Releasing more prisoners the only way to prevent more deaths
Sunday, April 5, marked the first coronavirus death of an accused person in Cook County Jail. The first - meaning there will be more, possibly many more.
Less than a week later, there was a second death of a jail detainee. Between the first and second deaths, the number of detainees and staff members testing positive for COVID-19 had jumped from about 300 to more than 400, and the number continues to grow.
Like many others in the jail at the time of his death, the virus victim was locked in our jail, accused of a crime, but not found guilty.
The Cook County Jail is now known nationally as a coronavirus cluster, a place where 5,000 people are unable to practice social distancing and where hundreds of workers travel in and out every day.
Jails are good at imprisoning people, but are no match for contagious diseases. It's no mystery why the jail is the largest-known source of U.S. infections - even more than on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt.
The county leaders overseeing bond court, filing criminal charges and operating the jail have taken steps to lower the population numbers to protect public health. Those efforts should be applauded, but in that process, they have not abandoned their pre-pandemic perception of "public safety risk" based primarily on the danger of the person's alleged crime.
In normal times, the justice system often sees a person accused of selling drugs, possessing a gun without a license or getting into a fight as worthy of detention before trial. Even driving on an expired license and being too poor to pay a bond will keep you in jail.
But in a pandemic, our approach to pretrial incarceration has to change drastically. So far, it hasn't in Cook County.
Remember, in a jail setting, an incarcerated person is forced to interact with far more people than an average person living in our new normal. Residents live communally, coming into contact with each other and jail personnel at a far higher rate than the strictures that have been applied can make safe.
The only safe response is removing enough people from the jail to slow the spread of infection by increasing physical distance. Locking the jail doors and throwing away the keys will not make it better for those held there or those working there and the family and friends of those workers.
The more people released, the smaller the number of people needed to work directly with those that reside in the jail. The more people released, the greater the physical distance the jail can provide for those still inside.
Most important of all, the lower the jail population, the more likely we are to avoid the ultimate disaster, a virus breakout in the jail that overwhelms the internal health care services in jail and reduces the capacity of county health systems beyond the jail walls.
• Sharone Mitchell Jr. is Director of the Illinois Justice Project, https://www.iljp.org.