US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infections | Hacker News Reader

US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infections

bbc.co.uk

26 pointspmoriarty11 comments

Doesn’t it seem wierd that you release people from a good isolation system?

Are the prisoners given enough support to be able to protect themselves when they are released? Surely most won’t have the ready resources to self isolate for weeks.

Doesn’t this just punt the problem onto the social services that will end up supporting many of the released prisoners, social services that will already be under incredible stress?

Can anyone with local information tell us what support these prisoners are provided?

Edit: Plus, assuming the average prisoner is anti-social, does releasing them risk (a) further stressing police and hospital resources, and (b) running counter to prevention policies that depend on social cooperation?

Many inmates aren't in isolation, but rather, are in dorm-style pods without sufficient separation, or in a small cell with one other person (and in cases of overcrowding, more than one)

No, it doesn’t seem weird. US jails are high density, low sanitation, often lack basic things like soap and running water, and have famously low standards of medical care even outside of pandemics.

It’s the worst possible place for anyone to be in a situation like this.

When this hits jails, very nearly everyone in the jails will be exposed, and the death rates are likely to be roughly equivalent to the critical case rates (>15%).

A more cynical person might claim that the people responsible for allocating medical resources and oversight to prisons see this as a generally desirable outcome; the system working as intended. (Jails in the US disproportionately hold nonwhite people.)

"have famously low standards of medical care"

I remember on another forum someone that used to post, who claimed to be a former IT worker who decided to go to nursing school, you know, because he wanted to do something "real" and then he graduated and could only get a job working in a prison. Some stuff he described was pretty chilling, even in its understatement.

I've done time in state and federal prisons. While I've never been without soap or water or been in an overcrowded facility, the medical care is very bad.

At an older federal prison, we had to check shoes in the morning for brown recluse spiders. One guy got bit on his foot by one of them and it quickly turned black and blue. He went to medical and they diagnosed him as having a fracture, and set a cast on his foot without doing an x-ray (which would have meant a trip out to a hospital).

Several weeks later they had to amputate his leg below the knee.

Sounds to me like they didn't need to be in prison in the first place. Promptly released upon being realized to be a liability rather than an income generating asset.

That is exactly what is going on. The idea of having to pay for treatment and care is driving this, not any humanitarian or security consideration.

None of them of course will have healthcare coverage...

This pandemic shows true nature of so many things.

I especially like how it shown that main purpose of schools is not the education but preventing kids from being a burden for their parents.

My experience with High School was that it was a daycare center with a focus on forcing conformity. I learned nearly nothing in the actual school aside from maybe a bit of math I could have picked up through online classes. I think it was mostly a taste of what it would feel like to be in prison.

English was mostly trying to teach the illiterate kids how to read 10 years too late while everyone else tried not to die of boredom. History was about how we won WWII with maybe a little nationalism mixed in. PE was okay. Physics was barely recognizable as such. Math was mostly rote learning. Biology was similar.

Perhaps pedantic, but these were inmates in jail, not prison. (at least in the US criminal justice system, the difference refers to whether or not they have been convicted and are subject to long-term confinement)

In recent years, Louisiana made efforts to reduce prison population then filled those for-profit spaces with higher paying immigrant detentions. I wonder what plans are for them?

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