Another encouraging report on those released under federal CARES Act

NPR has this notable new piece, headlined "Released during COVID, some people are sent back to prison with little or no warning," with a kind of good news/bad news reporting on persons released from federal prison during the pandemic under the CARES Act.  Here are extended excerpts: 

More than 11,000 people [under the bipartisan pandemic legislation called the CARES Act] have been released from federal prison in the last couple of years, to ride out the pandemic at home, often with their families and loved ones.  But that situation can be precarious.

In June 2021, [Eric] Alvarez and [his finance Eva] Cardoza took a 90-minute cab ride into the Bronx, so she could meet with staffers in charge of her supervision.  Cardoza, who had tested positive for marijuana, never came out of the building....  Cardoza's return to prison turned the family upside down.  She's now been back at Danbury for 14 months. Alvarez said she never got the chance to explain herself or challenge that single positive drug test.  "That's just mind boggling to me," Alvarez said.  "Where is the judicial system? Where is the fairness? Where is the 50-50? I don't see it."

Less than 0.2% of the people released committed new crimes while they were out

This week, the Bureau of Prisons told NPR that 442 people who were released during the pandemic have now returned to prison.  Only 17 people out of more than 11,000 who were released committed new crimes, mostly drug related ones, while they were out.  More than half, some 230 people including Eva Cardoza, got sent back for alleged alcohol or drug use.  Other cases involved technical violations.

Sakira Cook of the racial justice group Color of Change explained what that means.  "It could be as simple as failing to answer the phone when your probation officer calls you. It could be as simple as the ankle monitor giving an incorrect signal about your location," Cook said....

Most of the monitoring of people on home confinement is being done by private contractors, said Quinnipiac University School of Law professor Sarah Russell.  "There can be a lot of room for miscommunications and misunderstandings," Russell said.  Russell said that's all the more reason to ensure due process rights for people at risk of being sent back: the opportunity to see the evidence against them and to have a hearing before a neutral arbiter.

Last week, one of Russell's clients won those rights in court.  The decision by Judge Omar Williams is the first in the nation to hold that the current process for returning people to federal prison after home confinement is unconstitutional.

Russell said her other clients — moms with young children — are still nervous about having to leave their lives behind unexpectedly.  "My real hope is that this gets addressed at the national level through the Bureau of Prisons and through the Department of Justice," Russell said.  "They have a real opportunity to set clear procedures and criteria."

More lawsuits from people returned to prison are under way. The Bureau of Prisons said it can't talk about that pending litigation. But it is considering a new federal rule to make the process more clear.

Though I understand why the focus of this piece is on the opaque and seemingly unfair processes often adopted by BOP when returning people to custody, I am eager to highlight and stress the extraordinarily low recidivism rate being reported for those released under federal CARES Act.   FBI arrest data suggest (very very, roughly) that up to 1 in every 50 adults get arrested for a crime in the US each year.  That just over 1 in every 1000 persons released under federal CARES Act have been found to commit new crimes over the last 2+ years is truly remarkable.  (Or course, persons released under the CARES Act have been screened for riskiness and have very strong incentives to stay crime-free with a prison return looming.  Still, the same can arguably said for a large portion of persons released from prison, and yet usual recidivism rates are depressingly high for many other cohorts of former prisoners.)

I sense a lot of different groups and researchers are busy trying to better understand what factors contribute to desistance from crime these days.  The CARES Act data suggest this is a cohort that ought to be examined closely as we seek to engineer improved prison release mechanism.

UPDATE: I wrote to Professor Sarah Russell about the ruling from Judge Williams, which she was able to provide his 35-page opinion for posting here.  Folks will want to read the full 35-page opinion if working in this area, but this one line provides the main part of the holding: "this court finds that Respondents violated Petitioner’s due process rights in revoking her home confinement without a proper revocation hearing as described in Morrissey."

Download Tompkins Order on CARES Act return procedures