CALIFORNIA – As COVID-19 cases continue to rise in California’s prison system, a recent poll from The Justice Collaborative and Data for Progress indicates state voters’ support for releasing more incarcerated individuals from prison.
Currently, California has over 23,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), “as of April 11th, 2020, there have are 42 incarcerated persons” and 77 CDCR/CCHCS employees who have tested positive for the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have continued to recommend putting “distance between yourself and other people,” reminding that “some people without symptoms may be able to spread the virus. Due to the structure of jail and prison facilities, where individuals are often “housed in cramped, unhygienic conditions” and cannot carry out CDC recommendations to protect their health, many people around the world continue to call for the release of incarcerated individuals. According to The Justice Collaborative and Data for Progress, California is no different.
The Justice Collaborative, a criminal justice advocacy organization, and Data for Progress, a think tank focused on “supporting progressive activists and causes,” “conducted a survey of 1511 likely California voters” to gauge their support of “releasing people from California jails and prisons in response to the coronavirus threat.”
The poll “found broad bipartisan support”, with “58% of Californians, including a majority of Republicans, support releasing anyone charged with an offense that does not involve a serious physical safety risk to the community.”
Majority support was found for “releasing elderly incarcerated people” and those with certain medical conditions, a group that the CDC has declared to be “at higher risk of severe illness” presented by COVID-19.
“Older people are also the most expensive to incarcerate, and put a strain on the limited medical resources that will be required to treat the growing number of people with COVID-19 infections,” stated Lara Bazelon and Kyle C. Barry – the writers of the Justice Collaborative Institute polling memo. They argued that “releasing this vulnerable group will not pose a risk to public safety, but leaving them confined presents the risk of accelerating the spread of disease.
According to a press release from The Justice Collaborative, the poll also discovered that a majority of California voters supported “releasing individuals who have fewer than 12 months remaining 
on their sentences.”
Fifty-one percent of voters were found to be in favor of “following practices adopted in other countries, and releasing incarcerated people as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus and to ensure compliance with public health guidance.”
“Hundreds of people each day go to work at a California prison and engage with thousands of people in closed, overcrowded, unsanitary environment, and at the end of their shifts, these hundreds of people exit from the prison and return to their homes, their families and their communities,” stated the polling memo, commenting on the health threat overcrowded California prisons can cause in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the polling memo, “experts have said that inside [jails and prisons] the coronavirus will spread like ‘wildfire.’”
“With people sleeping in bunk beds and sometimes just five toilets for 100 people, social distancing is impossible,” Bazelon and Barry stated, calling for Governor Newsom to release people from prison.
On March 24, 2020, Governor Newsom issued an executive order, declaring that “no new commitments to state prisons or juvenile facilities will be accepted for the next 30 days.” The order also “directs videoconferencing of all scheduled parole suitability hearings” to begin “no later than April 13th.”
According to the CDCR, the California Board of Parole Hearings (BPH) “has held 116 parole sustainability hearings by video and telephone conferences” from the beginning of April, in accordance with Governor Newsom’s March 24 Executive Order.
The Justice Collaborative does not believe Newson’s actions toward relieving the threat of COVID-19 in California prisons to be sufficient enough. The poll memo argued that “it would take releasing tens of thousands more just to get under 100% capacity, and still more to ensure the space that public health guidance requires.”
When discussing COVID-19 outbreaks in jails and prisons, The Justice Collaborative stated that “releasing people and lowering prison populations is the obvious, and necessary, solution. But California and Governor Newsom have fallen dangerously behind.”
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