The Viral Underclass by Steven W. Thrasher

Author:Steven W. Thrasher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Celadon Books

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One day in August 2020, I logged on to the New York Times’s coronavirus tracker, which, among other factors, displayed how many COVID-19 cases could be traced to institutions. Besides a pork-processing plant in South Dakota and a chicken plant in Iowa, fifteen of the seventeen institutions on that date with a thousand or more coronavirus cases traced to them were jails or prisons. Six of them were located in California, three in Florida, two each in Ohio and Arkansas, and one each in Tennessee and Illinois, including Chicago’s Cook County jail. The governors who could have reduced these incarcerated populations with pardons to stop the largest clusters of COVID-19 in the nation were Republicans and Democrats alike. The viral danger had nothing to do with whether a state was “red” or “blue.” And if one were to trace the responsibility for the deadliest institution of them all on that day—San Quentin State Prison in California, where about twenty-five hundred people had tested positive for coronavirus and twenty-five had died of it—it would lead to the door of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom.

That very same month, more than 350 fires raged out of control across the state Newsom governed. While ash fell on Oakland, nonprofit organizations and mutual aid networks struggled to get N95 masks to vulnerable people before the smoke triggered asthma attacks or other lethal breathing problems. But the masks were already in short supply due to COVID-19. The same day, Cal Fire told the press it had no way to treat all the flames burning throughout the state, because for years it had been relying upon incarcerated firefighters to smother such blazes. These workers earned as little as a dollar per hour, and their criminal records kept them from becoming firefighters once they were released. And because California’s prisons were among the most powerful COVID-19 hot spots in the nation, so many firefighters were sick or under quarantine that there weren’t enough available to fight the hundreds of fires. It was a moment in which America’s twin epidemics of incarceration and COVID-19 entered into a three-way race with the global pandemic of the climate crisis.

This was a disaster of the Democrats’ making. Governor Gavin Newsom, a darling of Gay Inc. since he’d supported same-sex marriages as mayor of San Francisco in 2004, slowly began releasing some incarcerated firefighters in the summer of 2020. But he could have done so months or years earlier. Many of them were eligible to be firefighters for the same reasons their release dates had been moved forward: their model behavior. If Newsom had released them before COVID-19 spread in prisons, when activists had first begged him to, they could have gone home to their families, where they would have been far less at risk than in prison. If he had then pardoned them, they could have been called to duty not as enslaved workers—people convicted of crimes are legally enslaved under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—but as crisis-ready firefighters.

But Democratic policy in the Golden State had long been to incarcerate people needlessly.

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