If Lamont’s ‘let them eat cake’ prevails, the future could be bleak

A few weeks ago, a reporter asked Gov. Ned Lamont about families’ pleas for him to issue a plan to release their loved ones from prisons and jails. He responded by saying they should call him – yet his phone line was shut off, instead redirecting people to 211. If Lamont doesn’t reverse his callous approach to COVID-19 in prisons and jails, “call me” may well be his “let them eat cake,” with public health consequences for all of us.

I worry about a future in which Lamont and the Department of Correction have continued their disastrous, inhumane COVID-19 approach in prisons and jails. As public health experts and others have been telling Lamont since early March, a key to addressing the pandemic in prisons and jails is for him to issue a safe plan for compassionate releases.

Yet the government has, so far, ignored these calls, and the early numbers are horrific.

Under Lamont and the DOC’s current approach, there are more COVID-19 cases among workers and incarcerated people in the Connecticut DOC than in four entire U.S. states. If the Connecticut DOC was a town, it would have the highest infection rate in the state. At least two incarcerated people have died. A new epidemiological model shows as many as 200,000 people could die nationwide from COVID-19 — double the government estimate — if the government continues to ignore incarcerated people in its public health responses.

If the state continues down this path, communities of color will feel it most. Due to long-entrenched racial bias in the criminal legal system, black and brown people are overrepresented in Connecticut jails and prisons: more than two-thirds of people incarcerated in Connecticut are black or Latinx.

There is still time for Lamont to chart a different course, to prevent additional suffering and losses of life that will result if the DOC continues down its current path. Public health experts, incarcerated people’s family members, advocates, and others have all called for him to issue a safe, thoughtful plan to de-densify Connecticut prisons and jails through releases. He must do so.

After all, a COVID-19 response that does not specifically address existing disparities in the criminal legal system, health care, the workforce, and other areas of society runs the risk of exacerbating them. Pervasive injustices that existed before the pandemic have made black, Latinx, and indigenous people among the most vulnerable and at risk during. When it comes to the question of what Connecticut’s future will look like after COVID-19, it seems the bigger question is: whose future, and which Connecticut?