What Cuomo Hasn’t Done

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/coronavirus-prisons-cuomo.html

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Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has received high marks for his handling of the coronavirus. He has remained calm and clear while issuing urgent warnings about the crisis.

But there is at least one group of New Yorkers whom Cuomo hasn’t done much to protect: elderly prisoners. Without quick action, too many of them will die from Covid-19.

Older prisoners tend to be in fragile health, and many lack regular access to doctors. Prisoners also don’t have the option to practice social distancing. They live in close quarters, are frequently patted down and often wait in lines. When the virus begins to spread inside prisons, their sentences could quickly turn into a death sentence. “There will be dozens if not hundreds of deaths if they are kept inside when the virus hits,” Nina Morrison, an attorney at the Innocence Project, told me.

Jose Saldana, who spent 38 years behind bars before being released in 2018, recently wrote in The Journal News, a suburban New York paper: “I’m terrified for my friends and former colleagues in this moment in which coronavirus continues to spread throughout the state.”

What can be done? A large number of aging prisoners have applied to Cuomo for clemency, many of them months ago or longer. As governor, Cuomo has the power to grant those requests and return some older prisoners to their families, where they could live under either home confinement or with other restrictions. It’s true that some of them committed violent crimes, but they have typically spent decades behind bars and no longer present a threat. They don’t deserve a death sentence.

There is also a public health case for granting clemency to some of them: Because many prisons lack good medical facilities, prisoners who get the disease will need to be transferred to hospitals outside, where they could further spread the disease.

The issue obviously extends beyond New York. Nationwide, as Weihua Li and Nicole Lewis of the Marshall Project have written, “nearly 150,000 people incarcerated in state correctional facilities were 55 or older in 2016, the most recent year for which detailed data is available.”

In recent years, more politicians have come to recognize our country’s policy of mass incarceration — and our tolerance for wrongful convictions — as an inhumane mistake. In the short term, clemency is a tool that can make a difference, especially in the midst of a pandemic. But Cuomo and other governors will need to act quickly.

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Elsewhere, government officials have already acted. As New York magazine’s James D. Walsh wrote this month, “hundreds of inmates were released from Cuyahoga County Jail in Ohio, and officials in Los Angeles and San Francisco have pledged to reduce their cities’ jail populations by releasing inmates and cutting down on arrests.”

Justin Carissimo, CBS News: “Approximately 1,700 inmates have been released from Los Angeles County jails in response to the coronavirus outbreak, the local sheriff’s office announced Tuesday, reducing the inmate population by 10%.”

One clemency applicant in New York is Arnie Raimondo, a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran serving a 50-year sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility. Raimondo has chronic arthritis, emphysema and uses a cane to walk, and his application, filed with help from the CUNY School of Law, is online.

Another is Jose Medina, a 65-year-old inmate with lung and prostate cancer who has been behind bars for 39 years. His daughter has released a video asking that she be allowed to care for him.

Ulysses Boyd, 64, has an enlarged heart and chronic arthritis and recently had pneumonia. “When I wake up in the morning, I’m in pain,” Boyd said in a video filmed before the coronavirus outbreak. “Basically, I’m just waiting to die.”

Amanda Klonsky, in The Times: “If you think a cruise ship is a dangerous place to be during a pandemic, consider America’s jails and prisons. The new coronavirus spreads at its quickest in closed environments. … As this new disease spreads, it has become equally important for all of us to ask what steps are being taken to protect the health of people in jails and prisons, and the staff who work in them.”

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