A study of 29 U.S. cities has found no correlation
between the early release of detainees from the cities’ jails due to COVID-19
fears and any increase in crime in those cities between March and May, reported The Crime Report.
“The analysis confirmed that the amount by which a
county changed their jail population wasn’t correlated with the amount of
change in crime,” said the report by the American Civil Liberties Union, “Decarceration
and Crime During Covid-19,” released Monday.
“We found no evidence of any spikes in crime in any of
the 29 locations, even when comparing monthly trends over the past two years.”
The ACLU’s Analytics team looked for data on jail
population and crime in locations with “the largest jail and overall
populations,” using reported data from those 29 localities, which included
Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
The researchers looked at “Part I” crimes only.
COVID-19 infection rates among prisoners have been 5.5
times higher than the U.S. population case rate, according
to a recent study by the Journal of the American Medical
Association.
The ACLU found that “nearly every county jail that we
examined reduced their population, if only slightly, between the end of
February and the end of April.”
Over the same period of time, researchers say that
“the reduction in jail population was functionally unrelated to crime trends.”
“In fact, in nearly every city explored, fewer crimes
occurred between March and May in 2020 compared to the same time period in
2019, regardless of the magnitude of the difference in jail population,” the
report said.
The team said its findings were in line with recent
reports that documented certain types of crime have gone down during
the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring, which many have attributed to stay-at-home
orders and decreased overall activity.
While political rhetoric may be putting the blame on
early release from jails or prisons for a reported crime increase, no
statistics have been released to support such claims.
COVID-19’s threat to the incarcerated has caused alarm
in many quarters.
In its report, the ACLU said, “Since the pandemic
began, more than 50,000 people in prison have tested positive for the
coronavirus, and over 600 have died.”
In early April, Attorney General William P. Barr
ordered the Bureau of Prisons to expand the group of federal inmates eligible
for early release and to prioritize those at three facilities in Louisiana,
Connecticut, and Ohio where known coronavirus cases had grown precipitous.
Barr wrote in a memo to Michael Carvajal, the director
of the Bureau of Prisons, that he was intensifying the push to release
prisoners to home confinement because “emergency conditions” created by the
coronavirus affected the ability of the bureau to function, according
to The New York Times.
For its report, the ACLU looked at crime data
individually for each city or county. Because each location’s crime dataset was
drawn from separate sources and contained varying categorizations of crime,
crime patterns could not be compared between cities.
The stats can be seen here.
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