As Piper Kerman, author of “Orange is the New Black,” wrote in the Washington Post, this is largely the result of prison sentences that are longer than those imposed by any other country.
After an outbreak killed six inmates in a federal prison in Lisbon, Ohio, U.S. District Court Judge James Gwin decried the “shockingly limited” amount of testing, noting that the prison has received fewer than 100 tests, while a state prison of similar size had done about 4,000 tests.
Two federal prisons in New York City reported that they had tested a total of only 19 inmates since the outbreak began; 11 were positive.
This has to change before the pandemic spreads, and prisons across the country go up in flames as prisoners’ riot against their conditions.
The crisis should also lead to larger reforms — drastically reducing sentences while expanding alternatives to incarceration, ending the cash bail system and the practice of locking poor people up while they await trial, expanding parole, reducing the overcrowded and primitive conditions of too many jails and prisons.
