As Colorado, like the rest of the world, muddles along trying to grapple with the pandemic crisis, we’re all learning the value of expecting the expected.
Despite what an overwhelmingly incompetent Trump administration keeps trying to pass off as reality, there were many U.S. government officials who knew how dangerous the COVID-19 pandemic could be and what would needed to cope.
President Donald Trump’s utter failure to recognize, plan for and manage the crisis is simply the worst-case scenario of his long list of deficiencies as a president and a person.
Reasonable Americans expected nothing else from Trump. His malfeasance, however, teaches Colorado an important lesson: Don’t be that guy.
There’s no shortage of experts warning the Aurora area and all of Colorado that prisoners of all kinds locked up together make for a disaster certain to happen.
Trump would ignore or downplay the danger, and that would lead to yet another calamity.
A Sentinel Colorado story this week by reporter Quincy Snowdon reveals that local city and county jail officials are to be commended for working to reduce the jail populations. Officials are trying to prevent virus transmission from new arrivals and visitors. They’re trying to create conditions inside facilities that would prevent a COVID-19 case from infecting staff or other prisoners.
Given the reality of the virus, the pandemic and how jails and prisons work, it’s an impossible situation.
As one Sentinel source pointed out, it’s a matter of when, not if.
In Weld County, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued the sheriff there to get him to stop flagrantly dangerous jail crowding that endangers prisoners, deputies and the entire community, if not the state and nation.
Don’t be that guy.
While local jail officials have been open and frank about what they’ve done to limit the risk of an outbreak, the GEO ICE immigrant detention center in Aurora has been dodgy and troubled long before the pandemic struck the region.
Like so much of this pandemic crisis, the choices are all bad and worse. We must avoid worse.
Immediately, federal officials should order any immigrant not held on felony criminal charges to be released on a recognizance bond. Any inmate accused of a violent crime should be transferred temporarily to a federal facility capable of limiting exposure to the virus.
As for local and state prisoners, efforts to reduce jail populations by as much as a third and even a half are clearly helpful, but local jails are not built and operated to contain the spread of contagion. The inmate population must be reduced enough to ensure complete separation of prisoners and the safety of employees who handle them.
Releasing all but the most violent and dangerous convicts and suspects from local jails is critical to preventing a catastrophic mass infection. Jails that cannot reduce the population enough to ensure containment must send inmates to other facilities in the state until the most dangerous virus threat has passed.
State prisons are far more difficult and complicated, and they’re equally as threatening.
As difficult as it might be for fair-minded people to accept, Colorado must immediately begin commuting sentences of non-violent offenders. The prison population must be reduced to a capacity state epidemiology experts agree is a reasonably safe condition for inmates and staff.
Community service requirements or similar conditions can be imposed, but detention populations must be vastly reduced.
This isn’t about justice, equity and fairness, it’s about conditions that threaten the lives of inmates, prison workers and the public.
The Cook County jail in Chicago, deemed the biggest COVID-19 factory in the nation, is a portent of what will happen here if immediate action isn’t taken.
By ranking crimes from least violent to most, the state should begin commuting sentences of those closest to having served their time. Sentences should then be commuted using that criteria until prison and jail populations are deemed satisfactory by health officials.
Ignoring the halting danger or providing only lip service is something the Trump administration would do, and every American can see how ineffective and disastrous that’s been.
Don’t be that guy.
It’s clear the pandemic will come and go for months, possibly years if an effective vaccine isn’t widely distributed. Keeping jail populations small and separated will be critical for a very long time. Time is something the region has run out of.
Looking into the future is a job for the legislature, which has already taken up the job of prison and sentencing reform. But this crisis is a job for Gov. Jared Polis and local court and jail officials.
This is an extraordinary crisis. These are extraordinary measures. But it can take nothing less to address this extraordinary danger to the public, workers and inmates the government is responsible for.