“Whether you’re in a jail” – the place for people detained while awaiting trial or held for minor crimes – “or a prison” for those convicted and serving sentences of over a year, “you are probably in a facility that is in no way built to cope with a crisis like this”, Oliver said. For one, “it’s hard to practice social distancing when you live in what’s basically a closet with two beds and a toilet”.
There are also shortages of basic cleaning supplies such as soap, limited to no testing, no personal protective equipment (PPE) and the threat of solitary confinement as quarantine, which does not incentivize honesty.
“This has actually been a bit of a recurring theme lately,” Oliver continued, “but I’ll say it again: if it takes the destruction of property for a system to pay attention to human lives then we are in a dark fucking place.”
Oliver acknowledged that “it can be easy to ignore” the problem of coronavirus in prisons, especially for Americans with no personal tie to the incarceration system, but argued that prisoners are by no means a “separate population”, to quote a California spokesperson downplaying the outbreak at the Lompoc federal correctional complex, which had 1,000 inmates test positive in 9,000 coronavirus cases. “We might as well be handing them coronavirus gift bags as they leave work every day and head back out into the community,” Oliver said.
The virus can also spread from prison to prison as inmates are transferred, or when inmates are treated at local hospitals. And then there are jails, which have a constant churn of people – in any given week, more than 200,000 people – moving in and out.
So, Oliver asked, what can we do? “Realistically, we need to be getting as many people out of prisons and jails as possible, which is, frankly, something we should be doing anyway,” he answered.
And the first people to be released immediately, Oliver continued, are people awaiting trial in jail who could not afford cash bail, a practice Facebook Live video posted by Aaron Campbell, an inmate at a low-security federal prison in Elkton, Ohio, in which he begged for help: “They literally leaving us in here to die,” he says. Campbell has reportedly been in solitary since the video went viral as punishment for using a contraband cellphone, which led Oliver to ask: “What the fuck are we doing here? Particularly during this pandemic, but also in general. Because there’s obviously a much larger discussion to be had about how millions of people ended up incarcerated in the first place, and whether or not prisons even work – which, I would argue, they absolutely do, if your only goal is to have a lot of people in prison.
“The fact is, we should be depopulating prisons and jails as quickly as we can right now,” Oliver continued, and pushed back on the traditional axiom that “you should never do the crime if you can’t do the time”. Under America’s current criminal justice system, “you’re never just being sentenced to time”, Oliver said. “You’re being sentenced to a lifetime of social stigma, futile job interviews and roadblocks to necessities like housing. All of that is immoral enough; there is frankly no reason whatsoever we should also now be sentencing people to die from a virus. Because that’s not justice – that’s neglect.”
Incarcerated people are not, to quote the California spokesperson, a “separate population”, Oliver concluded. They are part of society, “and if this horrific year has taught us one thing, it’s that we’re all on this death cruise ship together”.