Inmates battle mixed messages on home confinement

WASHINGTON — She never thought her husband’s punishment for selling drugs would be a death sentence. But as the new coronavirus rips through the U.S. prison system and into the facility where he is serving eight years, she fears it could be.

The 24-year-old inmate suffers from severe asthma at the medium-security South Carolina prison. He has tried and failed to get released to home confinement, while his wife on the outside watches high-profile inmates go free.

“He is at a way higher risk and it’s not fair,” said the woman, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because she feared her husband would suffer retaliation. “I don’t want to lose my husband for something he did years ago, to an illness he can’t help.”

The Bureau of Prisons has given contradictory and confusing guidance how it is deciding who is released to home confinement in an effort to combat the virus, changing requirements, setting up inmates for release and backing off and refusing to explain how it decides who gets out and when.

And it’s unclear who is getting released, aside from high-profile inmates like Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti. More than 1,500 inmates have have been placed on home confinement so far, but prisons officials will not give out any demographic information.

Advocates fear the same inequalities at play in the criminal justice system are also a factor now. Most white-collar defendants get lighter sentences in less-secure facilities, making them better eligible for release in the pandemic.

“These releases of the wealthy, of the white, are just a continuation of an institutional injustice that really begins more or less at the time of arrest,” said Ron Kuby, a longtime New York criminal defense attorney who represented one of the men wrongly convicted in the Central Park jogger case.

More than 1,100 inmates out of about 153,000 incarcerated in federal prisons nationwide have tested positive for COVID-19, though it’s not clear how many total inmates have been tested. As of Monday, 28 inmates had died.