The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Pandemic Is Wreaking Havoc in America’s Prisons and Jails

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Three months ago, Kai Wright, the host of WNYC’s the United States of Anxiety, joined David Remnick for a special episode about the effects of mass incarceration and the movement to end it. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic puts inmates in acute and disproportionate danger, that effort may be gaining new traction. Wright and Remnick reconvene to examine the COVID-19 crisis in prison and its political effects. David Remnick also speaks with Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, who has signed an executive order to release certain at-risk inmates from states prisons—the sort of measure that would once have been deeply unpopular and risky. “I haven’t really spent any time on the politics,” Governor Murphy says. “In all the steps we’ve taken, we’re trying to make the call as best we can, based on the facts, based on the data, based on the science.” And Kai Wright interviews Udi Ofer, the head of the A.C.L.U.’s Justice Division, who notes that “the communities that the C.D.C. has told us are most vulnerable to COVID-19 are exactly the communities that are housed in our nation’s jails and prisons,” including a disproportionately older population among inmates. Given the lack of social distancing and, in many cases, substandard hygienic conditions, Ofer says that reducing the inmate population “literally is a life-and-death situation.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm joined now by Kai Wright, the host of the program, The United States of Anxiety from WNYC. Kai, welcome back. It's great to see you over Zoom at least. Exactly. This is the closest we can get. It was just three months ago, which now feels like five years ago, that you joined me for an episode that we devoted to the issue of mass incarceration and the consequences. of that policy. Now we're watching as the coronavirus wreaks havoc on every facet of our lives, including inside our nation's prisons and jails. So, Kai, what does it mean for people who are

behind bars still and people working in prisons as well? It means really quite acute danger. Honestly, I saw a list this morning. There was something about like 150 people that have died that at least have been documented so far inside jails and prisons. The number is certainly growing. It's impossible to social distance in those environments. Now, some authorities, and in some areas around the country, have sent some people home or sent people out of prison to achieve just what you're describing some more social distance there, maybe not people who are convicted of the most violent crimes. Is that not a step forward? Has it not achieved anything? Well, it has, but keep in mind, I mean, so there are about 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States. That's a huge spectrum of folks ranging from people who are waiting for trial, who can't make bail, who are there on minor drug charges on up through violent offenders, right?

When you think about that number, the most recent number I've seen of who's been released comes from the UCLA Law School, who's been tracking this. And they calculate there's about 38,000 people who've been released from the system. So out of that 2.3 million, that's less than 2%. And it's hard to see how that's going to make any real difference in terms of the ability to social distance or to reduce the transmission of the virus inside these facilities. You recently talked with someone at the American Civil Liberties Union who knows about these issues. Who is that? Udi Ofer is a head of the ACLU's justice division. So that means he heads up their criminal justice reform efforts overall.

And he's been kind of spearheading the organization's effort to go literally county by county. state by state and to the federal government and try to urge them to stop arresting so many people. And two, governors use all the power that you have to let as many people out as you can, particularly the people who we know to be most vulnerable. We're in a real crisis situation in jails and prisons, and even more so than the crisis we're all facing across the nation.

About 40% of people in prison before COVID-19 have at least one chronic health condition, such as asthma or diabetes, right? HIV is four to five times higher among people in prison than in the general population. People in our nation's prisons are older. So the communities that the CDC has told us are most vulnerable to COVID-19 are exactly the communities that are housed in our nation's jails and prisons. So you guys have reached out to 25 states, right? 25 governors, if I'm correct.

What is it you were requesting? And who's sort of been taking the most effective action so far? Yeah. We're asking governors to tell their prosecutors, their police, their sheriffs to stop bringing people into the system in the first place. Stop making custodial arrest for low-level offenses. If you have to make an arrest, give someone a ticket instead of taking them to central booking.

That may sound like not a big deal, but right now, literally, is a life and death situation. And are there places that you see that are doing that, that are taking this up? Who's doing a good job? Yeah. So look, I want to be careful here because I think everyone needs to do a lot more, but I also want to give credit where credit is due. So look, in Colorado, for example, Governor Polis has issued a couple of executive orders.

We have seen about a 40% reduction in the state's jail population. And, you know, in sheriffs there and police officers are starting. to get people making sure the jail population is going down. In Wisconsin, we saw the secretary there begin releasing people on what's known as supervision holds. In Kentucky, we've seen a bipartisan coalition lead to an executive order that has led to about 800 fewer people in prison, and the county jails had been reduced by about 28%.

Washington State, Governor Inslee, issued an executive order. They got about 950 people out. New Jersey has been in the forefront in many ways, both through the Supreme Court and Governor Murphy issuing an executive order. So we are seeing examples we can point to. And I'm proud to say that some of these are even in Republican administrations,

which I think is a very powerful statement. But we need to talk. Well, I was trying to track that math as you were speaking. I was trying to say, okay, which ones of these are Democrats or Republicans? I would assume that it would be largely Democrats, but you are seeing Republicans

who are stepping forward with them. Yeah, in Kentucky, the ACLU is working with Republican allies to get people out of prisons and jail. So, look, I mean, the way I always talk about the movement to mass incarceration is that in many ways, it's an island of political agreement in a sea of bickering, right? We've actually seen a lot of successes over the past couple of years in red states and blue states to begin tapping mass incarceration. but everything has become a lot more urgent now during this COVID-19 crisis. I wonder how this changes that in the long term, you know, in terms of either making it more or less likely

that that movement will continue. I've thought about that. What do you think? Yeah, look, I don't want to find a, you know, I'm trying to be careful and not find anything positive about this horrible pandemic we're all living through because there's nothing good about it. At the same time, you know, some mornings I wake up feeling a bit more hopeful where,

look, we've always struggled to make the public and politicians realize that people who are living in jails and prisons are our families, our neighbors, our human beings. And seeing the fact that more than 16,000 people had been released from prisons and jails by ACLU count since the pandemic began and that the public is being supportive, of this gives me that ray of hope that maybe this is the tipping point that we've all been waiting for in the mass incarceration space. And what about violent offenders? I mean, this is always the third rail of this conversation. I imagine those are the folks who are not being released at this time. What's going to happen there?

Yeah. It is true that in the vast majority of releases, it's mostly people who are held for drug or property offenses or what are called non-bound. offenses, and that's unfortunate. Particularly when you're talking about prisons, right? Look, one of the phenomenons of mass incarceration is that we have seen a 300% spike over the past 20 years of the number of people aged 55 or older who are in prison. So the reason people are held for these long sentences a lot of times are because they

were incarcerated for violent offenses that they engaged in when they were in their teens or in their 20s. Yet here we are 20, 30 years later, and they're still being incarcerated for these mistakes. So I'm hoping that in the coming weeks, we're going to see an increase of the number of elderly people who are being released, including people who were incarcerated for offenses involving violence. And to any listeners out there who are worried about what does that mean for crime in America, you know, the recidivism rate for elderly people is at the single digits, if not lower. People age out of crime. That is a fact that has been documented through many studies. It makes no public safety sense to hold someone when they're in their 50s, 60s, or older if the reason is public safety.

What about, like, correction staff and law enforcement unions? These are some of the folks who have traditionally been opposed to decarceration campaigns. And this outbreak is, I would imagine, not great news for prison guards either. So how have they responded to this moment and this effort? Yeah. So this is going to be a bit of a weird answer. But so far, they haven't been vocal as they would otherwise about all of the releases that are happening. So in many ways, their non-response, I think speaks volumes.

Everyone's life is at risk. You know, there are more than 37,000 federal corrections employees. And I know that they're frustrated. with the Trump administration's lack of an appropriate response. And I think we're going to start hearing more from federal correctional unions and from other spaces demanding more from the Trump administration. I wonder if it will have any impact on how the decarceration movement

operates out of this, if there's something new that will come out of it. I can't answer that fully now, but one of the things that I'm noticing on my team, and this is, you know, it's a bit of an admission, right? We normally do not talk about the health of corrections officers. We're focused on people who are incarcerated in jails and prisons. We at ACLU were about to release what we're calling a memorial for people who have died because of COVID-19 in prisons and jails. The first version of that was only going to include incarcerated people.

But then as we were kind of talking about it, we were. We're like, you know what, we have to include corrections officers. You know, they're dying. They're risking their families. So we're going to add that. And I don't think we would have done that before COVID-19. So maybe we even as the decarcerators are developing more empathy for the people who not only live inside prisons and jails, but also work inside prisons and jails. That's Udi Ofer of the American Civil Liberties Union talking with Kai Wright.

the host of WNYC's The United States of Anxiety. We should note that some of the numbers they mentioned may have already changed. I'm David Remnick, and we'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Udi Ofer singled out a number of states that are trying to reduce their prison populations in response to the coronavirus. New Jersey is among them. The state has the second highest rate of infections in the country.

County jails have temporarily released more than 800 people and New Jersey's governor, Phil Murphy, signed an executive order to begin releasing certain at-risk inmates in the state prison system. I spoke with Governor Murphy about a week ago. Yeah, how are you holding up? I'm holding up. I mean, we're going to, you know,

today is going to be another day with several hundred more fatalities we're going to announce in a couple of hours. And, you know, we think we're in a meaningfully better place than we may have been a week to two ago, but we're not out of the woods. without any question. Certainly not. Certainly not.

Governor, I know you've been inundated with information and so many challenges related to coronavirus for months now. I have to ask, when did you first become aware that prisons were going to become a major hotspot for transmission and that the prison population was at particular risk? I can't give you a specific date, but we knew that we're not going to crack the back of this virus if we only bring some of us along. We've got to bring everybody along. What is the prison population and how many people are you planning to let out?

The population at the state level, I believe, is about 19,000, and that's down over time from 30,000, not that long ago. I don't have a county jail number specifically for you, but obviously there's a different jurisdiction there. And the number in terms of the folks who will be let out is yet to be determined. And so we're right now going through batches of populations, and the batches are defined by things like age, underlying conditions. Another one is within X days of maxing out a sentence. Another batch is folks within a certain amount of time to parole. yet another batch is folks who had been up for parole within the past year and had been denied for whatever reason. So we're going through that process batch by batch.

And as you can imagine, you want to get that right, not just the right people are being released, but that there's something for them to be released too, just to make sure folks have a place to go, a home, some sort of a safety net that we're not just throwing people out in the streets. And we've got to be very careful in terms of those decisions. How do you respond to the critics who have said that this process in New Jersey hasn't moved fast enough? And these people point to other states, which have released many more inmates. How do you respond to that? I've got to do this responsibly is my answer, and we take this very seriously.

You know, we are, if you look at steps taken by states in America, and again, this is a general comment, but it does include corrections. I don't know that any state, when you add up all the steps we've taken in America, has been more aggressive. But we've also made sure that we've done it as right as we can. I'll give you an example. When we close schools, we made each district come up with their emergency action plan. And unless we blessed it, we did not allow them to shut down reasons, mostly because of lack of access for too many of our kids to adopt. device. You had to have an explicit paper plan for remote learning. Another reason was access to a hot meal. Where for schools, it might have been their only opportunity of the day for too many

kids in our state to get a reliable meal. So we took an extra couple of days to make sure we got that right. And I want to make sure we get any major shift in our population in our corrections community also as right as we can. Well, how have you responded to police and corrections officers unions that have opposed releases and other reforms. Have they come to you with their concerns and try to block anything? I have not gotten incomings personally. It's not to say that my team has not. They also are worried about their own populations. You know, you look at the corrections officers will have lost some. Healthcare workers who work in corrections facilities, we've lost some. You know, they're focused not just on what we're doing with the prison population. They're focused on

their own ranks, as they should be and understandably. Governor, give me the political dynamics of dealing with a prison population in particular. There are people on one end of the political spectrum saying you can't let anybody out. And then there have been voices, particularly on the left, who say, well, in this situation, this incredibly horrific emergency situation, all prisoners should be let out because of the circumstances of prisons themselves, which are where everybody's... up against each other and things can spread like wildfire. Yep.

So I'd say a couple of things, an area where we can let all prisoners out. And I've got to draw the line between violent and nonviolent. And that's a line that will adhere to. For the folks, even in the violent offender category, I hope sooner than later, we'll be able to achieve the social distancing and the sort of basics that may be more difficult

or may have been more difficult without any of these releases. And secondly, I haven't really spent any time on the politics. In all the steps we've taken, we're trying to make the call as best we can based on the facts, based on the data, based on the science. But are you, you have to say to yourself in the position that you're in uniquely, I'm willing to put certain people at much higher risk that is leave them in prison because of their past record. Is that what you're saying? That violent offenders, they're going to just be at higher risk because I can't let them out.

I think you can say both of those things. You know what? I'm sorry, but the violent offenders are going to have to stay in the system, but we're going to be able to much more appropriately and proactively care for their well-being while they're in the system. Governor Murphy, I wish you the best, and thank you so much. Thanks for being on, David. Phil Murphy, Governor of New Jersey. We spoke about a week ago.

I'm joined today by Kai Wright, who's the host of WNYC's program, The United States of Anxiety. So, Kai, for those who are being released, what happens to them after they get out of prison? They're re-entering society at an incredibly stressful, complicated moment. Yeah, it's hard to say, quite honestly. I mean, for a number of people, they're being released into home detention, right? So they're being sent either with ankle bracelets or back into their homes to quarantine with their families.

It raises an enormous number of questions. I mean, one of the things that we have to remember is that part of what's happened in mass incarceration is we have turned prisons into the one place where people get a number of social services that they need, from alcohol and drug treatment to mental health treatment. in many cases to forms of health care. And so there are a number of things that have to be done in folks' lives because of the way we've organized society. And I think it's going to be jurisdiction by jurisdiction, a challenge to figure out how to do this. I think the hopeful note is that if they do that, if we're able to figure out how to do reentry correctly in the course of this, and those places it may make that a much easier process when this is over as well. Well, I was going to ask, do you think that this terrible experience, which is affecting so much of society in so many ways, might have some kind of influence on the criminal justice system when we are past COVID-19?

I think it depends on what you mean. So I think in the sense of that there will be counties and states in particular who will have made the political and economic investment in decarceration of some sort. And I think that you will see a permanent downtick in some of those places in terms of the number of people who are held in these facilities. But on a broader level, in terms of changing our faith, which is really the only way you can describe it, our faith in the idea that punishment and incarceration is the way to deal with social ills, I don't see how this changes that in any way. I mean, that's rooted in 150 years' worth of racist ideas about the ways in which black and brown people are a threat to society. And this crisis won't up in that. The only thing that would up in that is a change in political power. And indeed, I'm probably most concerned about the ways in which this crisis will decrease the political power of the communities that are most affected by mass incarceration. Why do you say that?

Well, because we are in the middle of an election year. and the people who are most affected by this are the people who are most easily disenfranchised. And I think one of the problems that we are going to be staring down as this crisis unfolds is how does democracy continue to function. Kai, thanks so much. Thank you. Kai Wright hosts the United States of Anxiety from WNYC. Now, we've been covering this issue for quite a while, and we're going to keep following it. as prisons respond to the pandemic.

Some weeks from now, you'll hear what it's like for an inmate being released into a world that's been transformed by the crisis. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks so much for joining us and be well. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed

by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calli Leah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.