Keeping Released Prisoners Safe and Sane
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
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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.”
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| 1:12.2 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, WNYC's Marianne McCune reports on the former |
| 1:20.7 | inmates of Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland. In March, the jail reduced its population |
| 1:26.5 | by almost half. The rapid decarceration, though, |
| 1:30.0 | left many of the formerly incarcerated people without the mental health care on which they relied. |
| 1:42.9 | This year, we've been talking on the program about mass incarceration, the fact that the United States imprisons its people at a rate unparalleled in the world. |
| 1:52.9 | And when the coronavirus pandemic hit, we looked at a push by activists and prison officials to release some inmates as quickly as possible. |
| 2:02.3 | In March, to take one example, |
| 2:08.5 | the county jail in Cleveland reduced its population by almost half. 900 inmates came out with unprecedented speed, and one of them was a 36-year-old named Germain. They was trying to stop it |
| 2:16.3 | from spreading, so they were letting people out. |
| 2:20.4 | That's how I got out. |
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