What About Pandemic In Cuomo’s Prisons?

While Mario’s smarter son, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has grown a huge fan base within the Democratic party, enough so that there are mumbles about the DNC replacing Joe Biden with Cuomo as the presidential candidate. Yet, when it comes to exercising executive clemency, both before the pandemic and now in accommodation of the pandemic, he’s been woeful.

Criminal defense lawyers, activists and pundits have spent the past month calling for the release of a variety of categories of prisoners to avoid what was predicted to be a killing field in prison. It presented the perfect storm for disaster once coronavirus found its way into institutions, as had to happen. While some states and localities took action, albeit inadequate but something, most did pretty much nothing. Cuomo fell in the “pretty much nothing” nothing group, perhaps because he couldn’t find time between his television appearances.

Georgetown Law prof Shon Hopwood posed the question, and his answer, to why.

Why are law enforcement policymakers so reluctant to release enough people to make their jails and prisons safe? Maybe they realize that, if enough people are released, it undermines all the reasons why the U.S. nearly leads the world in incarceration rates.

— Shon Hopwood (@shonhopwood) April 14, 2020

Shon comes by his answer honestly, having done his decade at the hands of an old Nebraska judge with lousy sentencing instincts. As normally happens on the twitters, however, the vapid hosannas followed where thought might have actually served a more useful purpose.

Shon’s answer to his own question has become something of a truism in the activist approach to releasing prisoners to avoid death and disease by COVID-19, that if there is mass release of inmates who are being held pre-trial, are near their release date, are held on technical violations or are otherwise vulnerable by age or co-morbidity, it would demonstrate that their incarceration served no real purpose and that mass incarceration cannot be justified.

And this could well prove to be the case, as much of our carceral zeal has no justification, other than the American bloodlust for retribution shared by the right and left, only for different villains.

But that doesn’t explain why Mario’s less-handsome son has failed so miserably to complete his progressive tour to the Democratic National Convention. For all the noise and constant bombardment by the anti-carceral forces, one would hope that they stopped listening only to their echo chamber, which has managed to eke out only the barest of reactions and otherwise accomplished almost nothing beyond the soothing the angry feelings of righteous slacktivists.

If they really want to save lives, they need a real answer to Shon’s question, the sort of answer one won’t hear from the choir or the progressive-adjacents in the libertarian wing. On the one hand, there are a not insignificant group of people who just don’t care that prisoners might die. Non-prisoners, parents, spouses, siblings and children, are dying, and their concerns are used up by the people who aren’t being held in prison.

This group can’t be helped, even as one points out the list of reasons why inmates, some not as yet convicted of anything and some having paid their debt with usurious interest to society, don’t deserve to die.

But Andy Cuomo isn’t in this group, and this group doesn’t like him anyway. Granted, there are entire upstate New York communities whose only job market is behind razor wire, but they have more cows than people and don’t vote Democratic anyway. Even so, cutting a tenth of the prison population wouldn’t change much.

So why, Andy? There is another answer to Shon’s question that has nothing to do with the fear that releasing inmates now will reveal the pointlessness of prison nation. If prisoners are released to escape the petri dish of coronavirus, the cesspool of prison life that is rarely seen by outsiders, there will be someone, some percentage, of inmates who will eventually take to the street and rape, pillage and murder. Here’s where the narrative fails: not everybody in prison is someone’s kindly old uncle who made one unfortunate mistake but with understandable reasons. There are some bad dudes in there, some dangerous dudes, some crazy dudes, and when they get the chance, they will do some serious harm to some undeserving victim.

And when this happens, as it will, the same universe of outraged people will flip so fast they will make Michelle Goldberg look not ridiculously hypocritical. They will be furious that Cuomo put some killer on the road. And they will demand blood, this time Cuomo’s blood. Will he be Persky’d? Will he be Willie Horton’d? Will his puss be on the front page of the New York Post as the worst governor ever?

Afterward, everyone will know with absolute certainty that he did wrong, that it was obvious, that it never, but never, should have happened, because everyone is a genius in retrospect, but the only way to prevent a released prisoner from raping and murdering a girl scout troup is not to let him out in the first place. Once it happens, there is no nuanced discussion to be had. The guy who cut him loose is as guilty as the guy who did the dirty.

But maybe, maybe, this time will be different and we won’t hold public officials responsible for not having the ability to see into the future, to not make the heinous mistake of releasing someone who thereafter commits some horrible crime? Maybe, but maybe not, because life isn’t as simple as it looks from the distance of Washington think tanks or to the gnats who flit about the insipid echo chamber of twitter.

Then again, if the calls to release prisoners were as accurate a month ago as they are today, it’s too late to save the inmates, as coronavirus has already made its way through the prisons. Then again, as of yesterday, “131 inmates and 522 prison staff have tested positive” for COVID-19, but only three have died. In the scheme of tragedies, where more than 10,000 New Yorkers have died, three more tragedies isn’t likely to push Cuomo to risk his political career as the next progressive darling.