> Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans to alleviate the outbreak by releasing as many as 8,000 inmates and further reducing the population by about 10,000 through delayed admissions.[1]
Quite a lot; there is a federal policy for release to home confinement of current prisoners with COVID-19 risk factors after evaluation of other factors.
Levandowski was charged in the federal system, to which California state prison policy is irrelevant. (The fact that the particular federal court hearing the case was located in California doesn't change that.)
OTOH, both delays in prison sentences and releases of current prisoners to home confinement are not uncommon due to COVID-19 in the federal system right now.
It blows my mind that there are protestors at San Quentin agitating for prisoners to be released into the public when the prison is one of the biggest cohorts of COVID in the entire region.
They literally let people walk out of prison and get on a public bus, after spendings months in close quarters amidst the worst outbreak in the Bay Area.
I think your comment would be much stronger if you just stated it directly - "They should not be denied justice because the lack of justice made them vulnerable to infection". - paraphrasing gilrain
It's called compassion. Imagine you catch a dangerous virus, and you are in a place where you have literally zero agency.
It's as if you are assuming people who commit crimes, or even people who get sent to jail (they are not a perfect venn diagram) aren't empathetic human beings.
Most people in prison don't want to randomly infect and kill people. Most of them do not want to hurt families, or friends. Most of them don't even want to talk or engage with anyone, and here you are, saying they should stay in a cage, accept their fate, get sick because a guard spits on them, and reflect about how they are serving time for selling cannabis, a now legal substance.
There are people who are intentionally not wearing masks, and you are assuming people leaving prison will not actively try to protect themselves and others, think about that.
Also, that they are put on busses is what the state is doing, not the former prisoners. They could do many other things to mitigate risk, and it's not on the prisoners, who have no money, or agency to have responsibility for that.
> It's as if you are assuming people who commit crimes, or even people who get sent to jail (they are not a perfect venn diagram) aren't empathetic human beings.
Empirically speaking, as compared to the general population. Prisoners are less empathetic. Empathic concern is highly correlated with agreeableness and agreeableness is lower in prisoners than the general population.
"Results of this study showed that big five personality traits accounted for 19.4%, 18.1%, 30.2% of the variance in three dimensions of empathy, namely, perspective taking, empathic concern and personal distress, respectively. Specifically, agreeableness had a strong positive association with empathic concern..."
"Both tests found that while prisoners were lower in agreeableness and extraversion than non-prisoners they were also substantially higher in conscientiousness than the general population..."
Cohen is mostly notable not because he was initially eligible for the general COVID-19 release to home confinement that the DOJ has set up, but because DOJ tried to unconstitutionally craft his conditions of release in a way to squelch his first amendment rights when they found out he was planning on releasing a book that would be embarrassing to the President.
I think GP was mixing it up with the President's chief Campaign Manager, Paul Manafort, who was serving his 7.5 year sentence in prison and moved to home confinement for covid 19.
I did mean Cohen, not Manafort (Cohen was Trumps lawyer, Manafort his campaign manager) -- The GGP said "How many other criminals can avoid jail time right now due to the Covid threat?" and having recently seen an article about Michael Cohen being out of jail on furlough due to C19 (linked in my original post) I posted the link; from TFA:
"Cohen was released to furlough in late May as part of a release program undertaken by the Bureau of Prisons to address the coronavirus pandemic."
However, as dragonwriter points out, turns out Cohen 1) was writing a book possibly damaging to Trump and 2) had been out at restaurants in NYC possibly in violation of his furlough; again from TFA:
"A photographer from the New York Post captured Cohen dining at a restaurant near his apartment with his wife and another couple in early July. Cohen said that didn't violate the terms of his release."
The controversial part is that the DoJ put him back in jail, but it seems it might have been to prevent him from completing his book (and the ACLU successfully sued to get him released again).
This is the link I should have posted regarding his original release in May due to C19:
