Civil rights activists and prison watchdog groups in Connecticut say one way to protect inmates from a potential COVID-19 outbreak is to release some people from jails and prisons.
Dozens of groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, put their name on an open letter to Lamont.
“We are calling on the governor and the Department of Correction commissioner to start releasing people from our correctional institutions before this pandemic hits them,” says David McGuire, president of the Connecticut ACLU.
McGuire says prisoners are especially vulnerable to contagious diseases.
“These folks have very limited access to health care, they’re in confined quarters, a lot of these folks are in cells with other people in the system. We’re very concerned about them getting the coronavirus and it ravaging the facility.”
The Connecticut Department of Correction put a response plan in place after Lamont’s emergency declaration last week. The plan suspends social visits entirely. It puts limits on who can enter and leave, and it cuts down on large group activities, among many other changes.
Arvind Venkataraman with the Yale School of Medicine says it’s not enough.
“We were kind of taken aback by what the DOC actually has in place,” he says.
Because coronavirus is a new pathogen, no one has antibodies, there are no vaccines and there’s no herd immunity. And the virus can be contagious among people who don’t show symptoms.
“We can’t just assume that only those people have coronavirus,” Venkataraman says. “It’s very hard to predict right now who does or who doesn’t.”
Venkataraman was one of three Yale-affiliated health advocates who put their name on a provocatively-titled op-ed in the Connecticut Mirror last week: “To contain coronavirus, release people in prison.”
Another is Noora Reffat, who studies infectious disease at the Yale School of Public Health. She says prisoners are uniquely susceptible to infectious diseases.
“Prisons tend to be super overcrowded,” Reffat says. “People don’t have adequate access to health care services all the time. Also, there is a disproportionate incarceration of individuals from communities already hard hit by infectious diseases.”
So new prisoners might be transmitting something they brought in from the outside. And they’re not the only ones who might bring something in.
“Lawyers, visitors, families…I guess you could kind of think about prison facilities as a revolving door of bodies,” Reffat says.
At least one case has turned up in a jail in the greater New York area. An inmate at the Nassau County Correctional Center on Long Island was hospitalized after testing positive for coronavirus.
Anthony Boutin with the Nassau University Medical Center says the inmate came in earlier this month, then became symptomatic last week.
“Right now he’s actually being treated, isolation room, negative pressure, he’s being taken care of,” Boutin says.
Officials say the Nassau County Department of Health is identifying inmates and staff who may have been exposed.
“This is just a humanitarian crisis waiting to happen,” says Joseph Gaylin, a fellow at the Dwight Hall at Yale School of Public Service and Social Justice. “This crisis should be a wake-up call for the fact that if you have so many people locked behind bars, you not only have a humanitarian crisis but a public health crisis in the making.”
Advocates say they’d specifically like to see elderly inmates, those with medical conditions and people in pre-trial detention released. More than 3,000 people in Connecticut are awaiting trial.
McGuire, with the ACLU, says if they are released, the state needs to provide for them.
“They cannot just be discharged into the street and go into homelessness,” he says. “That itself is a public health hazard as well.”
A spokesperson for the Connecticut Department of Correction didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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