Keeping Released Prisoners Safe and Sane

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Starting this spring, many states began releasing some inmates from prisons and jails to try to reduce the spread of COVID-19. But a huge number of incarcerated people are mentally ill or addicted to drugs, or sometimes both. When those people are released, they may lose their only consistent access to treatment. Marianne McCune, a reporter for WNYC, spent weeks following a psychiatrist and a social worker as they tried to locate and then help some recently released patients at a time of uncertainty and chaos. This is a collaboration between The New Yorker Radio Hour and WNYC’s “The United States of Anxiety.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This year we've been talking on the program about mass incarceration.
0:18.1	The fact that the United States imprisons its people at a rate unparalleled in the
0:23.0	world. And when the coronavirus pandemic hit, we looked at a push by activists and prison officials
0:28.9	to release some inmates as quickly as possible. In March, to take one example, the county jail in
0:34.3	Cleveland reduced its population by almost half.
0:44.4	900 inmates came out with unprecedented speed, and one of them was a 36-year-old named Germain.
0:50.6	They was trying to stop it from spreading, so they were letting people out.
0:53.2	That's how I got out.
0:59.3	Like so many incarcerated people, Germaine suffers from mental illness and he's addicted to drugs. That's true of anywhere from 20% to more than half of incarcerated people,
1:04.5	depending on where you are and how you calculate it. In some counties, prisons are the largest
1:09.9	providers of mental health care. And when
1:12.5	Germain was released, the first thing he did was to vanish.
1:17.0	Nowhere to go, so it was just messed up, for real. I mean, it just was messed up.
1:24.6	As part of our collaboration with WNYC's United States of Anxiety, reporter Marianne McKeown spent weeks following a psychiatrist and a social worker who were trying to find Germain and others like him during a time of chaos. Here's Marianne McKeown.
1:39.3	A lot of us have someone in the family or someone close who is addicted to drugs or has some kind of mental illness.
1:48.4	Manic episodes or paranoia.
1:51.0	They can't keep out of trouble and we can't figure out how to take care of them.
1:55.7	Those are the kind of people who end up in Dr. Testa's office.
1:58.6	Hi, Mary Ann, it's Meg Testa, psychiatrist from Cleveland.
2:02.1	Since I can't go see her myself, I'm at the agency, I'm outside. Dr. Testa has been recording
2:07.1	dispatches from her office, and it's down to every little detail. I'll be using this
	...

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