Coronavirus VIII: Prisons & Jails: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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tonight

concerns the corona virus, you know, the thing you have to regularly convince your parents still exists oh, you went to Shoney's, who else was there in the whole city? Wow, please stay inside you extremely fragile maniacs, in recent

week

s there have been a series of alarming spikes across the country, but in one particular type of place, as we are hit especially hard,

prisons

are experiencing a spike frightening. Data collected by the New York Times shows that the number of infected inmates exceeds 68,000, a figure that has doubled in the

last

month. Deaths in

prisons

. related to the virus have increased by 73 percent since mid-May, the five largest known virus clusters are in correctional institutions.

Yes, that's right, the five largest

coronavirus

clusters are all correctional institutions, which is so terrible it sounds like an ad produced by some guy. from a bad news generator that spits out random phrases like ink from Confederate statues. 10 episodes dealing with kwibi or tick-tock hamster charged with four counts of vehicular manslaughter or sean hannity dating ainsley earhardt one of them is real and it's the worst and the facts the corona virus is ravaging prisons and

jails

is especially alarming given that there are 2.2 million people held in them nationwide and prisoners are generally a group with higher health risks.

Between 1999 and 2016, the number of people aged 55 and over in prison has increased. 280 percent and people inside prisons are more likely to be immunocompromised with chronic health problems like diabetes and hypertension, so this is an immensely vulnerable population and inmates know very well that, as these advocates explain, I personally I am in contact with more than 300 people who are incarcerated. They tell me day after night, Lois, this is like I'm standing in the middle of I-95 in New York, right in the middle of the road, and cars are speeding by at one hundred and seventeen miles an hour in both directions and it's It's just a matter of time before I get hit with this, yes folks I feel like it's just a matter of time before you get sick, which is terrible because we don't punish people by giving them sickness, take me for example, I do not do it.

I have Lyme disease because of my public intoxication charge in 2008. No, I have it because those deer knew they were having a party back then. I have to be honest. I miss that team, so

tonight

let's talk about some things about why the corona virus has spread so quickly. behind bars the impact this has on absolutely everyone and what we can and should do about it and as a quick reminder, prisons are places where people are detained awaiting trial or held for lesser sentences , while prisons typically hold people who have been convicted and are serving sentences of more than a year and whether they are in a jail or a prison, they are probably in a facility that is in no way built to cope to a crisis like this because it's basically impossible to stay six feet away in a tiny place. cellular, as Ted Koppel discovered a few years ago, confinement and social distancing are mostly incompatible.

You don't have it, you can only move at a time like a phone. basically a closet with two beds and a bathroom, in fact, I would say that most things cannot be practiced in those circumstances, apart from games like trying not to accidentally hug each other and who can poop the quietest and, by the way, the correct answer to that. The

last

question is Blake Lively, she poops silently, that is simply a fact and some of the measures that the authorities have taken to deal with this problem are ridiculously small, as this worries the mother of a prisoner, explains that They will be locked up for twenty-three and one years. half an hour a day they go out for about ten minutes and they use the phone and you know, they take a shower and then they come back in and these little cells tell them to sleep from head to toe, but I mean even from head to toe if you're in a small cell, it doesn't exactly make a difference and probably isn't comforting for a mother to hear.

Oh, don't worry, Mom, all prisoners are instructed to sleep from head to toe and when they're awake we tell them. that breathe in opposite directions, we're pretty sure we've got this covered, then there's the simple matter of soap, as everyone knows, a key way to protect yourself against the corona virus is to wash your hands regularly in

jails

and prisons. Soph are perhaps rationed or not available at all and if inmates need more they may have to buy it from the commissary and as we have covered before on this show despite doing most of the work to maintain the prisons and functioning prisons, inmates only earn a few cents for their work.

In fact, some facilities have even posted signs about the importance of handwashing, but then continued to charge inmates for access to soap and several inmates felt they had to do everything they could to try to alert the world to this dangerous shortage. . gave us there is less danger CELTA it is worth it to stay clean they wash their hands and this for Harry two

week

s they are not giving us hand sanitizer they are not giving us episode this is the soap dish that is on the arm after all they are just pieces of soap that everyone has to wash their hands, we have soap dispensers, but sometimes on the weekends the soap runs out, that's clearly horrible, there should always be enough soap and I know that if you wanted to make a decent parody of me, you wouldn't you would do it too. far away, if you put on a suit, faked a British accent, and went around shouting, there should always be enough soap, but that doesn't make it any less true, right?

There should always be enough soap, and especially in that last facility where As of April, around 80% of its residents had contracted the virus and it is by no means just cleaning products that are in short supply. PPE is so scarce that it has led prisoners to wear socks on their hands when using the phone, which might be the saddest sock puppet. and testing has been so scarce that inmates can't be sure who does and doesn't have the virus, and furthermore, if someone shows symptoms, they are often placed in solitary confinement because prisons have nowhere else to put them. quarantine. and it's not much of an incentive for inmates to show up if your policy is basically to look, just tell us you're sick and we'll put you in this special punishment hole and when you take all of this together, up close, the lack of basic protections and uncertainty over the spread of a potentially deadly virus, it's honestly no surprise that tensions could reach a breaking point just after 3 o'clock Thursday afternoon, an inmate took cell phone video inside the block C from Lansing Correctional Facility, yeah, I mean.

Someone is thinking that is an extreme answer. I would simply ask: what else are they supposed to do? What other bargaining chip do two prisoners have at their disposal right now? This is actually being a recurring theme lately, but I'll say it. Again, if it takes the destruction of property for a system to pay attention to human lives, then we are in a dark place and I know that if you are lucky enough to have little or no familiarity with the prison system, it can be easy to ignore. problem and that problem is actually reflected by some in local government in California when an outbreak at a Santa Barbara prison made it difficult for that county to meet state standards for reopening, local officials proposed simply not counting prisoners and a spokesperson The county said the people are not in the community, so it's actually a completely separate population, which is the kind of thing you would only say if there was a

coronavirus

outbreak in Atlantis.

Look, they don't even breathe air there, they are actually a whole. separate population and the director of the Arkansas Department of Health trying to put an even more optimistic spin on the prison outbreaks that they were having there, these are high risk environments, we are covered, 19 they can spread very easily, very quickly, but also closed systems and do not necessarily represent the situation in Arkansas in general. One fortunate thing about that type of environment is that it's not that difficult to contain because people don't go out and they don't go out. Getting out of prison is fine, even if prisons and jails were closed systems, which they are not for reasons we are going to address, it is strange to call outbreaks of a deadly virus lucky just because they are confined in a place where the news did not appear.

I didn't go crazy covering the balloon boy because they were excited, it was just a kid contained in a homemade balloon going through the sky no, it was treated as an emergency because there was a chance he would die, luckily of course it turned out to be zero . boys in that balloon, as it was later revealed that it was a hoax carried out by the boy's parents to make the family that had appeared on the reality show wife swapping more marketable to the media and saints remember when Balloon Boy was the craziest story I had to worry about 2009 really was an easier time to be alive and look for the record that people are getting out of prisons because not everyone in a prison is in prison, there are about 440 to 5000 employees non-inmates working in prisons around the world. country and those workers have reported more than 9,000 cases of coronavirus, we might as well hand them coronavirus gift bags as they leave work each day and return to the community, and the staff who bring the virus in and out of the facilities are not the only ones way it can spread, it can jump from prison to prison as inmates are transferred and it can also go out into the community when sick prisoners are treated in local hospitals, especially in rural areas where hospitals can easily become overwhelmed and that is before that we enter prisons. where there is a constant rotation of people coming and going in a typical week, more than 200,000 people are booked into jails across the country and another 200,000 are released, so outbreaks in prisons and jails can easily spread to the broader community , in fact, suggested a study. that as of mid-April more than 15% of all documented coronavirus cases in Illinois could be linked to a single facility, the Cook County Jail, and while the jail strongly disputes those findings, there were activists who saw the danger signs from the beginning, like this man who was warning people in March from now on The Cook County Jail is a virtual petri dish Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is the captain of a cruise ship.

Wow, a death cruise. Cruise ships are bad enough without including death into the equation. It's like our parent company called itself genocide, AT&T guys. I don't know how they could have a worse experience than what they're already giving people. The point here is that the coronavirus doesn't stay behind bars, it travels easily. Which really brings us to our final question: what can we do well? Realistically, we need to get as many people out of prisons and jails as possible, which, frankly, is something we should be doing anyway, but right now we really don't have much to do. choice, the fewer people there are in these facilities, the easier it will be for those people to socially distance, the less staff you will need on site and the lower your demand for PPE will be but of course when you release inmates, this is the answer, first, taxidermy.

George Lucas, you seem to have a hard time thinking of more than one type of criminal, thief, burglar, identity forger, those are all just synonyms for stealing, what about all the other criminals in Texas, like the man who posed as for a boat? Oh, a rogue volunteer broke into someone's house and took a lollipop or the man who was forced to return three thousand dollars in prizes for cheating in bass fishing contests or even Thorman who drank wine from a Pringles can while drove an electric cart through a Walmart parking lot for several hours Texas has a vibrant crime scene with so much more variety than, frankly, you give credit for a dog, that there are some people we have no excuse not to release immediately, especially those awaiting trial in jail who pose little risk to public safety and are only there because they couldn't afford bail and look, I'm NOT saying that all the people who get out due to the corona virus will behave perfectly, no one can say that and I'm sure you'll see people on TV enthusiastically citing isolated cases of people who were released and then did bad things, you'll see it on shows like crime porn for old White with Laura Ingraham orThey come for you with a human squash court, but in general, the risks of letting people out carefully are far outweighed by the risks of leaving everyone in plain sight, since in prisons the least we have to do is release to offenders who have served most of their sentences, particularly the immunocompromised and the elderly, those groups are at high risk of contracting the virus and the elderly.

They are also very low risk for RIA Vent, you can also place certain prisoners on leave, basically pausing their sentence and have them return to finish it once the pandemic is under control or you can place them under house arrest and nationwide for him and No. I can't believe I'm going to say that this part of the attorney general credit released a Department of Justice memo instructing federal prisons to reduce their populations, which sounds like a great idea in theory, but to date they've only done it in about three percent, which is even worse. than the typical state prison because they have reduced their population by only 5 percent and that is simply not enough and I know this could put you in the uncomfortable position of having to argue on behalf of people who you may not find intrinsically sympathetic, take the case. of a federal prisoner who lobbied hard to be released, a judge rejected convicted pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli's requests to be released from prison to research a coronavirus treatment.

The presiding judge noted that parole officials saw that claim as the type of delusional behavior that led to his conviction in the first place. Yes, Martin Shkreli, the farmer brother, tried to be released under house arrest so he could work on developing a cure for corona. presumably he called it Rhona juice and then sold it for five thousand percent more than it should cost and was denied and when you hear that, you might think well of that guy and generally, yes, that guy, but in this case even though martin Shkreli is an attention hungry tree frog who clearly wasn't kept long enough as a tadpole and even though his reasoning for why he should be released is complete, I don't want him to contract the virus and potentially die because of him. that none of us should, and yet right now millions of Americans are trapped in a truly desperate situation and, very disproportionately, people of color and some prisoners have become so desperate that they will risk being punished to try to get someone in the outside world to pay attention. to his situation, just look at this prisoner openly using a contraband cell phone that he knows will have consequences for trying to raise the alarm.

This one is here dying for Khurana. They were wrong. They literally left us and her to death. This is Aaron Campbell. He's an inmate at the FCI Elton low-security federal prison in Ohio, he's using a contraband cell phone and he knows he's going to get in trouble for making this video, so I told him, you know, try to keep this situation going. on the farm like a book like this. Seriously, it's fun for everyone in this man and he says what you want him to do, my man is a little, no, I absolutely don't want that and I have to tell you that the authorities at that prison have said that the men in that video in In reality they were completely fine and none were sick, although you should also know that according to the government's own count in that low security institution, more than six hundred inmates tested positive for coronavirus and nine died and if you are wondering how that prisoner was doing, he is supposedly Ha He has been in isolation since that video went viral in early April and wrote a letter to a journalist saying that officials told him he would not face additional discipline if he issued a statement saying the video was fake, a request he later rejected, making him which is incredibly brave. and that's coming from me, a man who never missed an opportunity to say: I'm sorry for literally anything, so at this point it's worth asking what are we doing here, particularly during this pandemic, but also in general, because obviously There is a much broader discussion.

You have to know how millions of people ended up incarcerated in the first place and whether or not prisons work, which I would say they absolutely do if the only goal is to have a lot of people in prison, the fact is that we should depopulate prisons. and prisons as quickly as possible right now and I know how that sounds because we were all raised hearing that you shouldn't commit the crime if you can't serve the sentence, but in our current system you are never simply sentenced to This time they have sent us to a life of social stigma, useless job interviews and blocking of necessities such as housing, all of that is quite immoral.

Frankly, there is no reason why we should now also sentence people to die from a virus because that is not justice. It's negligence and it really matters because as much as we'd like to pretend that incarcerated people are a population separate from whatever they've done, they're still members of our society and if this horrible year has taught us one thing it's that they're all on this cruise together. of death.