we eventually figured out, because he was considered “medically high-risk” for the coronavirus. Five years ago, he was hospitalized for tuberculosis; decades of addiction have ravaged both his body and his mind. He is mentally ill and has made multiple suicide attempts. He is also a gifted artist, and was once a carpenter. When I visited him in jail in February, he showed me some of his whimsical cartoons, telling me his fellow inmates often asked him to draw people they missed.
Until his unexpected release, my uncle had been in jail for 11 months, waiting for a bed to open up at a substance abuse felony punishment facility, where he would take part in a court-mandated six-month treatment program, followed by up to three months in a transitional treatment center, six to nine months of outpatient aftercare and up to 12 months of support groups and follow-up supervision. But amid covid-19, the substance-abuse facility sealed its doors, and the waiting list for its lifesaving program was wiped clean.
My uncle was released at 2:15 p.m. on April 13. After more than three weeks of searching, my mother finally found him. He was in an alley behind a grocery store, thin and unshaven, a dirty face mask sagging beneath his chin. He was living under a bridge, using his SNAP card to buy cooking sherry, his drug of choice. My mother couldn’t hug her little brother, because she didn’t know whether he was sick. She and I have pieced together what we know of his release from a few Dallas County employees speaking off the record.
The pandemic is shining a spotlight on people who are highly vulnerable — not just to the virus, but to the broader social injustices that greatly increase the chance of contracting and dying from it.
By washing its hands of my uncle in the name of risk avoidance, the criminal justice system has delivered him straight back to the life-and-death risks that too many Americans face every day.
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