wrote that "decarceration is urgently needed, particularly during a persisting and prejudicial pandemic."
Likewise, the nearly 420,000 correction workers traveling to and from their jobs every day could unwittingly become vectors. The ACLU report estimated that nearly 100,000 could die of COVID-19, both in and out of prisons and jails, unless drastic cuts were made to the inmate population. urging federal prisons to transfer medically at-risk and nonviolent inmates out of prisons and into home confinement.
"He said, 'I really hope I don't get it because we're not out there," she remembered. "I hope [the guards] don't bring it in.'"By the time Cynthia connected with a nurse on his hospital floor, her brother couldn't talk to her. He was on full oxygen already. But it's not just inmates who are dying — corrections workers haven't been spared from the virus, either.
And so Rochelle's new life began at his sister's house in Gainesville, Florida. His days were bracketed by accountability calls to a halfway house. His nights were spent sleeping while tethered to the nearest electrical outlet, his ankle monitor charging away. And so, free to do almost nothing but think, he decided to keep doing that — only out loud and online. Rochelle taught himself to use Facebook Live.He started broadcasting in the evening, when he knew people were home from work. He often dressed in a hat and tie and began with a chipper greeting: "Hello, hello, hello! This is Rufus Rochelle!"
Public health experts could testify before Congress and TV news reporters could show ravaged nursing homes. Rochelle would head to Facebook every night. He would grab two cell phones and yell into their cameras. If 2.3 million people were locked up and unable to speak, he would do it for them. "The person on the victim's side of that equation — it just dominates their mind, almost every second, and it's fear. It's living in fear," he said.Some in law enforcement have maintained that the post-release infrastructure can't absorb hundreds of thousands of prisoner releases, all at once.
Like Rochelle, Williams was locked up at Coleman and so the family went back to pick him up one windy morning, arriving in time to see correction officers push Williams' wheelchair out into the parking lot. He was free, after 29 years and 11 months. This was prison, under COVID conditions. Education and support programs had been paused in lock up's across the country. Guards kept prisoners in their cells almost continuously to guarantee physical distancing.