Overcrowded Prisons Should Get Priority Vaccine Distribution
It might not be popular, but the alternative might be worse.
Unsurprisingly, a California Sheriff is refusing to release 1,800 inmates after a judge’s order, calling the incarcerated individuals a “serious threat” to the community. Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said he will not release these prisoners into the community despite a court order to do so.
The depopulation order was intended to slow the spread of COVID-19 within the confines of the prison.
“I have no intention of doing that, of releasing those individuals back into the community. I think they pose a serious threat,” Barnes told “Fox & Friends”.
Orange County Civil Court Judge Peter Wilson made this decision and ordered Sheriff Barnes to release the 1,800 inmates in response to a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union. The lawsuit argued that the prison was overcrowded and it was filed in an effort to “protect medically vulnerable people and people with disabilities detained at the Orange County Jail.”
The ACLU’s Jacob Reisberg said, “Public safety does not just mean crime,” KABC reported. “Public safety also means, is there a hospital bed open if you get sick? And if there’s a massive outbreak in the jail, which this depopulation order is trying to avoid, there will not be hospital capacity in Orange County for people on the outside who get COVID.”
“We’ve released 1,400 inmates to date since March for low-level offenders. The only inmates remaining now are serious offenders,” Sheriff Barnes said. “Of the medically vulnerable, 90 of them are in custody for murder or attempted murder, 94 for child molestation.”
In his order, Judge Wilson wrote that Sheriff Barnes’ “deliberate indifference to the substantial risk of serious harm from COVID-19 infection to … medically vulnerable people in [his] custody violates their rights,” according to KCBS-TV of Los Angeles.
Additionally, the judge wrote that Barnes, “abused his discretion in failing to exercise his clear and present duty … to consider for release petitioners and all other incarcerated people who are medically vulnerable to COVID-19, whose lives are endangered by the COVID-19 emergency.”