Release Shadow Prisoners to Prevent Covid-19 Deaths
The Coronavirus pandemic is a global emergency. People confined against their will in high concentrations at close proximity in notoriously overcrowded facilities are extremely vulnerable to this invisible, quickly spreading threat. Civil rights and human rights organizations have called on officials to release persons from the traditional legal system but have overlooked people confined to “Civil” facilities “for treatment” after the completion of their prison sentence.
Your voice is essential to ensure these 9,000 people aren’t forgotten.
Spoke to a friend at FCCC yesterday. He said that the National Guard will be there to do Coronavirus testing today (April 28). He said the results will be known in 2 days. We shall see what happens.
Over a thousand inmates in Michigan prisons have tested positive so far, with over 35 deaths. Horrible situation. Testing is very inadequate there as well.
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The crowded conditions, lack of PPE and inability to use infection control measures set up a petri dish effect, allowing the virus to replicate over and over again, and the employees cart the virus back and forth to the community. The government is effectively setting up viral breeding grounds for covid19. No one ever said elected officials were smart.
COVID-19 is a new version of a virulent killer that is too much of an unknown quantity to take even the smallest chances of spreading. In hospitals, jails, and prison settings you are typically separated from other people by being placed in a special room, called an isolation room.
Unfortunately, most hospitals have insufficient facilities to provide airborne infection isolation for large numbers of patients with COVID-19 presenting in a short time period, and jails and prisons have far less ability or desire to provide adequate facilities during a pandemic.
The most effective system for containing those with an airborne infection is a negative pressure room that utilizes lower air pressure to allow outside air into the segregated environment. This traps and keeps potentially harmful particles within the negative pressure room by preventing internal air from leaving the space. Negative pressure rooms in medical facilities isolate patients with COVID-19, and protect people outside the room from exposure. Machines pull air into the room and then filters the air before moving it outside through HEPA filters.
Everyone who enters or leaves the negative pressure rooms must wear masks, gowns, shoe covers, and gloves. These are also known collectively as Personal Protection Equipment (PPE’s). Due to shortages of PPE’s in hospitals, medical and support staff are at high risk of contracting COVID-19 via direct contact through inhalation of the airborne infection. Jails and prisons are unlikely to maintain PPE’s for all medical staff as well as correctional officers.
Studies have shown that soles of shoes worn by members of the medical staff might function as carriers of the COVID-19. How likely do you think jail and prison medical and correctional staff are taking off shoes and cleaning them before entering their homes (and leaving them in their garage, washroom, or porch).
In effect, inmates in jails and prisons serve as massive incubating facilities for the COVID-19 disease, and the staff at these facilities are potentially bringing the COVID-19 into their communities via direct contact with an airborne infection or indirectly from their shoes.
Based upon my own personal experience in Florida jails and prisons, medical facilities and inept medical staff cannot manage to provide essential services to inmates and certainly cannot control a highly effective airborne infection like COVID-19 within these facilities.
Recently, Prosecutors in Orange County, California issued a warning to the public about the release of seven sex offenders due to their inability to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in California jails.
“These are not the kind of people who should be getting a break,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer in the news release. “As a state legislator, I was the author and founder of the State of California Sex Offender Management Board and the author of Megan’s Law on the Internet, which allows the public to see where these sex offenders are so that they can protect themselves and their families. It is not the Court’s responsibility to control the jail population by releasing these dangerous criminals back into our communities. The residents of Orange County deserve to have the peace of mind that registered sex offenders are being held accountable and not just let out the front door of jail by a court commissioner who refuses to follow the law.”
Just as the hourly announcements of the death count due to the COVID-19 disease generally serves to frighten the general public as to the potential dangers of coming in contact with the airborne infection, similar repeated blanket statements regarding all sex offenders by Todd Spitzer, among numerous others, serve to frighten the general public into believing the vast majority of sex offenders don’t deserve to be released from their confinement.