
US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infections - pmoriarty
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51947802
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robocat
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?

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sneak
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.)

~~~
perl4ever
"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.

~~~
Fjolsvith
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.

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cmurf
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.

~~~
scotty79
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.

~~~
foxyv
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.

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facesonflags
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?

