"Let Our People Go" Michelle Alexander

"The crisis of mass incarceration is not simply
a legal or political problem to be solved, but a
profound spiritual and moral crisis as well,"
Michelle Alexander

I have been wondering what to say about
the horror of Covid-19 behind bars. Much
has already been written about the scale
of the crisis, the moral argument for
freeing people from prisons and jails,
and the utter inadequacy of the response
in many states, including New York.

Activists, community leaders, medical
experts and family members of people
who are incarcerated have been raising
their voices to little avail. In recent weeks,
I sensed something was missing from the
public debate but struggled to name it.

Then I read a letter from a man in Marion
Correctional Institution in Ohio. Suddenly
the answer was obvious.

In Ohio, my home state, more than 80 percent
of the people caged at Marion have been infected
with the coronavirus because of the state’s l
ackluster response. Thirteen have died. Last
month, the Ohio Prisoners Justice League and
Ohio Organizing Collaborative demanded that
Gov. Mike DeWine release 20,000 prisoners,
about 40 percent of those in state custody, by
the end of May. That number would encompass
those whose sentences are nearly complete,
those imprisoned for “nonviolent” offenses,
elderly people and those with health problems
that render them especially vulnerable to infection

In response to coronavirus concerns, Governor
DeWine commuted seven sentences and created
an opaque process through which the prison
population may have been trimmed by roughly
1,300. The bulk of the reduction has been accomplished
through diversions to alternative programs that
lowered new prison admissions rather than
through releases. About 200 people have been
recommended for early release.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people crammed
in the state’s prisons fear for their lives. This crisis
could have been averted if the governor had been
willing to free people en masse when the risk
to the caged population became 

While the coalition’s demand to release 20,000
people might strike some as unreasonable, Gary
Daniels, the chief lobbyist at the A.C.L.U. of Ohio
insists that figure should actually be viewed as a
floor considering the scale of the crisis.

“The system is already 10,000 above capacity,”
he told me. “Roughly 22 percent of people are
there for technical violations of their post-release
conditions. And the No. 1 reason people end up in
prison is for drug offenses. Releasing 20,000 is the
baseline.”

Mr. Daniels is right. Our nation’s prison population
has quintupled over the last few decades; we lock up
and lock out more people than any other country on
earth — overwhelmingly poor people and people of
color. Viewed in this light, cutting the prison population
by less than half in order to prevent unnecessary suffering
and death is hardly an unreasonable demand.

As I see it, people who have been convicted of violent
crimes — not just nonviolent ones — should be
considered for possible release. Why should we
exclude from consideration someone convicted of
armed robbery at 18, who’s still locked up at age 45,
simply because he has two more years left on his sentence?
Our governments have been willing to shut down our entire
economy, sparing only those sectors deemed “essential.”
Shouldn’t we also consider whether it is truly “essential”
for millions of people to be caged?

Saying that it has been difficult to persuade policymakers
to listen to the voices of those most affected would be a
gross understatement. Given the restrictions on public
gatherings, activists have had to become remarkably creative.

In April, people from all over Ohio held a protest in
Columbus to draw attention to the coronavirus crisis
behind bars. More than 100 cars, filled with friends,
loved ones and allies of those locked in cages circled
the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
and waved signs reading “Prisoners’ Lives Matter.”

The car caravan then proceeded to the Statehouse,
where about 50 people staged a “socially distant die-out.”
People lay in rows, six feet apart, as though they were
about to be buried. Supporters chanted the slogan
“20K by May,” and one family in attendance had
children carrying signs pleading for their father’s life.

In the days after the protest, I wondered what could
be said that might make a difference. Facts, data,
medical evidence and pleas from family members
have not been enough to stir a meaningful response.
I asked myself and others: What has not yet been said?
What do people need to hear?

And then I read the letter.It was shared with me, with
the writer’s permission, by one of my colleagues.
To protect this man from possible retaliation from
administrators and guards, I cannot tell you his
name or the name of the addressee. I cannot
tell you whether he was convicted of a minor
crime or a serious one. Those details do not
matter in any event.

What you need to know is that he, like many other
people imprisoned today, is demonstrating a
higher level of moral clarity and compassion
in this crisis than many of us, especially elected
officials who would rather let people die in cages t
han let them go months or years ahead of schedule

I recognize that prison officials may dispute some of
claims in this letter. Last month, a spokesperson
for the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
said “There is no shortage of cleaning supplies, and
inmates have access to soap and other hygiene products,
hand sanitizer and masks.” However, the conditions
described here have been echoed by others, and the
author makes a larger point that deserves to be heard.
This is what he wrote, abbreviated and lightly edited
for clarity:

I walked to the back of the dorm today to check on my
friend. He is confined to his bed by Covid-19. Weakness,
fatigue, intense vertigo and difficulty breathing allow
him to leave his bed area only to defecate (he has to
urinate in a drinking jug) or an occasional shower.

It has been two weeks now. I have somehow
become his nurse. I cook and help with laundry,
homework and whatever else he needs.

He was asleep. I was relieved. I finally had a
moment of rest. These last two corona-months
been crazy. I have been sick, helping the sick, or both.

Along my way to the day room, I met a nurse
who’d just finished passing out daily medications. I
asked her if we’d be retested for the virus. A
fter testing positive with over 2,000 other men,
and with the symptoms seeming to linger and e
ven reoccur, I am eager to be retested. It has
been over 14 days since the tests. We should
be negative by now. I am concerned that we
are reinfecting each other.

The middle-aged nurse, with the sweetest
demeanor, gave me her undivided attention
and began to speak comfortingly to me.
This is a rarity in prison; nurses are usually
curt and distracted. So I tuned in.

She assured me that we would be retested
at some point. I should be patient. The nursing
staff really cares about us, she said, even those
who act a “little snobby.” I shouldn’t listen to
what was being said in the hallways; they’re
raking good care of us. Everyone who needs
serious medical attention is being sent out.

The proof of their commitment to us is the
fact that they are here. They could have quit
like other nurses. I should look at the bright side.
Even with all the cases, only a few have had
to be sent to outside hospitals.

As she spoke, I thought of my friend I was trying
to nurse back to health. She knew nothing of this
man because, while his case is documented, no
one has come to examine him. A cursory glance
will show anyone how serious his condition is.
Neither he nor I have notified the staff because
we know from other friends’ experiences that he
will be thrown into a cell and left to his own devices.
We believe that we — unqualified inmates — can do better.

I also thought of another friend who, only now after
two weeks, is beginning to walk on his own again.
The virus hit him hard. At one point he had such
difficulty breathing that we thought for certain
he would die. We frantically scrambled around
trying all sorts of remedies, while insisting that
the guards alert the medical staff. The nurses
refused to come.

For hours, we fought for his life. The only thing
that helped was boiling water and Vicks 44
in a crock pot and allowing him to inhale the
steam. In the meantime, we contacted his
family and told them to contact the administration
incessantly. After about 3 ½ hours, the nurse
arrived. She took him to the medical area.

Less than an hour later, we watched him
be carried back into the building by two officers.
He still wasn’t walking on his own. His friends —
his fellow prisoners — have taken it upon
themselves to nurse him back to health ever since.

As I pictured these things, she continued to explain
why we should be grateful that we are receiving
any care at all. She encouraged me to tell the men
around me to be grateful in spite of the two-month
delay in the issuing of commissary items. I wondered
how grateful she would be without toothpaste and
soap, or how her mood would change if the state s
shortened food rations and wouldn’t allow her to buy a few snacks.

She said the officers were doing their best and
that they didn’t have to be here. They were working
only because they care. She said they were
volunteering to do things. She recounted how s
ad it was that one officer almost “threw in the
towel” because of all of the ungratefulness.

I struggled to understand what she meant by
“volunteer.” The officers are not only paid but
paid extra for their efforts. I suspect that if the
pay were to stop, they would stop. She waxed
passionate when she talked about how some
officers had to handle garbage (a job normally
reserved for inmates). That sight affected her
deeply. She was impressed by people who would
willingly handle garbage for a short period of t
ime for $22 an hour but considered it normal f
or prisoners to do it every day for $22 a month.

The conversation saddened me because the nurse
meant well. She was sincere. She was one of the
good ones. She reminded me of one of the “moderates”
Dr. King talked about in his “Letter From a
Birmingham Jail.” If the good people feel this way, t
hen we are really in trouble. Despite all her passion,
her main agenda was not to hear my needs or concerns
or to help address them; it was to provoke passivity,
assuage anger, and prevent revolt. She was alright
if my problems didn’t go away as long as I didn’t make
too much of a fuss about it. She is convinced that
prisoners should be grateful for deficient medical
care and two-month lapses between access to vital
necessities, hygiene products and sanitation services.
Those are things that we don’t deserve and shouldn’t
expect or feel entitled to. I’m certain she doesn’t feel this
way about everyone. She wouldn’t see her daughter
locked in a room with Covid-19 and no medical care
and say, “Well, you know, you lucked out, honey.”

She just feels this way about prisoners. The social
category of prisoner qualifies one as undeserving
of a decent civilized life. Herein lies the cause of
the profound spread of the virus throughout the i
nstitution: the collective sense of the
undeservingness of prisoners. A vaccination
would be nice. Proper P.P.E. would help. But the real
cure for our woes is an affirmation of the inalienable
entitlement to life for people in prisons and jails.

After reading this letter, I took a deep breath.
I had to admit to myself that there was a time
when I was that nurse. I was a well-intentioned,
sincere person who viewed myself as working for
social justice yet unconsciously believed that the
lives of some people matter a bit less.

Perhaps you are that nurse today. If you’re completely
honest with yourself, do you believe that “we,” the
so-called innocent, are more valuable than “them,”
the “criminals”? Do you believe the lives of those
locked up or locked out matter a bit less and they
should be grateful for any care or concern at all?

We now face a choice regarding what kind of
country we want to be in the months and years to come.
Rather than imagining that the lives of those locked in
cages are less valuable than our own, perhaps we ought
to get down on our knees and say, “There but for the
grace of God go I.” I do not even consider myself a
Christian and yet those are the only words that
spring to mind when I think of all those at
Marion Correctional, including our letter writer, a
s well as all those in prisons and jails nationwide,
whose lives have been discarded in the era of mass incarceration.

It may be tempting to believe, if you’ve never been locked up,
that you could never find yourself in prison. Yet most of us,
at some point in our lives, have committed crimes that could
result in prison time, such as illegal drug possession or theft.
Some of us, due to poverty, trauma, oppression or mental
health challenges, have gone through periods in which we
made grave mistakes or caused serious harm to others.

Equally important is the fact that who’s behind bars today
has more to do with our collective choices than individual
ones. Our nation has spent trillions on endless war and
systems of mass incarceration and mass deportation;
yet basic human rights such as a living wage, health
care, housing and quality education are routinely
denied on the grounds that we — the richest
country in the world — cannot afford to provide
to all of our people what citizens of many other
nations are granted as a matter of right. If we had
invested heavily in the communities that need it
most, rather than pouring our resources into
policing, surveillance, prisons and jails, most
of the people who are behind bars today would
not need to be freed by a group of protesters
staging a “die-out” on the Statehouse grounds.

It is precisely because of our collective choices
that so many of us have friends and family
who are incarcerated during this crisis.
One in 4 women have a loved one behind bars;
the figure is nearly 1 in 2 for black women.
As the coronavirus sweeps through prisons and jails,
millions of people are living in terror that their loved
ones will not escape their cages alive.

More than 95 percent of people in prison will come
home one day, if they live that long. The issue is not
whether they should come home but when.
According to a recent study by the A.C.L.U.,
failure to aggressively decarcerate could add
100,000 fatalities to the overall U.S. death count
─ among people both in and outside of jail.

Fortunately, California has released nearly 10,000 people
from prisons and jails and hopefully will release many more.
But most states are responding like Ohio, even though national
polling indicates that 66 percent of likely voters support
measures to reduce prison overcrowding in response
to the coronavirus, including a clear majority who support
various forms of decarceration.

If we, as communities and as a nation, fail to free people
in this pandemic because we’d rather risk their lives than
allow them to come home earlier than our criminal
injustice system originally planned, we should
consider ourselves guilty of utter disregard for human life.

Let our people go.

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and advocate,
legal scholar and author of “The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

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