Thursday, January 23, 2025, 5:50PM |  29°
MENU
Advertisement
1
MORE

Treat prisoners with dignity

Getty Images/iStockphoto

Treat prisoners with dignity

States have begun releasing low-level offenders in an effort to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading. These moves have won both sympathy and opposition. But it is important to see how we got here.

We know jails and prisons are filthy, unsanitary places. These terrible conditions are usually tolerated. People who are in prison have done something bad. If incarceration carries with it the risk of illness, the reasoning goes, they shouldn’t have broken the law in the first place.

But the pandemic is revealing the problems with this argument. COVID-19 doesn’t stop at the prison gates. Prisoners aren’t the only people in prison. Guards and other staff work in prisons. At the end of the day, they go home to their families. They could spread the virus.

Advertisement

And most people in prisons and jails will be released. Very few are in prison for life. They too will go home. COVID-19, if they have it, will go home with them.

Now states are releasing prisoners to prevent a massive COVID-19 outbreak. Such an outbreak would tax already scarce health care resources and put those on the “outside” also at risk. We would have been in a better position to prevent an outbreak if we had some minimum standards of hygiene in our prisons and jails.

If we don’t buy that we owe prisoners these minimum standards as a matter of human decency and human dignity, we now have a new argument for those standards: our own self-interest.

CHAD FLANDERS
St. Louis, Mo.
The writer teaches criminal law and criminal procedure at Saint Louis University School of Law.

Advertisement

First Published: April 8, 2020, 4:00 a.m.

RELATED
SHOW COMMENTS (0)  
Join the Conversation
Commenting policy | How to Report Abuse
If you would like your comment to be considered for a published letter to the editor, please send it to letters@post-gazette.com. Letters must be under 250 words and may be edited for length and clarity.
Partners
Advertisement
Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes, right, plays a “Bucco Trivia”game — inspired by the old $50,000 Pyramid game show from the 70s and 80s — with Pirates fan Owen Howe of Squirrel Hill at PiratesFest at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center Downtown Sunday Jan. 19, 2025. The three-day festival, which wrapped Sunday, features player autograph signings, Q&As, game-show-style events with players and fans and other family friendly activities to gear up for baseball season.
1
sports
Joe Starkey: Pittsburgh desperately needs the Pirates right now. Is anybody home?
Steelers safety Minkah Fitzpatrick (39) and linebacker T.J. Watt (90) stand on the sidelines during an NFL football game against the Cleveland Browns in Pittsburgh, Monday, Sept. 18, 2023.
2
sports
Brian Batko's Steelers mailbag: Is Minkah Fitzpatrick's decline on the player or the coaching?
U.S. Steel's Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock. Workers penned an open letter this week making it clear that they want the steelmaker to be sold to Nippon Steel, not domestic rival Cleveland-Cliffs.
3
business
Steelworkers make fresh plea to Trump to save U.S. Steel-Nippon deal
Signage is pictured at Penn State University Fayette campus on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, in Uniontown.
4
news
Penn State’s current campus ecosystem is ‘not sustainable,’ commonwealth campus chancellor says
Michael Lyons, who was appointed president Downtown-based PNC in February, 2024, is leaving to become president and CEO-elect at Fiserv, a global provider of payments and financial services technology.
5
business
PNC president to leave after less than a year on the job
 (Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Getty Images/iStockphoto
Advertisement
LATEST opinion
Advertisement
TOP
Email a Story