Wake Correctional Center, which is about 4 miles from NC State’s campus, recently revealed that about 35% of their inmates have tested positive for COVID-19. This was after a nationwide release of prisoners to avoid such an issue, in which North Carolina freed about 5,000 prisoners, while the country as a whole freed 170,000 of its about 2 million inmates. According to The News & Observer, of the nearly 30,000 inmates in North Carolina still serving their sentence, less than 500 are doing their time at home or in transitional housing.
Currently, all of North Carolina’s prisons combined are supposed to hold about 32,000 prisoners at “standard operating capacity.” However, the North Carolina prison system has had more than that since 2006. During this time, the system has been under “expanded operating capacity,” capable of holding 37,330 prisoners. Had it not been for the pandemic, North Carolina would have been on track to have too many prisoners for even that standard by 2027.
Whitley Carpenter, an attorney and advocate for prison reform at Forward Justice, described talking “to so many [prisoners] that say they can lie in their bed, and reach out their hand and touch the person in the bed beside them.” Obviously this is not acceptable for social distancing; North Carolina needs to lose more of its inmate population, along with enacting strict safety guidelines to ensure the health of its prisoners.
The first of those things is very doable; North Carolina, and the United States in general, incarcerates more people than comparable countries while seeing no decrease in crime or recidivism.
The United States has the most prisoners of any country on Earth per capita. In North Carolina, the prison population has been rising at a rate above the national average. Between 2000 and 2019, the total U.S. prison population increased by about 3%, in that same period, our state prison population rose by 22%.
During this pandemic, we should at least temporarily adopt aspects of the systems overseas. A 2011 report from the Justice Policy Institute found that the United States was far more likely to punish crimes by incarceration, sentencing about 70% of offenders to imprisonment, while the likes of England and Wales, Germany, etc. used imprisonment less than 10% of the time. These countries were more likely to use fines, with modifications to the manner in which the fine is paid, depending on income level.
Using such countries as a reference, I think a better developed and expanded fine system can be used to empty out prisons providing more space for social distancing while maintaining society’s safety. However, recognizing that this a more long term goal and requires through planning, a more temporary solution could be to release certain prisoners on parole to help maintain safety levels during this pandemic.
This will not be enough to mitigate this issue, however. We also need to make prisoners one of the first groups of people to receive the vaccine. Be it from the perspective of the state government or the federal government, this is also doable.
From Feb. 1 to Feb. 8, about 10 million vaccinations were administered in the United States, less than 200,000 of those being North Carolinians. Considering the 2 million prisoners nationwide, or the 30,000 prisoners statewide, the full or majority vaccination of our prisons is a reasonable goal in the near future. If this strategy were to be implemented alongside the aforementioned mass release program, then making prisons virus-free is even more achievable.
Not every prisoner has been given a death sentence. If we saw that 35% of the general populace was being allowed to contract a virus as severe or deadly as COVID-19, we would demand our government to change, and we should have the same response for these inmates. By following what European criminal justice systems have been doing for years and by prioritizing the vaccination of this relatively small group of people, we can significantly minimize the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in our prison system.
