The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.

The COVID-19 pandemic poses grave risks to incarcerated people, to corrections staff and to the community. Imprisoned people live in crowded, unsanitary conditions with no way to practice social distancing or adequate hygiene. Detention facilities such as the Cook County Jail in Illinois have already become epicenters of infection. Many incarcerated people suffer from health conditions that put them at greater risk of complications from COVID-19, and almost 200,000 prisoners in the United States are 55 or older.

Even before COVID-19 hit, the United States’ carceral system was in crisis. We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world. African Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. According to the NAACP, “If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%.”

On an average day, over 50,000 people are detained in our immigration detention system, most of whom are simply awaiting a hearing. Growing up with an incarcerated parent is a highly stressful adverse childhood experience that negatively impacts a child’s mental and physical health for life.

It was already time to radically transform America’s prison industrial complex. It was already time to end the over-policing and disproportionate incarceration of communities of color. It was already time to move toward proven models of community-based alternatives to incarceration, such as restorative justice programs and diversion programs for youth, people with serious mental illness and people with substance addiction.

It was already time to shift resources toward supporting children, families and communities, working to create a society that doesn’t lock people in cages. This pandemic just makes the need for meaningful decarceration more apparent, and more urgent.

When people first encounter the concept of prison abolition, a common response is, “but what about murderers, rapists, child molesters, sex traffickers?” What about people who seem likely to harm again once released?

In response, I quote prison abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes: “Questions like, ‘What about the really dangerous people?’ are not questions a prison abolitionist must answer in order to insist the prison industrial complex must be undone. These are questions we must collectively answer, even as we trouble the very notion of “dangerousness.’ The inability to offer a neatly packaged and easily digestible solution does not preclude offering critique or analysis of the ills of our current system.”

The long-term work of collectively imagining restorative alternatives to incarceration must take the safety of those who are victimized by violence and abuse seriously. As we commit to that long-term work, shorter-term actions must be taken now. It is time to heed a coalition of grassroots organizations, led by Mass Liberation Arizona, that are calling on state and local leaders in Arizona to “release and stop jailing anyone charged with an offense that does not involve a risk of serious physical injury to a reasonably identifiable person.”

Officials should immediately:

  • Release imprisoned people at high risk of complications from COVID-19, including the elderly, people with underlying serious health conditions, and pregnant people
  • Release people who are within six months of completing their sentences;
  • Release trans and non-binary people;
  • Release people in immigration detention and suspend new immigration-related detentions;
  • Expedite parole hearings and cease penalizing people for technical parole or probation violations such as failure to appear.

The time to act is now, before it is too late.


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Amanda Heffernan is a certified nurse midwife, Ph.D. student and parent. Her views are her own and do not speak for her employer.