Prince : Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York (9781682192542) by Barkan Ross

Author:Barkan, Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: POL000000
ISBN: 9781682192542
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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State prisons were rife with coronavirus. Releasing inmates, who were crowded into decrepit and unsanitary cell blocks, was the quickest and most obvious way to cut down on the spread of the virus.

Cuomo’s reputation as a liberal in the national media did not correlate, in any serious way, to his instincts on criminal justice. From the time he took office in 2011 to the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020, Cuomo had granted clemency to just 24 prisoners. In a far shorter span of time, the otherwise revanchist Donald Trump granted clemency to 94 people charged with federal crimes.

Cuomo lagged behind his predecessors too. His father, who completed three full terms, issued 37 commutations. Hugh Carey, another influential Democratic governor, granted 155 commutations.96 Remarkably, Cuomo had gone his entire first term without commuting the sentence of a single person, and only relented under pressure from civil rights activists.97

On one hand, Cuomo would luck out: coronavirus, so widespread in New York, never ravaged prisons in his own state the way it did elsewhere. Even into February 2021, New York had a total of 1,207 cases per 10,000 inmates, a rate that placed it well behind large states like California, Texas, and Florida, which had higher rates in their prisons.98 (California, for example, had surpassed 4,000.)

Over the course of the year, Cuomo would release more than 3,500 inmates, largely due to the pandemic. But criteria had been limited to those who had committed nonviolent offenses, shrinking the pool of possible releases and overlooking many elderly inmates who had been locked behind bars for decades. Of the 43,000 locked up in New York, at least 9,500 were over the age of 50.

“In all these cases, the governor has the absolute ability to grant clemencies, to grant compassionate release, to allow people to go home,” said Katie Schaffer, the director of organizing and advocacy at the Center for Community Alternatives, a longtime reform organization. “That is entirely within his power and his discretion. He has taken wholly insufficient action.”

That insufficiency extended into the new year. In 2021, a new coronavirus outbreak threatened to overrun state prisons. Hundreds of prisoners tested positive in January. Though the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encouraged prison officials to “vaccinate staff and incarcerated/detained persons of correctional or detention facilities at the same time because of their shared increased risk of disease,” the inmate population was not among those Cuomo had listed as eligible to receive a vaccine. The Legal Aid Society called Cuomo’s policy “cruel and irresponsible.”

Cuomo faced renewed criticism from advocates and at least one bold-faced name: Chelsea Clinton. “We’ve had ~2,000 new #covid19 cases in New York State prisons in the last 6 weeks alone. Please @NYGovCuomo allow and prioritize #covid19 vaccinations of incarcerated people in our state,” Clinton tweeted on January 13.99

Despite outbreak after outbreak, little changed around the country to mitigate the threat of the virus spreading throughout prisons. Inmates remained jammed together, sharing bathrooms, dining tables, and sleeping quarters. Opportunities to safely isolate from someone infected with the virus were virtually nonexistent.

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