COVID-19 and prisoners

One of the recent articles in the Spokesman discussed the complications associated with taking care of our prisoners and the fear of spreading the coronavirus. Unfortunately, some of the suggested solutions to this epidemic and our prison system include outlandish ideas such as releasing prisoners and merely taking less stringent action on people involved with certain crimes. This is not solely a Spokane County idea, however, we can see the same situation occurring in Los Angeles, for example, where the Sheriff’s Office has already began to release prisoners, and arrests have gone from 300 a day to roughly 60.

This makes us wonder, is it safer to release these people back to the general public than to have them potentially get coronavirus whilst in the prison system? What we need to do being the productive members of society is to deny these criminals the ability to be released or written off, just because of an outbreak such as COVID-19.

If our justice system continues to do nothing to solve the issues related to our prisoners, then it is up to the citizens to take care of ourselves when/if things get really messy.

Austin C. Pfennig

Cheney