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Carol Rose, executive director of the Massachusetts ACLU, said, “Prisons and prisons are just petri dishes for the coronavirus.” She added: “We need to reduce the levels of incarceration and release those who do not pose a danger to society, so that more people are alive to receive the vaccine when it becomes available.”
But in Massachusetts, as in other parts of the country, efforts to reduce the number of people behind bars – largely by freeing those held in remand – have slowed. And the numbers have skyrocketed: as of December 7, 4,306 inmates were in pre-trial detention in Massachusetts, surpassing 4,194 inmates at the start of April.
Although the state has a process to grant medical parole, many inmates who suffer from chronic illnesses that would put them at risk for severe Covid-19 are not eligible.
“You must be terminally ill, within 18 months of death, or be permanently incapacitated,” said Elizabeth Matos, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, an organization that defends the rights of prisoners and advocates the least restrictive imprisonment.
The organization represents a 78-year-old inmate who was denied medical parole last spring, despite suffering from heart disease and chronic lung disease and being dependent on a additional oxygen supply.
There is no guarantee that offering the vaccine to prisoners will end the epidemic behind the walls, several experts noted.
It will be difficult to simply pass the doses to the prisoners. Prisons do not have the ultra-cold refrigerators needed to store Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and are often located in remote areas. And tracking patients to make sure they receive both doses will also be difficult – inmates enter and leave prisons on bicycles and prisoners are frequently transferred.
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