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I analyzed CDCR's plan to release prisoners and #StopSanQuentinOutbreak. Thread. https://www.hadaraviram.com/2020/07/11/unpacking-cdcrs-covid-19-release-plan/
The plan feels like an effort to navigate btwn curbing the pandemic and avoiding too much public backlash--by trimming prison population at the margins, rather than slicing the middle of the population cake and causing controversy 2/
The plan can be summarized into five points: (1) 4,800 of the candidates for release are people who have 180 days left and are not doing time for violence or domestic violence, or registered as sex offenders. 3/
(2) release undetermined no. of people with a year left on their sentence and nonviolent, nonsex crime of commitment at an outbreak epicenter. Those aged 30 and over are immediately eligible; younger people will be reviewed case-by-case by CDCR. 4/
(3) 12-week programming credit to everyone not on death row or serving life without parole who doesn’t have a serious violation (ranging from murder to possession of cellphone) since March 1. 2,100 of these folks will therefore complete sentences this summer. 5/
(4) Case-by-case releases of ppl over 65 with chronic medical condition, or with respiratory illnesses, who are .low risk for violence who are not on death row, serving life without parole, or high-risk sex offenders. 6/
(5) CDCR will also assess for release people in hospice or pregnant, and expedite release for people who have been granted parole (including the governor’s approval.) 7/
To be fair, there are upsides. Ppl will get out, in itself is a blessing to them and their family. Also, the rolling basis, albeit not ideal for pandemic prevention, might allow folks to better plan their future, especially against the backdrop of a terrible economy. 8/
BUT: this plan is too little, too late, too reactive, and too sensitive to public pressure. 9/
1. Too little. 8,000 is a drop in the bucket– 6% of current prison population. To give you a sense of what is needed, the medical report from UCSF and UC Berkeley recommended that Quentin reduce by 50%. 10/
Moreover, right now 26 facilities are overcrowded, 19 of them above 120% of design capacity. Releasing a total of 8,000 people does not even come close to allowing the kind of social distancing that would be necessary to halt pandemic spread. 11/
2. Too late. The plan relies largely on case-by-case evaluations. The time to do careful individual assessment was on March 1. Now we're in triage time. A solid plan in the future will have to include more categorical releases akin to the credit plan. 12/
3. Too reactive. The list of targeted prisons for release is already dated--does not include new outbreaks at CCI and CRC, and does not account for the sluggish testing (no true sense of where the pandemic is still active) => releases are reactive, not preventive. 13/
4. Too tailored to public pressure, relying on usual public tropes: nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual offenses. I feel like a broken record, but this apparently needs to be said again: There's no correlation btwn crime of commitment and risk to public safety. 14/
The math is simple. 1/4 of prison population are over 50, overlapping with ppl sentenced for a violent crime decades ago. They are (1) aging and (2) infirm. 15/
If we were truly concerned about recidivism and pandemic infection, these folks would be the obvious targets of a sound prison release policy: no public safety risk, high medical risk. 16/
For more on our idiotic approach to lifers and risk assessment, see here: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520291553/yesterdays-monsters 17/
In summary, the Governor and CDCR want to mitigate the medical catastrophe and hope that, by cobbling together palatable candidates for release, the numbers will somehow add up to sufficient prevention. They won’t. 19/
It’s a good start, and something to take pride in as activists, because I am sure that our constant pressure brought this about. But it is only a start, and much more needs to happen before we are even close to having a chance to save lives. /fin
