Inside the Prison Pandemic

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Three months ago, Kai Wright joined The New Yorker Radio Hour's David Remnick, for a special episode about the effects of mass incarceration and the movement to end it. And now, as the coronavirus pandemic puts inmates in acute and disproportionate danger, that effort gains new traction. Wright and Remnick reconvene to examine the COVID-19 crisis in prison and its political effects. Kai Wright interviews Udi Ofer, the head of the ACLU’s justice division, who has been leading the organization’s effort to get people out of unsafe environments in jails and prisons. Ofer notes that “the communities that the C.D.C. has told us are most vulnerable to COVID-19 are exactly the communities that are housed in our nation’s jails and prisons,” including a disproportionately older population among inmates. And David Remnick speaks with Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, who has signed an executive order to release certain at-risk inmates from states prisons — the sort of measure that would once have been deeply unpopular and risky.

Transcript

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0:00.0	As I set down to record this episode, I took a look at this grim Excel file I've got open on my laptop.
0:07.0	It's sort of an open source data set that the ACLU has been compiling.
0:11.0	A list of people who have died from COVID-19 inside our nation's jails and prisons.
0:17.0	Right now, there are 241 entries, overwhelmingly inmates, but also staff.
0:23.0	This is surely an undercount, and it will surely grow.
0:27.0	So in this episode, we begin a partnership
0:30.0	with the New Yorker Radio Hour in which we're going to follow the developing crisis inside our prisons and jails.
0:35.0	Will it change anything about mass incarceration?
0:39.0	And if it doesn't, will that political reality undermine the larger public health effort to control this virus?
0:46.0	The ACLU published a study that argues the national death toll from COVID-19 may increase by 100,000 souls because of the failure to get people out of
0:57.1	jails quickly enough.
0:59.1	People who are still our family members, our neighbors, our lovers. Their health. our
1:03.4	our lovers. Their health ultimately impacts us all.
1:07.4	I'm Kywright and this is the United States of anxiety,
1:10.8	a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future. As part of our partnership with the New Yorker Radio Hour, I interviewed
1:35.2	Udi Over at the ACLU. He's leading the organization's effort to get people out
1:39.9	of these unsafe environments in jails and prisons.
1:43.4	And he's been going county by county, state by state,
1:46.0	asking elected officials to, one, stop arresting people,
1:49.7	and two, to let the most vulnerable people out immediately.
1:54.6	Our conversation is also part of this week's full episode
1:57.6	of the New Yorker radio hour,
	...

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