The California COVID-19 Prison Tragedy, in Four Snapshots

Something is rotten in the state of California. Rotten throughout, from top to bottom. In today’s post I juxtapose for you four pieces from the last couple of days, which illuminate just how much trouble we’re in.

Scene 1: The SATF Horror and the Geography of Prison Remoteness

Throughout the summer, the public gaze was laser focused on San Quentin. There was a good reason for this; at 2,239 cases and 29 deaths, the outbreak at Quentin was the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the nation and the worst medical prison disaster in the country’s history. But as has been the case throughout this ordeal, once attention turns somewhere, the government’s or anyone else’s, the virus has already found opportunities elsewhere. By the time the litigation surrounding the Quentin catastrophe matured into an order and started moving toward fashioning remedies, the pestilence metastasized elsewhere–whether through a careless employee or a botched transfer, we won’t know. The CDCR population infection count shows numerous large outbreaks, to the tunes of hundreds of people, in prisons located in rural areas. Jason Fagone’s recent Chron story turns the focus to the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility (SATF) in Kings County, the largest prison in the state, which is operating at 128% of capacity. Not only is the outbreak there horrible, and has already claimed lives, but the conduct of prison authorities there seems absolutely appalling:

In just the past two weeks, 713 men in custody at SATF [now 851 – H.A.] have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to CDCR’s web tracker, and as of last week, 150 staff members were infected. Half of the facility’s 4,400 prisoners have caught the virus since August. Three have died.

One day last week, when prison staff tried to move a new man into an empty spot in Meyer’s eight-man cell, he got nervous, he said in an interview via JPay, a prison email service. Days earlier, another man sleeping mere feet away from Meyer had developed COVID-19 symptoms and was removed by staff, and Meyer suspected that his new cellmate might also be infectious. Meyer approached the officers’ station and complained, saying he didn’t want to be housed with a potentially contagious person. That’s when he was handcuffed, Meyer said.

Two days ago I talked with Sam Lewis of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition about the possibility of a vaccine for incarcerated populations, and one of the points he brought up was the proximity of San Quentin to white, wealthy Marin County. I think Sam was right to say that Quentin receives an inordinate amount of attention, but I suspect race and class play into this situation in ways that have more to do with political culture, proximity, and opportunity. Quentin is extremely close to the Bay Area, where all kinds of do-gooders like me have easy daily access to the prison; if there’s no traffic, it takes approximately 35 minutes to drive to Quentin from my house. Given that, for decades, prison programming has been slashed–most recently, this was one of the negative effects of the recession–the availability of a cadre of academics and activists as volunteers produces a rich array of programming (go ahead, click on each link, and I could offer more.) Because parole hearings emphasize programming and encourage people to talk in “programspeak”, and because of the paucity of programming elsewhere in the system, people are desperate to come to Quentin and avail themselves of these opportunities as much as they can if they ever want to be approved for parole.

By contrast, California’s other large prisons are located in rural areas, mostly in poor towns that were persuaded to accept prison siting and become a “company town” because of the promise of jobs. These places are not squeaky wheels, and for Bay Area or Los Angeles do-gooders they are difficult to access. For example, during the Pelican Bay hunger strike, my students had to drive 8-9 hours to visit the strikers, which implies huge barriers for visitors without the means to drive or stay at a hotel. These places are not “squeaky wheels”, and it’s quite difficult to get the programming “grease” there. Also, it means that the voices raising serious concerns about the outrages that happen in these rural prisons are far less amplified by voices of high-profile, concerned progressive politicians.

Scene 2: Inaction Figures

The Chronicle is on a roll, continuing with a hard-hitting, data-intensive piece by Nora Mishanec. Mishanec managed to obtain a demographic breakdown of the thousands of people who were released by CDCR since Newsom promised 8,000 releases by the end of the summer. It’s not summer anymore, of course, and even when the plan was proposed it was already underwhelming–too little, too late, too piecemeal, and too restrictive. I am sorry to say that this sad excuse for pandemic relief played out exactly as I had predicted, and please believe me that I take no pleasure in having been 100% right.

This graphic from the Chron story gives you an idea of who was released and who was not. Take a look at the circle in the top left. The vast majority of people who have been released had only months left on their sentence back in early July. It is now early December, and these folks would have gotten out by now anyway–they just got a wee push on the way out the door to hasten their release. This is something that happens all the time in California prisons, pandemic or no pandemic: every month thousands of people churn in and out of the system, the folks whose sentences have ended to be exchanged for folks coming in from jails (The population reduction here is artificial, and stems from the halt of transfers from jails–but the carceral apparatus as a whole is bursting at the seams, and of course now the jails are seeing their own COVID-19 horrors and are grossly over-capacity. Something’s gotta give, and there are already jail lawsuits.) Only 0.8% of the people who were released were deemed “COVID high-risk medical”, when a full quarter of the population on the eve of the pandemic was people aged 50 and over.

Why, you might wonder, are so few of the people who got released in the over-50 bracket (1,390 out of 7483)? The answer is in the bottom right. People convicted of violent crime who, unsurprisingly, serve longer sentences and, also unsurprisingly, are older because of it, are underrepresented. Those are also the folks at highest risk of contagion and serious complications. But this plan was not designed with public health in mind–it was designed to avoid headlines like “Newsom Releases Murderers, Yikes.” And so here we are.

Scene 3: Insult to Injury

If they’re not laboriously and efficiently going over people’s files and releasing grandparents back to their families, what, pray tell, are state officials busy doing? I’m so glad you asked: The best and brightest at the California Attorney General’s Office are busy not only petitioning the California Supreme Court to review the population reduction order in Von Staich and jamming the wheels on hundreds of habeas petitions, they are petitioning the court to depublish the decision itself. Yes, you heard it right. Dozens dead, tens of thousands infected, and the most pressing order of business is to obliterate from bureaucratic memory that there were compassionate, humane, knowledgeable judges, who recognized a human rights crime when they saw one, and acted accordingly.

You are incredulous? I get it. So was I. Here’s the whole thing for you to read.

VON STAICH Request for DePublication by hadaraviram on Scribd

What more is there to say about this? At every junction, when the opportunity emerges to do the right thing, these folks are doing the exact opposite. We are going to pay dearly for this concerted cruelty when the time comes to get buy-in for vaccination (that is, if anyone there might ever see prisons for what they are, which is confined, crowded spaces, and actually prioritize “murderers, yikes.” Want to know why it is important to vaccinate? here’s my op-ed in the Chron about this.) By the time the vaccine comes to the prison gate, people will not believe CDCR that it is in their benefit to take it, and while I find this awful and deeply disappointing, I deeply understand where the suspicion and resentment come from.

Scene 4: No Bad Deed Goes Unrewarded

What is going to happen to all these folks, who have worked so hard for months to keep aging, infirm people languishing behind bars, vulnerable to the pandemic? Gosh, I’m so glad you asked, because California’s AG Xavier Becerra, whose signature decorates everything you’ve seen defending CDCR in courts since March, is being tapped for a position in the Biden cabinet.

Look, I’m not a member of the no-lesser-evil brigade, and in November I cheerfully and without reservations voted for Democrats, even Democrats who have deeply disappointed me, because the alternative was to keep a despotic, sociopathic, semiliterate career criminal in office. For four years I was a vortex of disdain for the repertoire of cruelties of the Trump Administration, and I’m thrilled the people I voted for won. Elections are a buffet at a roadside motel, not a personalized meal. But when you’re handling what we call a “Big Bad” in TV tropes, the other side automatically becomes “the good guys,” and critique of them is muted, or at least softened–even when the courageous leaders of La Résistance forget about the burden of proof or flip-flop about the death penalty. I suspect it won’t be long before we forget how Monsieur et Madame Blanchisserie Française, the delectable taste of Yountville gastronomy still fresh in their mouths, proceeded to close our children’s playgrounds with not a shred of medical evidence connecting them to outbreaks. I get it. We’re grownups, politicians are politicians even when they are generally on the right side, and people should not be expected to be perfect. But I’m frustrated that the nature of California politics creates the illusion that we are a blue, progressive state, in the face of everything that has been going on.

Why is it that we appear so blue when our prisons are such a horror show? My colleague Vanessa Barker offers a convincing explanation. By contrast to the East Coast, or even the Pacific Northwest, California’s political culture is both deeply polarized and populistic. Our red counties, which are, after all, where most of our prisons are, are deeply red; jails there are run by red sheriffs and prisons by red CDCR officers. A lot of decisionmaking happens on a local level. Even when a prison is located in a blue county, such as San Quentin in Marin, prison officials refuse to collaborate with county health officials, citing jurisdiction. Moreover, we tend to legislate our criminal justice arena via referendum, which creates a lot of the horrors that I recount in Chapter 2 of Yesterday’s Monsters: a salience of a particular class of victims as the moral interlocutors of criminal justice, inflammatory rhetoric, and a lot of money backing up fear and hate.

The consequence of this is that our elected officials, who are so right on so many things (immigration, healthcare, climate action) are so often so wrong about criminal justice. Some of what we have going on is so deeply ridiculous–to name just one example, moratorium on a death penalty that should have been abolished eons ago, and because of populist stubbornness we can’t reap the huge economic benefits of abolition–and it is difficult to explain to lefty friends on the opposite coast how come people who appear to be such heroes on the national stage act in such villainous ways on the local stage.

This week, I recommend that you keep your gaze on some of the newest outbreak sites. Beyond SATF, there are also serious outbreaks in PVSP (643 new cases), HVDP (473), MCSP (416), CTF (284), and VSP (298). Dozens of other facilities have “only” dozens of cases. The only CDCR facility with no cases at present is RJD. The death toll systemwide has risen to 90.

Prisons Must Be Vaccine Priority Sites and Ground Work Must Start NOW

I’m getting a lot of phone calls from journalists about the California Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 vaccination plan, which you can find here in its entirety. The state vaccination plan consists of three phases (see the image below).

Phase 1, during which the state will have a limited supply of vaccines, focuses on critical populations in two subphases:

  • Healthcare personnel likely treating patients with COVID-19 (Phase 1-A)
  • Healthcare personnel likely to be exposed to COVID-19 (Phase 1-A_
  • People at increased risk for severe illness or death from COVID-19 (Phase 1-B)
  • Other essential workers (Phase 1-B)

California has an Allocation Data Team tasked with identifying these critical populations. CDCR is mentioned as one of the agencies whose datasets are going to be reviewed by the Allocation Data Team. Notably, one of the criteria for allocating vaccines is “identifying disadvantaged populations and communities that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 in terms of higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and deaths.” To combat these well-documented disparities, California has developed a health equity metric and is working to improve the collection of race and ethnicity data associated with testing and cases.

Part and parcel of the vaccination plan is an effective communication strategy, which consists of outreach and education. The report explains how communication will be carried out:

With over 4,000 medical providers participating in California’s Vaccines for Children program and over 500 federally qualified health centers in our Vaccines for Adults program, a solid communication infrastructure exists for getting information and program updates to participating providers (program updates are sent electronically and also posted at https://eziz.org/ ). The CDPH Immunization Branch also employs field staff in five regions to serve as liaisons between provider offices and local health departments. These mechanisms, combined with the knowledge and relationships between local health care providers, pharmacies, and local health departments, have already established points of contacts and methods of communication. Additionally, local emergency preparedness programs have established close communication channels with first responder organizations, groups serving vulnerable populations and large employers throughout our state’s diverse counties. Local health departments have also been keeping close track on communities most adversely affected by COVID-19 and many have bolstered their responses to include specific outreach, education and mitigation efforts in those communities, establishing good relationships along that way that are paving the way for COVID-19 vaccine.

We have also been working with the California Conference of Local Health Officers and the
County Health Executives Association of California to define and establish contacts for Multi
County Entities (MCEs). An MCE is a health system that has facilities in more than two California
counties to centrally support local implementation in all of its locations, set policy for all of its
facilities, order and store vaccine, has a centralized pharmacy, and has a demonstrated track
record in immunizing all of their staff. Northern and Southern California Kaiser Health Systems
are the two largest MCEs defined to date. Conversations are continuing to delineate more
MCEs and processes are being created and refined for how these entities will be registered in
our provider enrollment systems for vaccine ordering, allocation, tracking and reporting. MCEs
will become critical partners to immunizing in their communities and will be brought fully into all communication networks and monitoring infrastructures. We will augment these well-established networks with any additional input from our Community Vaccine Advisory Committee.

Successful communication regarding critical population groups will start with clear guidance at the state level. The state will communicate to local health jurisdictions and MCEs about which and when specific critical populations should be receiving the vaccine. The state, in turn, will rely heavily on these local jurisdictions and multi-county entities to communicate directly with the providers for whom they will be approving allocations. The points of contact for these providers will be established through the provider registration process, which is discussed in further detail in Section 5.

Additionally, we will employ various communication methods to reach critical population groups. To communicate out to the groups that will be eligible for vaccination, we will send messages both from the local and state level about which categories of people should be vaccinated and, when. At the local level, emergency operations centers remain activated and will utilize well-established networks for reaching emergency responders and health care personnel. These well-established networks include Public Health and Medical emergency response partners, such as the Regional Disaster Medical Health Coordination and Medical and Health Operational Area Coordination programs. We will rely heavily on these networks as well as on statewide health care associations such as the California Hospital Association, the California Primary Care Association, the California Medical Association, local health care coalitions, and others. We will also rely on the California Immunization Coalition, our CCLHO and CHEAC organizations, EMS organizations (such as the Emergency Medical Services Administrators’ Association of California [EMSAAC] and the EMS Medical Directors Association of California [EMDA]), and many other professional associations. Emphasizing transparency and equity every step of the way, we will engage our Office of Health Equity, Governor’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, Community Vaccine Advisory Committee members and other stakeholders to ensure that our communications are inclusive and that our strategies are in alignment with the best use of the vaccine at any given point in time.

This report, to me, raises a few points that are crucial to highlight at this particular time–and that require immediate action:

Prisons MUST be designated a vaccine priority site because of the nature of the interpersonal interactions.

Everything we know about the pandemic in prisons shows us that the rate of infections is much higher–approximately ten times higher–than the rate in California generally, and that mortality rates–even when adjusted for age–are much higher. Prison staff–correctional officers and prison workers–come in direct contact, and treat, incarcerated COVID patients just like healthcare personnel on the outside. Moreover, incarcerated people have not seen their families and loved ones since early March, when all visitation was halted because of the pandemic. Vaccinating them should be a priority.

Prisons MUST be prioritized because vaccinating behind bars protects everyone in CA.

Moreover, it is imperative to understand the role that prison outbreaks play in the overall COVID picture of the state. As of today, only two CDCR facilities do not have any cases, and numerous prisons have serious outbreaks with hundreds of cases. The analysis we have provided throughout the last months shows a correlation between spikes in CDCR COVID rates and spikes in the surrounding and neighboring counties. Prioritizing prisons as vaccination sites protects everyone in California.

If equity is a consideration, incarcerated people should be first in line to get vaccinated.

The California Department of Health plan rightly emphasizes the need to factor equity in the distribution of vaccines, specifically through the prioritization of communities and race/class demographic groups who have born the brunt of infections and deaths so far. I can hardly think of a category of Californians who have, disproportionately, suffered more from COVID than incarcerated people. Vaccinating them first is not only prudent and worthwhile–it is fair.

At the same time, from a public health standpoint, outreach and education must begin now.

There are three main populations behind bars: incarcerated people, prison workers, and correctional officers. For reasons that I explained here, there is a serious, and understandable, trust and legitimacy deficit that could hinder effective cooperation in getting the prison population vaccinated, which stems from the fact that, for months now, whenever CDCR had an opportunity to earn trust and engender good will, they did exactly the opposite. CDCR have to start working on repairing this fundamental trust breakdown right now. The best way to do it is to drop all appeals, petitions, grandstanding, performative protestations about public safety, and resistance to the idea of releases, and let aging, infirm people go immediately home to their communities. Not only will this help get the pandemic under control much more quickly, it will go a long way toward reversing the understandable sense among the prison population that CDCR is deliberately indifferent to their plight, and thus will contribute to raising vaccination rates.

The other problem I foresee is with collaboration and buy-in from correctional officers. As I explained here, instead of raising the alarm about the health risks to their membership, CCPOA has been throwing millions of dollars at punitive voter initiatives. And as we learned from the Inspector General’s report and saw at the Assembly hearing, CDCR has not taken disciplinary steps against correctional officers who did not wear PPE when engaging with colleagues and with incarcerated folks. This could be the product of a members in thrall to a leadership that has been completely politically captured, Trumper-like COVID denialism among the rank and file, or both. But it needs to be firmly understood that COs who do not wear PPE and/or do not consent to getting vaccinated have no business working at CDCR facilities.

The problems with buy-in from these two populations need to be addressed immediately if there’s any hope of success with a vaccination program. Buy-in is an essential component of public health, and even if the entire prison population is prioritized–as well it should be–the vaccines are only as effective as their distribution in the population as a whole.

I will update this post with newspaper/media outlet articles about the challenges and urgency of vaccination programs in prison throughout the next few days.

Políticas Penales y Penitenciarias en EEUU durante la Administración Trump: Rupturas y Continuidades

  • Hola Amigos Latinoamericanos y Centroamericanos, y otros amigos que hablan español. Hoy di una plática, via Zoom, a la Facultad de Derecho en la Universidad de Buenos Aires sobre las políticas penales durante la administración Trump. Se me ocurrió que quizás hay mas gente que habla español y se interesa en el tema, y por eso aquí están mis notas para la plática. En unos dias, publicaremos la plática entera en YouTube y la ubicaré aquí.
  • Antes de discutir la política de justicia penal de la administración Trump, es importante preparar el escenario con algunas características únicas del panorama penológico estadounidense.
  • Los EE. UU. son los campeones internacionales del encarcelamiento, pero no es un campeonato que nos da orgullo: tenemos cuatro porciento de la población mundial pero veintidós porciento de la población mundial de prisionerors! Los Estados Unidos tienen setecientos treinta y siete prisioneros por cien mil de populación. En dos mil diecisiete Argentina tuvo doscientos siete.
    • En dos mil siete, uno en cien personas en los EE. UU. estaba encarcelado.
    • Este encarcelamiento masivo trasciende los muros de la prisión: uno en 33 estaba bajo alguna forma de supervisión estatal, por ejemplo libertad condicional después de servir una sentencia en la cárcel.
    • Además, los riesgos de encarcelamiento no se distribuyen de manera uniforme entre la población y varían drásticamente según la raza, la clase y el género. Para hombres jóvenes Africanos-Americanos – uno en 3 estaba encarcelado (!!!)
  • Pero Estados Unidos es un país muy grande y existe una gran variación en el encarcelamiento dentro de él. Para comprender esto, es importante tener en cuenta que no solo tenemos un sistema de justicia penal: tenemos un sistema federal, cincuenta sistemas estatales independientes y numerosos tribunales indígenas independientes.
  • Para complicar aún más las cosas, incluso el sistema estatal es una generalización excesiva. Hay dos estructuras administrativas superpuestas: el nivel municipal y el nivel de condado.
    • La policía es municipal – cada ciudad, incluso los pueblos mas pequeños, tiene su propia forza policial. Tenemos dieciocho mil diferentes departamentos de policía.
    • En cambio, nuestros tribunales y fiscalias operan en el nivel del condado.
    • Tenemos prisiones estadales y carceles mas pequenas, que llamamos “jails”, en el nivel del condado. Esto es importante porque los costos del encarcelamiento corren a cargo de diferentes niveles administrativos. En otras palabras, las fiscalías y las cortes no tienen un incentivo financiero para reducir el encarcelamiento, porque los condados no pagan por el encarcelamiento. Mi colega Frank Zimring llama esto “el almuerzo gratis correccional.”
  • Otra consecuencia de la fragmentación de Estados Unidos es que los niveles penales y los “sabores” penales se ven muy diferentes en todo el país.
    • Por ejemplo, en California, donde yo vivo, las políticas penales son una combinación de leyes y de referendos publicos, resultando en un populismo penal que es especialmente sensible a las apelaciones punitivas en nombre de las víctimas de delitos. El resultado es una maquina gigantesca de encarcelamiento, incluyendo el corredor de muerte mas grandee en los EE. UU, y muchas sentencias muy largas. Un tercio de los presos en california está cumpliendo cadena perpetua, ya sea sin posibilidad de liberación o con una posibilidad muy lejana de liberación. Mi libro nuevo Yesterday’s Monsters es sobre esta populación.
    • El noreste es gobernado de una manera menos populista y mas elitista, y por eso las sentencias son menos punitivas.
    • El noroeste es aun menos punitivo. Muchas de las reformas que mejoraron la guerra contra las drogas comenzaron en el noroeste del Pacífico.
    • El sud tiene un legado trágico de racismo y esclavitud. Muchos de los problemas politicos que todavia son reflejados en las politicas penales en el sud originan desde antes de la Guerra Civil. Durante los años sesenta, la Corte Suprema introdujo algunos estándares de derechos civiles y debido proceso que corrigieron algunos de los peores aspectos de la justicia penal del Sur. Pero todavía las condiciones en muchas prisiones en el sur imitan las plantaciones anterior de la guerra.
    • La justicia penal en el suroeste se caracteriza por la hostilidad hacia los inmigrantes de Centroamérica. Muchos de los casos de drogas en el suroeste involucran pequeñas cantidades de marihuana contrabandeadas a través de la frontera. La política fronteriza también conduce a cierta corrupción policial que implica la confiscación de dinero y objetos.
  • A pesar de estas diferencias locales, existen algunas características comunes al panorama de la justicia penal estadounidense, y es posible que le recuerden bastante la situación en varios países de América Central y del Sur.
    • Ya hablé un poco del legado nacional de colonialismo y racism, pero es importante decir que no se limita al sur del pais. ésto se manifiesta de dos formas. Primero, la policía estadounidense tiende a operar de manera racializada, lo que significa más arrestos y hostigamientos en vecindarios donde viven minorías raciales. En segundo lugar, debido a un legado de privaciones y falta de oportunidades, las minorías raciales están sobrerrepresentadas en los delitos violentos, tanto como perpetradores como víctimas.
    • Otra caracteristica es la proliferación de armas legales e ilegales. En Argentina es necesario tener CLUSE para armas, y uno tiene que presentar una solicitud y aprobar exámenes de competencia de salud física y mental. En cambio, en las EE. UU. Es muy fácil comprar armas. Para muchas personas, el derecho constitucional a portar armas alcanza proporciones míticas, algo relacionadas con el legado de la justicia fronteriza.
    • Los EE. UU. Tienen una cultura policial de violencia, entrelazada con politicas de arrestos y registros por motivos raciales. Hay un problema especial con abuso de fuerza, especialmente con matanzas.
    • Además, hay un legado difícil de corrupción política (incluso a nivel estatal, local y del condado.)
  • La trayectoria de encarcelamiento Estadounidiense continuó aumentando hasta la crisis financiera de 2008, que transformó la justicia penal estadounidense de manera importante. Este fue el tema de mi primer libro, Cheap on Crime.
    • El desarrollo más importante fue la prominencia de un discurso fiscal, centrado en los ahorros de la justicia penal. Durante décadas hubo un callejón sin salida entre el apoyo conservador a la seguridad pública y el apoyo progresivo a la descarceración. El hecho de que la crisis hiciera que el encarcelamiento masivo fuera económicamente insostenible ayudó a salvar estas diferencias con ideas sobre la parsimonia que todos pudieran considerar. Estos cambios estaban en sintonía con las lógicas neoliberales, y voy a explicar de cual manera.
    • La dependencia del discurso del ahorro también permitió la formación de coaliciones bipartidistas entre progresistas que intentaban reducir la maquinaria carcelaria y los libertarios de los gobiernos pequeños que estaban hartos de los gastos de la guerra contra las drogas y el encarcelamiento.
    • Estas coaliciones resultaron en una variedad de practicas de ahorro: muchas cárceles fueron cerradas o fusionadas con otras instituciones, muchas políticas consistieron en mas bajas sentencias, especialmente para delitos de drogas, y diez estados abolieron o suspendieron la pena de muerte. La economía de las prisiones privadas también cambiaron: Con la reducción del mercado del encarcelamiento nacional, los empresarios de prisiones comenzaron a invertir en el creciente mercado de la detención de inmigrantes.
    • Las lógicas neoliberales se manifestaron también en cambios en la percepción de los presos: en lugar de verlos como responsabilidad del estado, ellos fueron percibidos como “clientes” involuntarios del estado. Las nuevas politicas prestaron atención a categorías de presos previamente invisibles: los ancianos y los enfermos. Además, muchos costos de encarcelamiento se transfirieron a los propios reclusos, lo que en algunos casos resultó en que las personas debían pagar por su propio encarcelamiento.
  • No todas las reformas fueron puramente economicas. La indignación pública por la violencia policial, especialmente contra las minorías raciales, produjo algunas reformas de la era de Obama, como la eliminación de las sentencias mínimas obligatorias para los infractores no violentos de drogas.
    • Estas politicas federales ocurrieron junto con muchas políticas estatales que legalizaron el uso y posesión de marihuana al nivel del estado.
  • El ascenso de Donald Trump, notablemente, dejó algunas de estas reformas en su lugar, al tiempo que cambió drásticamente el ánimo detrás de otras.
  • Tengan en cuenta, como dije antes, que la mayoría de las políticas de justicia penal en los Estados Unidos se hacen a nivel local, donde la administración federal tiene un impacto muy limitado. No obstante, hubo rupturas significativas durante el mandato del primer fiscal general de Trump, Jeff Sessions, y el segundo, William Barr. Hablaremos de seis:
    • Falsa Conexión entre Inmigración y Criminalidad
    • Animando la Lucha contra las Drogas
    • Animando la Pena de Muerte
    • Interviniendo en la Justicia Local
    • Obstrucción de la Justicia contra los Poderosos
    • Y quizá la mas significantive, Cambios en la Corte Suprema
  • Falsa Conexión entre Inmigración y Criminalidad
    • Desde los primeros días de su campaña presidencial, Trump confió en reunir a sus partidarios a través de promesas xenófobas para frenar la inmigración. Una gran parte de la campaña se dedicó a promocionar una correlación entre inmigración y criminalidad.
    • Esta conexión es cien por ciento falsa. Existe un sólido cuerpo de investigación empírica, que cubre diversos tiempos y lugares, y todas las investigaciones llegan a la misma conclusión: los inmigrantes cometen menos delitos, en todas las categorías de delitos, que los nativos.
    • La falsa suposición de que los inmigrantes son un peligro para la seguridad pública se basa en inseguridades económicas profundamente arraigadas, principalmente de los hombres blancos, de que los inmigrantes aceptarán trabajos estadounidenses.
    • Una gran parte de la política de justicia penal estadounidense, como la criminalización de ciertas drogas, se creó para criminalizar los comportamientos de los inmigrantes a fin de mitigar estos temores.
    • Además de las políticas xenófobas bien publicitadas, incluida la prohibición de los viajeros de países musulmanes y las separaciones familiares, la administración Trump prosiguió los procedimientos de deportación sobre la base de condenas penales, por lo que la aplicación de la ley de inmigración es la principal preocupación del departamento de justicia.
  • Animando la Lucha contra las Drogas
    • Cuando fue elegido para el cargo, Jeff Sessions anunció públicamente que los consumidores de marihuana eran “malas personas”, una afirmación fuera de contacto con las sensibilidades bipartisanas de republicanos y demócratas, que apoyaron una tregua en la lucha contra las Drogas
    • La administración procedió a revertir las restricciones de la era de Obama y perseguir casos federales contra infractores de drogas en estados en los que el uso y posesión de drogas son legales.
    • Pero al mismo tiempo, estados y ciudades continuaron sus politicas regulatorias. Marijuana se legalizo en mas estados, y algunos estados y ciudades decriminalizaron otras drogas tambien.
  • Animando la Pena de Muerte
    • Como mencioné antes, la pena de muerte ha disminuido en los Estados Unidos debido a la política de la era de la recesión. La administración de la pena de muerte, junto con los litigios, es muy cara. Durante el crisis financiero, muchos estados abolieron la pena de muerte o dejaron de usarla.
    • Trump ha sido un admirador público de la pena de muerte desde la década de 1980, cuando publicó enormes anuncios en los periódicos pidiendo la pena de muerte en varios casos, incluyendo el célebre caso de cinco adolescentes acusados de acostar a una corredora en el Parque Central de Nueva York. Lo increíble es que los cinco fueron exonerados por evidencia de ADN, pero Trump continúa hasta el día de hoy argumentando que eran culpables y merecían la pena de muerte.
    • Aún ahora, en los últimos días de su administración, Trump y Barr continúan a ejecutar a personas condenadas a muerte en el nivel federal, incluyendo personas con discapacidades mentales y trauma personal documentado y personas que muchos expertos creen que son inocentes.
  • Interviniendo en la Justicia Local
    • A pesar de que la administración de Trump no tenía jurisdicción en asuntos estatales, Trump intervino, a través de Twitter, en los procedimientos locales cuando fueron simbólicamente útiles para él.
    • Un ejemplo fue la muerte de una joven llamada Kate Steinle en San Francisco. Un inmigrante indocumentado fue acusado del crimen. Resultó que había encontrado un arma perdida por un agente del FBI y el arma falló. El acusado fue absuelto. A lo largo del juicio, Trump atribuyó el resultado a los “valores de San Francisco” y lo utilizó para criticar las “ciudades santuario”, que tenían una política de no cooperar con las agencias federales de inmigración.
  • Obstrucción de la Justicia contra los Poderosos
    • Es instructivo comparar estas políticas punitivas hacia las comunidades marginadas con la obstrucción de la justicia orquestada por la administración Trump en lo que respecta al propio Trump y sus leales.
    • Trump usó repetidamente el poder del perdón para excusar a sus amigos y asociados, acusados ​​o condenados por crímenes atroces, más recientemente, Michael Flynn.
    • La investigación del fiscal especial Robert Mueller sobre la interferencia rusa en las elecciones de 2016 encontró que los funcionarios de la campaña de Trump eran receptores entusiastas de la inteligencia rusa y que los miembros de la campaña de Trump, incluido el propio Trump, obstruyeron la justicia en este contexto en al menos diez casos.
  • Cambios en la Corte Suprema
    • Pero quizás el efecto más duradero de la administración Trump en la justicia penal son sus tres nombramientos en la Corte Suprema.
    • Neil Gorsuch fue designado para un escaño que quedó vacante durante la era de Obama, pero fue arrebatado por los republicanos argumentando que un presidente en su ultimo año no debería nombrar a un suplente.
    • Despues, Trump tuvo otra oportunidad a nombrar a un juez supremo y nombró a Brett Kavanaugh, cuyo proceso de solicitud se vio empañado con una acusación creíble de abuso sexual. Los votos a favor y en contra de su nombramiento fueron de partidos políticos.
    • Finalmente, tres semanas antes de las elecciones, falleció la jueza ruth bader ginsburg, lo que les dio a los republicanos la oportunidad de hacer exactamente lo que impidieron hacer a los demócratas al final de la presidencia de Obama: nombrar a una jueza más, Amy Coney Barret.
    • El nuevo tribunal es incondicionalmente conservador en varios asuntos de justicia penal. Seis jueces apoyan la pena de muerte y los tres nuevos jueces tienen un historial de imponer largas penas de prisión. En asuntos relacionados con las investigaciones policiales basadas en tecnología, sin embargo, Gorsuch podría votar más a la izquierda que sus dos nuevos colegas.
  • El Futuro Penal de la Administración Biden
    • Los partidarios de la reforma de la justicia penal se sintieron aliviados con los resultados de las elecciones, aunque están mucho más cerca de lo que se esperaba y el control del Senado aún no se ha determinado.
    • Es importante recordar que la justicia penal sigue siendo principalmente un asunto local. Las reformas que apoyan la igualdad racial y erosionan la guerra contra las drogas todavía ocurrirán en los estados azules, excepto que ahora, el aspecto federal de la guerra contra las drogas probablemente volverá a la moderación que caracterizó a la administración Obama.
    • Otros cambios federales podrían involucrar recortes presupuestarios a los departamentos de policía municipales, que apoyarán muchas iniciativas locales de desviar los problemas sociales a agencias no policiales.
    • El desafío más complicado involucra cambios en la Corte Suprema. Una posibilidad, que no está prohibida por la ley, es que Biden amplíe la Corte y nombre siete jueces progresivos para equilibrar la composición conservadora de la corte. El problema con este enfoque es el riesgo de que el tribunal pierda la legitimidad que le queda, y que una futura administración republicana nombrará a 14 jueces, etc., etc. Pero los partidarios progresistas de Biden lo presionarán para que lo haga, en parte porque se han adoptado enfoques más cuidadosos se encontró con ofuscación y manipulación durante los últimos cuatro años. Sin embargo, si el Senado permanece en manos republicanas, Biden tendrá dificultades para tener éxito con estas nominaciones.

Putting the Unemployment Prison Fraud in Context

Bay Area newspapers are reporting a first-of-its kind unemployment fraud, in which unemployment claims were filed, and paid, on behalf of prisoners. The latest in the series is this article from the Sac Bee, which purports to explain “How inmates pulled off giant California unemployment scam.” But even having read it, I’m unclear on what exactly happened, and especially on what they mean by “a spider web.” Here’s what we know:

Court records show a handful of inmates contacted friends and relatives on the outside, supplied them with Social Security numbers and other information, and persuaded them to file for pandemic relief on behalf of 30 different inmates. The outsiders had the unemployment payments — in the form of Bank of America debit cards issued by EDD — mailed to them.

“The cards came pre-loaded with upwards of $20,000,” said Sean Riordan, deputy district attorney in San Mateo.

Riordan said the outside accomplices then went to ATM machines and withdrew their pre-arranged cut — usually $3,000 or $4,000 — and arranged for friends or family to deliver the cards to the inmates at the jail. In one case, an outsider was found to have used an ATM in Las Vegas to collect his cut.

“It was thousands of dollars,” Riordan said.

Accomplices arranged for the remaining funds to be delivered to the inmates’ jail accounts, which could be used to buy extra toiletries or other items.

That people commit fraud, behind bars and on the outside, is not difficult to understand, and I’m sure the COVID-related deprivations and difficulties produced the kind of conditions that act as a Petri dish for these kinds of schemes. What I don’t understand is this: to what extent were the people whose names were used in this fraud (the New York Times story names Scott Peterson, convicted murderer of his wife Laci Peterson) part of the fraud? When the article say that people’s “names were used,” was it with or without their consent?

Moreover, how does all of this map onto the bigger picture of COVID relief structures? We already know that CARES Act relief is available for prisoners, because it took a lawsuit to make it happen. I also know from family members of incarcerated people that several facilities are interfering with their population’s ability to complete the claim forms. In one case I heard of, when the family member called the San Joaquin County Jail, they were told the jail would not accept any check if the IRS mails it inside, and that “they [jail staff] don’t care what law was passed.” If this is a widespread problem, as the lawsuit suggests, unemployment fraud scams appear a lot less surprising. What I want to know, though, is whether there’s some connection between the two phenomena, and whether the financial scales of the CARES Act sabotage and the unemployment fraud are on par.

If you, or a family member, are having difficulties with prisons or jails undermining your CARES Act stimulus claim, email me and tell me your story, or post it in the comments.

BREAKING NEWS: Von Staich Legal Team’s Response to CDCR’s Petition for Review

Today, the First District Appellate Court team representing Von Staich filed a response to the Attorney General’s petition to the California Supreme Court to review the case. Here is the brief in its entirety; my summary follows.

S265173 Von Staich PFR Answer by hadaraviram on Scribd

In essence, the argument is this: The importance of this case does not lie in some complicated, novel legal question that requires judicial review (such as in the case of contradictory decisions from lower courts): it lies in the fact that it provided a much-needed, urgent remedy for a horrific unfolding situation. The Court of Appeal’s decision was not extreme; rather, it was a measured, mild order, which leaves CDCR vast freedom to achieve population reductions at San Quentin in whatever way they see fit. The AG’s request to review the case does not offer any legal grounds to do so: they continue to argue that they did their best (without providing any expert opinion/authority supporting this claim) and that they are not bound by the findings of the AMEND team (without providing any alternative findings.)

If anything, this assertion is rather generous on the part of Von Staich’s legal team: we now know from two Inspector General reports (1, 2) that even the “commendable” measures that CDCR claimed to have taken (and was given credit for taking in the Court of Appeal decision) were not, in fact, taken in a satisfactory way.

Most importantly, the response highlights what is important about proceeding with the Court of Appeal’s remedy: the upcoming winter, which threatens a serious pandemic wave that could decimate what’s left of San Quentin unless CDCR comply with the order. More on this below.

Von Staich’s attorneys also filed a brief pertaining to the Attorney General’s request to deep-freeze the 311 San Quentin cases hanging before the Marin Superior Court. Here’s the request in its entirety; my summary follows.

Von Staich’s team argues that staying the proceedings in cases of people who are facing illness and death from a second wave is “precisely the wrong response at this time of crisis.” That the AG’s office’s reaction to the order–rather than hustling to save lives–was not only to appeal in Von Staich, but to ask for a stay in all the other cases, is emblematic of their breathtakingly obtuse approach to the crisis itself. At every juncture in these cases, the government has done the wrong thing: caused the outbreaks in the first place, failed miserably at taking any remedial steps, adopted the wrong administrative response, prioritized the wrong people to be released, went for short-term measures that cause outbreaks in jails and other facilities, and–which was notable in both cases–explicitly and repeatedly said that “there is no need to act hastily.” At the oral argument in Von Staich, Justice Kline responded to this with, “yes, there is. Yes, there is. There is a need to act hastily.” The measures he ordered CDCR to adopt are mild, flexible, and give them just enough rope to continue doing the wrong things (more on that in a future post.) I very much hope that the Supreme Court agrees with these response briefs that, in the face of a winter wave of COVID-19 and dire warnings for California as a whole, acting promptly (though, to our collective tragedy, far from preemptively) is exactly what we should do.

In the off-chance that anyone reading this still does not comprehend why, going into the winter holidays, urgent population reductions should be top priority not only at San Quentin, but in all CDCR facilities, here are some sobering facts. As of today, there are huge outbreaks in seven CDCR facilities:

CAL (171 new cases)
CEN (50 new cases)
CTF (303 new cases)
HDSP (649 new cases)
PVSP (319 new cases)
SATF (523 new cases + the prison’s first COVID-19 death)
VSP (155 new cases)

There are also new outbreaks in ten other facilities:
CCC (12 new cases)
COR (32 new cases)
LAC (6 new cases)
SOL (12 new cases)
CHCF (9 new cases)
DVI (3 new cases)
KVSP (16 new cases)
MCSP (3 new cases)
NKSP (7 new cases)
PBSP (6 new cases)

CDCR now “boasts” 2436 new cases per 100,000–ten times worse than the CA rate of 345 per 100,000 that has all of us hurtling toward the purple tier. The spikes in prison infections correlate with spikes in surrounding counties. We are all (sensibly) being asked to mask up, put our holiday travel plans on hold, and cook mini-feasts for our nuclear families. All of this effort and sacrifices are worthless if we continue to incubate this virus in prison. You and yours are far more at risk from aging, infirm people sitting in one of CDCR’s COVID-19 Petri dishes than you are at risk from them in the community (people age out of crime in their late 20s, and the folks most at risk from COVID are less at risk of reoffending than people on the outside.)

CDCR’s hemming and hawing about doing the right thing is not just callous disregard for the lives of people behind bars, but also for your life and mine.

Essential Readings for CCC3: COVID-19 Meets Mass Incarceration

In anticipation of our upcoming symposium about COVID-19 and mass incarceration, here are a few sources that our attendees might like to read. It’s not an exhaustive list; rather, it focuses on some of the themes we will be covering throughout the symposium.

Prisons, Disease, Medicine

Ashley Rubin, Prisons and jails are coronavirus epicenters – but they were once designed to prevent disease outbreaks, The Conversation, April 15, 2020

Misha Lepetic, Foucault’s Plague, 3 Quarks Daily, March 4, 2013

Margo Schlanger, Plata v. Brown and Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, and Politics, Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 48(1) 2013: 165-215.

Osagie Obasogie, Prisoners as Human Subjects: A Closer Look at the Institute of Medicine’s Recommendations to Loosen Current Restrictions on Using Prisoners in Scientific Research, Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties 6(1) 2010: 41.

COVID-19 In Prisons

Brendan Saloner, Kalind Parish, Julie A. Ward, Grace DiLaura, Sharon Dolovich, COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in Federal and State Prisons, JAMA, July 8, 2020

Hadar Aviram, Triggers and Vulnerabilities: Why California Prisons Are So Vulnerable to COVID-19, and What to Do About It, Tropics of Meta, July 3, 2020

Hadar Aviram, California’s COVID-19 Prison Disaster and the Trap of Palatable Reform, BOOM California, August 10, 2020

Sharon Dolovich, Mass Incarceration, Meet COVID-19, University of Chicago Law Review Online, Nov. 2020

Matthew J. Akiyama, M.D., Anne C. Spaulding, M.D., and Josiah D. Rich, M.D., Flattening the Curve for Incarcerated Populations — Covid-19 in Jails and Prisons, The New England Journal of Medicine, May 2020

Oluwadamilola T. Oladeru, Nguyen-Toan Tran, Tala Al-Rousan, Brie Williams & Nickolas Zaller, A Call to Protect Patients, Correctional Staff and Healthcare Professionals in Jails and Prisons during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Health and Justice, July 2, 2020

The San Quentin Catastrophe

Megan Cassidy and Jason Fagone, 200 Chino inmates transferred to San Quentin, Corcoran. Why weren’t they tested first? San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 2020

AMEND SF and UC Berkeley, Urgent Memo – COVID-19 Outbreak: San Quentin Prison, June 15, 2020

Megan Cassidy, San Quentin officials ignored coronavirus guidance from top Marin County health officer, letter says, San Francisco Chronicle, August 11, 2020

Al Jazeera Front Lines, Pandemic in Prison: The San Quentin Outbreak, October 28, 2020

In re Von Staich on Habeas Corpus, A160122, California Court of Appeal for the First District, October 20, 2020

Solutions and Policies

Hadar Aviram, Gov. Newsom’s Release Plan Is Not Enough, San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 2020

James King and Danica Rodarmel, Gov. Newsom must release more people from prisons to protect Californians and save lives, The Sacramento Bee, July 11, 2020

Jason Fagone, California could cut its prison population in half and free 50,000 people. Amid pandemic, will the state act? San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 2020

Ruth Wilson Gilmore in conversation with Naomi Murakawa, Haymarket Books, April 17, 2020

Reproductive Justice, Women, and Gender in CA Prisons

Sulipa Jindia, Belly of the Beast: California’s dark history of forced sterilizations, The Guardian, June 30, 2020

Jason Fagone, Women’s prison journal: State inmate’s daily diary during pandemic, San Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 2020

Valerie Jenness, Transgender Prisoners in America, September 5, 2016

AJ Rio-Glick, COVID-19 Adds to Challenges for Trans People in California’s Prisons, Vera Institute of Justice Blog, July 7, 2020

COVID-19 in Immigration Detention Facilities

COVID-19 in Jails, Prisons, and Immigration Detention Centers: A Q&A with Chris Beyrer, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, September 15, 2020

American Bar Foundation, Impact of COVID-19 on the Immigration System

Carmen Molina Acosta, Psychological Torture: ICE Responds to COVID-19 with Solitary Confinement, The Intercept, August 24, 2020

SAVE THE DATE: California Correctional Crisis: Mass Incarceration, Healthcare, and the COVID-19 Outbreak

Dear Friends,

Three UC Hastings journals are coming together to organize an important symposium on incarceration and healthcare, focusing on the COVID-19 prison crisis. We are excited to invite you–details will follow. For now, please SAVE THE DATES!

When?

  • Feb. 5, 12-4pm: California Correctional Crisis, Meet COVID-19
  • Feb. 12, 12-4pm: Focus on reproductive justice, trans incarcerated people, and special populations
  • Feb. 19, 12-4pm: Focus on immigration detention and healthcare

Where? Online (registration details to follow)

The conference will feature amazing speakers: advocates, activists, academics, officials, formerly incarcerated people. Among our confirmed speakers are renown prison historian Prof. Ashley Rubin; prison law expert Prof. Sharon Dolovich, Director of the UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project; Adnan Khan, Executive Director of Re:Store Justice; Richard Braucher of the First District Appellate Project, counsel for Ivan Von Staich in the landmark case that resulted in a San Quentin population reduction order.

MCLE Credits for lawyers pending. Please plan on joining us!

Your hosts:

COVID-19 Prevention in Prisons and the Problem of Buy-In

Throughout the last few months, there’s something that’s been constantly gnawing at me and I haven’t had a moment to process in an organized way. I started thinking about this a lot when the AMEND report came out in June, reporting that people at San Quentin were afraid to get tested or report symptoms, lest they be placed in isolation in a death row or solitary confinement cell. And it came up again when I listened to the Assembly hearing on the PPE wearing failure and the commentary about the “physical plant” being “not conducive to compliance.” Then, I thought about it again when I read the AG’s briefs yesterday, detailing all the “reasonable” COVID-19 prevention steps they took. And finally, I felt a sense of despair and futility when I read this well-intended missive from Brendon Woods:

My immediate, gut reaction to the idea of vaccination priority was this: If I were incarcerated in one of the places that experienced horrific outbreaks–or anywhere else in CA, really–why would I believe anyone from CDCR or CCHCS offering me a vaccine, treatment, PPE, quarantine space, transfers, or anything else, except a ticket out of the system? And why on earth would I want to cooperate with anything short of being released? The sense of futility comes from a strong core realization that the trust between the state and incarcerated people is so deeply broken that, even when reasonable steps are being proposed, they’ll be understandably doubted. The long history of being swindled and harmed, especially in the context of healthcare, is so embedded in the system’s DNA, that any prevention or treatment initiative must take into account poor buy-in.

I’m not a doctor or a public health expert, but it seems obvious to me that, when designing a public health response, one important consideration is public buy-in. As this paper explains, effective COVID-19 prevention measures depend, in big part, on an enormous amount of groundwork to foster compliance, including virtual community building, fostering solidarity between high-risk and low-risk groups, and trust building between decision-makers, healthcare workers, and the public. What we’ve seen in the U.S. on the national level is instructive of what happens when the government not only fails to make this effort, but actively stokes the opposite sentiments. I suspect that even a reasonable administration would have had trouble containing the virus in such a big country with deep pockets of ignorance and misinformation, but given the Trumpian legacy of actively creating misinformation and division, this is going to be a huge challenge for whoever runs the COVID-19 response for the Biden administration.

What we’re seeing in CDCR facilities is a crystallized example of this problem. Efforts to implement pandemic prevention methods have to contend with deep mistrust of prison authorities in general, and prison healthcare in particular, which have profoundly painful historical roots. Osagie Obasogie reminds us of the horrific history of harm and deception in prison healthcare in this piece:

As early as 1906, Dr. Richard P. Strong—director of the Biological Laboratory of the Philippine Bureau of Science who later became a professor of tropical medicine at Harvard—gave a cholera vaccine to twenty-four Filipino inmates without their consent in order to learn about the disease; thirteen died. Though this provides an early modern example of using prisoners as human subjects, it certainly was not the last. Twelve inmates from Mississippi’s Rankin Farm prison became test subjects in 1915 to study pellagra—a disfiguring and deadly disease characterized by skin rashes and diarrhea. Though common wisdom at the time suggested that pellagra was a disease caused by germs, Dr. Joseph Goldberger—a physician in the federal government’s Hygienic Laboratory, predecessor to the National Institutes of Health—thought it was linked to malnutrition characteristic of Southern rural poverty. After Mississippi Governor Earl Brewer promised pardons to all participants—an inducement to participate in research that would be intolerable today–Goldberger tried to prove his theory that poor diet caused pellagra by subjecting inmates to what many called a “hellish experiment”: eating exclusively high-starch foods such as “corn bread, mush, collards, sweet potatoes, grits and rice” that caused considerable pain, lethargy, and dizziness. Despite their pleadings to end the study, prisoners were not allowed to withdraw. And, in an early 1920s experiment that was as bizarre as it was gratuitous, 500 inmates at California’s San Quentin prison had testicular glands from rams, boars, and goats implanted into their scrotums to see if their lost sexual potency could be rejuvenated.

But one needn’t go that far back. Nonconsensual sterilization of incarcerated women was still going on as of 2013, when the practice was exposed and excoriated. The Guardian’s Shilpa Jindia explains:

Despite federal and state law prohibiting the use of federal funds for sterilization as a means of birth control in prisons, California used state funds to pay doctors a total of almost $150,000 to sterilize women. That amount paled in comparison to “what you save in welfare”, one doctor told the news outlet.

Against this backdrop, you would expect public health experts at CDCR to bend over backwards to build trust, so as to engender cooperation. Instead, they’ve done exactly the opposite. The most obvious problem, of course, has been the botched transfer from CIM. I can finally put my finger on what seemed so disingenuous in the AG’s brief from yesterday: “[P]etitioners’ attempts to suggest prisoner transfers of any kind are not safe or effective is not well taken.” The irony of taking offense at people’s understandable mistrust after this colossal fiasco is completely lost on them, which I find breathtakingly obtuse.

But the transfer issue is just one of many. Why would prisoners comply with PPE-wearing requirements when they see guards, frequently and openly, flouting these requirements with no consequences? Why would people rush to report symptoms and get tested when the consequence is that they’ll be put in places which they’ve associated, for decades, with punishment and deprivation? Most importantly, given the history of using prisoners as experiment subjects, how could CDCR and CCHCS possibly lay some trust groundwork when rolling out a vaccine, so that people don’t suspect them, understandably, of subjecting them to untested, unreliable treatments?

This is the real crux of the problem. It’s not that “the physical plant is not conducive to compliance.” It’s that the atmosphere of neglect, indifference, and cruelty, and the resulting deep mistrust, does not engender compliance, and at every turn in this situation, prison authorities have moved the compliance needle further out of whack. This problem is a big part of why the only way out is to release people. Whatever other preventative steps the authorities are taking, regardless of their objective usefulness, need to actually be adopted by people on the ground to succeed. Hanging informational posters and handing out masks might work with some fantasy environment in mind, but it doesn’t work with the institutions and people we actually have. And it doesn’t seem like the AG’s office, or CDCR officials, have even begun to comprehend the depth of this problem.

AG Asks Marin Court to Halt Proceedings in San Quentin Population COVID-19 Cases

On the heels of the AG’s petition to the Supreme Court to review Von Staich comes this brief, submitted to the Superior Court that is handling the consolidated habeas corpus petitions of more than 300 people from San Quentin. In the brief, the AG is asking the court to halt all proceedings and stay all orders until the Court of Appeal decision in Von Staich becomes final. Here’s the full thing for you (13 pages of reading); my comments follow.

Respondent's Brief Regarding Effects of Von Staich Decision (1) by hadaraviram on Scribd

In case words like “abeyance” and “remittitur” set your teeth on edge, what this means is that the AG wants the 311 pending cases to go into hibernation until the Supreme Court (1) denies review in Von Staich or (2) reviews Von Staich, issues a ruling (upholding or overturning Von Staich) and that ruling becomes final. In practical terms, we are talking about a possible delay of several months.

What will happen in the meantime? According to the AG’s brief, they are going to spend this time working with the Receiver on the COVID response strategy. This strategy will be based on transfers, not releases, and apparently the AG’s office becomes upset when reminded that their transfers are what caused this mess in the first place: “Obviously, CDCR does not intend to conduct mass transfers of the same kind that were previously unsuccessful.” Thousands of infections and 28 deaths? “Unsuccessful” would perhaps not be the word I’d pick from my thesaurus, but okay. It goes on: “[P]etitioners’ attempts to suggest prisoner transfers of any kind are not safe or effective is not well taken.” Thousands of people sick, dozens dead from a preventable outbreak on your watch that started with a transfer, but heaven forbid your fee-fees might get hurt by mentioning that CDCR doesn’t have quite the flawless track record on transferring people without infecting or killing them.

The rest of the brief is, essentially, a game of Tetris: they argue that they could easily shift people around and move them to other prisons “even (!!!!!) omitting the prisons that are currently at more than 100 percent capacity.” As in, adding people to institutions that are already overcrowded is a viable option (remember the track record?), but we’ll go the extra mile and show the court that we can achieve the desired population reduction by transferring people to facilities that are only at or near 100%.

If you don’t feel like you’re quite disgusted yet, in the last page we are told:

Arguing that [people incarcerated at San Quentin] should not be transferred because it is stressful, their family will be unable to visit, and they will be unable to participate in programs that may support their bid for parole necessarily implies that petitioners view the foregoing factors as mutually exclusive and more important than their need to be free from San Quentin’s alleged unsafe environment. Neither can be true.

Seriously, who writes this stuff? The cynicism drips from “it is stressful.” Implied is the comparison between the “stress” associated with being moved around by the people who brought you the outbreak, and consequently facing possible targeting and violence from strangers in the new facility, and whatever the author of this magnum opus considers “stressful”, like, I dunno, deciding whether to go with vinaigrette or ranch on their side salad. Same thing for families being unable to visit–a serious mental health issue not only for the prisoners, but also for their young children–which is not the same as the family “stress” involved in the government lawyer’s need to balance the time it took them to author this masterpiece with the need to help their kids with their Zoom homework.

But most importantly, the dichotomy the authors are setting up is false, because the AG only presents people with two options: stay in a dilapidated, decrepit facility and face death, or face health risks and other negative outcomes by being transferred. That the Court of Appeal didn’t order them to transfer people doesn’t mean the Court didn’t prefer this strategy. It did, and it said so explicitly at least thrice in the decision, specifying the population of aging and infirm people doing time for violent crime as the key to a successful release strategy. That the authors of this brief don’t see it is emblematic of their inability to truly “see” this population: that’s why, when they reviewed 6,000 cases for release, they only found 44 (!!!!). That to the AG representatives, through their biases and blinders, release is not a viable option, does not mean that it is not the obvious, sane solution to everyone else.

This is infuriating, beyond offensive, and breathtakingly vicious, and I’m at the edge of my seat waiting to see how the Superior Court will respond.