Highlighting compassion's limits as to prison releases during pandemic

Wanda Bertram has this notable New Republic commentary fully headlined, "State Prisons Released More People Before Covid-19 Than During It: Prison officials touted a compassionate response to Covid, but the statistics tell another story."  I recommend the full piece, and here is how it starts (with links from the original):

As Covid-19 first spread through the United States, it became clear that jails and prisons would see the worst of it. Already suffering from overcrowded, unsanitary facilities and medical neglect, incarcerated people lived in prime conditions for deadly outbreaks.  Responding to pressure from advocates, prison officials insisted they would look for opportunities to release people who could go home safely or who were at high risk of dying from the disease.

But state prison statistics show another story: Relatively few people have been released from prisons over the course of the pandemic.  According to data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative (where I work as a spokesperson) tracking releases in 11 states, 10 of those states reported releasing even fewer prisoners in 2020 and the beginning of 2021 than they had in 2019.  This drop in releases occurred as the coronavirus infected one in every three people in prison nationwide, leading to 2,800 deaths as of this October.

Many prisons did make policy changes designed to expedite early releases.  In most places, though, these changes didn’t result in more people going home.  An apparent drop in the overall prison population during the last two years, most agree, is due to fewer people being sent to prison in the first place, not people being freed. So why did releases go down?  Prison officials say that they make decisions on petitions for early release by weighing several factors, including an individual’s behavior, the nature of their original offense, their potential risk to public safety, and circumstances that might prompt a “compassionate” release (such as a prisoner suffering from severe dementia).  To be sure, the pandemic posed logistical challenges — making it hard to hold in-person parole hearings, offer classes that are sometimes prerequisites for parole, or place people in halfway houses.  But the pandemic also introduced what should have been a compelling new factor in release decisions: the risk of serious illness or death.  One would think this would have tipped the scales in a significant number of cases, adding up to more releases.  The fact that it did not raises disturbing questions about the conduct of prison officials.

While the data collected by my colleagues at the Prison Policy Initiative is incomplete, because only some states publish monthly release data, anecdotes and statewide reports help fill in the gaps. We know, for instance, that compassionate releases have stagnated in many states.  A recent investigation by The Salt Lake Tribune showed Utah’s parole board didn’t increase compassionate releases during the pandemic; instead it denied people like Jesus Gomez, an 84-year-old man confined to a wheelchair who can’t remember his crimes.  Over in Nevada, officials granted zero compassionate releases in 2020; medical staff in its prisons failed even to identify candidates to review. Alabama, whose infamously crowded prisons hold about 28,000 people, identified just 15 candidates for compassionate release last year and granted it to five.  Alabama also granted parole to a smaller percentage of the people who applied in the spring and summer of 2020 than it had from 2018 to 2019.  Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center obtained a list of the oldest incarcerated people in Alabama, discovering that hundreds were parole-eligible but either had been denied or hadn’t had a hearing.