The covid-19 pandemic exasperated pre-existing, deeply imbedded flaws of the U.S government, causing an over-crowded federal prison system to burst at the seams. Amidst this over-crowding, violence and infections grew exponentially at the onset of the pandemic and nationwide lockdowns. With a Bureau of Prisons (BOP) already failing on multiple fronts to safely house their inmates with staffing shortages and the in-ability to separate infected inmates from healthy ones, the potential of months-long lockdowns proved detrimental and life-threatening.
Under the leadership of the Trump Administration, Attorney General William Barr offered an innovative approach that not only remedied the over-crowding of our federal prisons but saved individual taxpayers thousands of dollars per year. The CARES Act Home Confinement rule allowed non-violent, low-risk, medically vulnerable inmates with no history of violence within prison, who had served most of their sentence, to spend the remainder of their sentence under home confinement. Since March of 2020 under the CARES Act rule, the BOP successfully placed 13,204 inmates in home confinement with nearly 3,000 inmates in the program remaining today.
Since its implementation, individual taxpayers have saved $65.33 per inmate, per day and those sent to home confinement under the program have made significant steps towards rehabilitation with a recidivism rate of only 0.2% (compared to the 43% rate of people leaving federal prison).
Now, some Members of Congress are looking to send the remaining 3,000 individuals back to prison for no other reason than a political ploy. The CARES Act home confinement rule slowed the spread of COVID-19 in our federal prisons, protected BOP staff and their families from infection and violence caused by overcrowding and saved the taxpayer a pretty penny while reuniting families without causing a threat to public safety. Sending these people back to prison now is a waste of Congressional time, taxpayer money, and earns us nothing in public safety.
Read more about the issue here: There’s no reason to send these 3,000 people in home confinement back to federal prison | The Hill
