The U.S. recently marked a grim milestone in the death toll resulting from the 2½ year COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1 million Americans who’ve now died from the virus. Among wealthy industrialized nations, U.S. COVID-19 deaths per capita are the highest in the world.
The Covid virus spread easily in America’s state and federal prisons, where inmates are living in close quarters, social distancing is nearly impossible and building sanitation is poor. As of early May, more than 2,800 U.S. prisoners died of Covid, with another 300 prison staff members also succumbing to the illness.
Despite the high rate of coronavirus transmission in U.S. prisons and cumulative death toll, governors in eight northeastern states did little to use the power they have to commute sentences of prisoners whose lives were in jeopardy due to the pandemic. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Wanda Bertram, communications strategist with the Prison Policy Initiative. Here she summarizes her group’s research, which found that almost none of the eight northeastern states increased their rate of prisoner commutations during the pandemic, at a time when reducing prison populations was critical to save lives.
WANDA BERTRAM: The overwhelming conclusion we came to is that states in the Northeast – for all that they consider themselves to be better than other states or more progressive on criminal justice reform – these states have granted very, very few commutations over the last two decades.
MELINDA TUHUS: Right, and Rhode Island hadn’t done any and Vermont hadn’t done any because they don’t have that in their criminal justice vocabulary or something. Can you explain that?
WANDA BERTRAM: Yeah, we found something a little different with every single state. All the states are very interesting. Connecticut was interesting in part because we requested data from 2005 to 2021, and Connecticut only gave us data from 2016 to 2021. But what we do know is that out of 224 applications for commutation that Connecticut received in those 6 years, only 5 were granted. I know it’s not exciting to describe a chart on the radio, but if I can paint a picture…
Between 2016 and 2018 you see the number of applications for commutation go up every year, as people bank on former Gov. Malloy being more likely to grant commutations as he nears the end of his term. All in all, he grants four commutations out of the hundreds he received. And then, in 2020 and 2021, it drops to zero commutations, and moreover, Connecticut actually paused their entire commutation process – they weren’t even reviewing applications, which is funny – and disturbing, in my view – because it is a global pandemic. If you are a rational criminal justice system, at a time when people’s lives are threatened behind bars, when case rates and death rates are extremely high behind bars and when people’s prison sentences are going to become death sentences unless they are released, you want to be releasing more people, but Connecticut paused its commutation process entirely.
MELINDA TUHUS: And we should say this was under a different governor, Ned Lamont. I guess one question I had, do you know anything about the people who were filing these petitions for clemency, what they were incarcerated for?
WANDA BERTRAM: We don’t know that. That’s very hard data to get. What we do know is that people only apply for commutation if they think they can get it; it’s very hard to apply for commutation. So, the people who are applying are people who think, I actually have a shot at this. They may be incarcerated for a very low-level offense. They may be serving a sentence that nowadays you would never be sentenced to that much time for whatever they were convicted of. They may have a very solid case that they were wrongly convicted. They may be really old or really sick, and applying for commutation just based on the fact that being in prison is going to kill them, and that was not the intention or the spirit behind the sentence that they received. It could be all sorts of reasons, and we don’t have data on these individuals, but we do know that people only apply for commutation when the think they have a shot.
MELINDA TUHUS: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the other states.
WANDA BERTRAM: Absolutely. Just a couple highlights from the other states. Vermont does not seem to have a process for commutation at all. But they got back to us and said something very interesting. They said it’s in the spirit of our state Constitution for the governor to be able to commute sentences. But there’s no process, so as a result, no one has applied. So no one has been granted a commutation in Vermont for the last two decades.
Rhode Island has granted only one commutation since the 1950s, and actually no, it was not a commutation at all, it was a pardon for a man who was already dead.
Massachusetts has not granted a single commutation in the past two decades.
New Hampshire — only 15 commutations requested have actually been received, and only one granted.
In New York, where I live, it looks a little bit better at first if you just glance at the data, because you’ve got way more commutations in absolute terms, but when you consider the fact that 15,000 applications have been processed in the past two decades in New York, it comes out to a grant rate of less than .3 percent.
So none of the states we studied did very well, but what I think is so disappointing and so deeply disturbing about these states is that most of them granted very few commutations, if any at all, during the Covid 19 pandemic, when so many lives behind bars were being lost, so many people were in danger, and there was such a compelling case for releasing more people, even people that in normal years might have a very good case to make to get out.
MELINDA TUHUS: What do you hope will happen from shining a light on this particular issue?
WANDA BERTRAM: Well, I hope it causes people, especially people in charge of making policy around criminal justice in these states, think about why they are not using this tool, which is such a long-standing and effective and important tool for criminal justice. I hope it changes some people’s minds, because there’s been an attitude both at the state level and the federal level for the last few decades that says once a judge makes a decision, once a judge sentences someone to prison, there’s no reason to revisit that. But that’s not true.
For more information, visit the Prison Policy Initiative at prisonpolicy.org.
