New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to passionate pleas from activists to release low-level offenders amid the COVID-19 pandemic with a plan to do exactly that. On Tuesday, the mayor announced the planned release of about 300 nonviolent inmates from Rikers Island, according to CNBC. Officials had already reported at least 38 confirmed cases of the virus at the jail complex and in other nearby jails, according to Time magazine. Scott Hechinger, a Brooklyn public defender, described conditions at Rikers as horrific in a long Twitter thread Monday. "PLEASE READ: Conditions on Rikers are unimaginably bad. My colleague has spoken to a few people trapped inside. What they told her is horrifying,” he said in one tweet. “Unless @NYGovCuomo , @NYCMayor , & all DAs do something ASAP, we're looking at mass death."
Hechinger reported inmates being served meals on "dirty food trays" and sleeping "close enough to reach out and touch the next person." "There is one toilet for every 29 people trapped on Rikers Island right now," he tweeted. “’It is like a f---ing slave ship,’” Hechinger quoted a colleague of his saying. “It makes me want to f---ing cry. They can't even wash their hands. It is insane that this day & age we treat human beings this way. This is shameful."
Hechinger described how inmates were forced to sit four to a table despite social distancing urgings and how kitchen staffers failed to wear masks. He even said Rikers staff members did not clean the general areas following the first reported COVID-19 case at the prison Saturday. “People are being housed with others with flu-like symptoms and there is no recourse,” Hechinger said.
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The attorney’s social media messages are part of a larger effort calling on authorities to release low-level offenders, following in the footsteps of at least a dozen local jails in California, New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas. Maya Ragsdale, a Miami public defender, said she observed similarly disheartening conditions during professional visits to one of the city's jails Monday. “The ppl I met are caged in dirty cells w/ 50-60 ppl, forced to share toilets, showers, sinks, laundry,” she tweeted Tuesday. “Many stay in bed all day b/c of fear about who may be carrying the virus.” Meanwhile, one guard “cavalierly” called COVID-19 fears “overblown,” revealing no plans to change how he does his job, Ragsdale said. The attorney described multiple clients who had died in Miami-Dade County Corrections’ custody "due to medical neglect during normal times." "Now, pretrial incarceration will be a death sentence..." Ragsdale said in another tweet. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle has said her office is working on a process to release inmates held for misdemeanor and nonviolent felony offenses, according to Florida Politics.
De Blasio’s plan to release hundreds of prisoners followed the New York City Board of Correction interim chairwoman Jacqueline Sherman’s plea for New York inmates to be released in a letter to criminal justice officials Saturday. It was the same day the first federal inmate tested positive for COVID-19 at a Brooklyn facility, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Fewer people in the jails will save lives and minimize transmission among people in custody as well as staff,” she said in the letter Time magazine obtained. “Failure to drastically reduce the jail population threatens to overwhelm the City jails’ healthcare system as well its basic operations.”
De Blasio’s office first announced plans Thursday to release 40 Rikers inmates prone to catch the virus, and following Sherman’s letter on Monday said the city is considering releasing even more inmates, "initially hundreds," according to the New York Post. De Blasio said inmates considered for release included those with underlying health conditions, the elderly, and inmates who have served most of their time. “Those are the categories we’re looking at and we’re going to announce day by day the number of people we think is appropriate,” de Blasio said in a 1010 WINS radio interview.
Ross MacDonald, the chief physician at Rikers, had warned officials Wednesday on Twitter that a "storm is coming." “We will put ourselves at personal risk and ask little in return. But we cannot change the fundamental nature of jail. We cannot socially distance dozens of elderly men living in a dorm, sharing a bathroom. Think of a cruise ship recklessly boarding more passengers each day,” the doctor said in a follow-up tweet. He asked officials to consider the public servants who “muster every tool of public health, science and medicine to try to keep our patients safe.” “You must not leave them in harm’s way,” MacDonald tweeted.
