A great disservice to readers and those on the front lines of this pandemic was done by an op-ed advocating the mass release of detainees that appeared in the Chicago Tribune (“To slow the spread of COVID-19, Chicago must decarcerate,” Sept. 20).
The COVID-19 pandemic presented a nightmare scenario for the Cook County Jail: a highly contagious, deadly new disease in a confined setting where you are legally forced to house thousands of people.
Yet, thousands of security and medical professionals at the jail rose to the challenge and worked selflessly to exceed even the strongest public health recommendations — an overwhelming effort to protect one another and those incarcerated, often at great personal risk.
Those efforts saved lives and are proving successful today, but that doesn’t matter to the authors.
First, the authors gloss over the complexities of criminal justice and blindly insist prisons and jails should — even could — simply be emptied. They didn’t mention that 80% of those in the jail pretrial are facing violent charges, including gun possession, and a judge determined they were at risk of flight or committing a new crime. Another 4% are serving a sentence or awaiting transfer to another correctional facility. Moreover, while as Cook County sheriff I have no control about who is ordered into custody, efforts by judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys led the jail population to historic lows during the height of the pandemic.
Critically, the authors completely ignore our successful public health efforts while pointing to squishy math to claim the jail helped spur community COVID-19 spread. This may serve their advocacy goals, but not the truth.
During this pandemic, we followed the science. We were the first jail to start universally testing every person ordered into custody (84,000-plus tests administered so far). We opened shuttered buildings to allow more social distancing. We flooded the jail with sanitizer, masks, gloves and cleaning products. We created new quarantine and intake procedures. We vaccinated more than 6,500 people ordered into custody, and we even test the wastewater to monitor for COVID-19.
Researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have pointed to our efforts as a model and found they led to a sharp drop in new jail cases even as the virus raged unabated in Chicago. Meanwhile, researchers that included experts from Yale and Stanford universities found jail protocols that exceeded CDC recommendations saved more than 30 lives, prevented 435 hospitalizations, and stopped 3,100 new cases over just the pandemic’s first 83 days.
The authors also claimed a significant percentage of COVID-19 cases in the community originated in the jail. They failed to mention the significant limitations of that study, including that they didn’t have access to data related to those released who had COVID-19. This is of critical importance because it means they have no idea whether any of the anonymous individuals they studied were positive for the virus. As Dr. Stephanie Black, medical director of the Communicable Disease Program at the Chicago Department of Public Health, has said, ” … this study paints an alarming picture that simply is not supported by the evidence.”
Internally, we know that in the first year of the pandemic 219 individuals were positive for COVID-19 and potentially contagious out of 16,286 individuals released to the community. Meanwhile, we had stringent protocols in place to try to minimize community spread, including safe housing plans for those without a stable place to live, clear medical guidance, educational packets and directly contacting the individual’s home to ensure they could self-isolate if needed.
As of Wednesday, despite the delta variant, there were only 27 positive cases in the jail, and all but three were identified at intake and quarantined, meaning they didn’t get the virus in the jail, and we minimized spread. In fact, about 75% of positive cases since March 1 have been identified through our stringent intake testing procedures.
The authors painted the picture they wanted to see: heartless bureaucrats doing nothing while people needlessly suffer in jail in a pandemic. The truth is, there are no easy answers or bad guys in this story, just people trying their best to help each other through an unprecedented pandemic. Spreading misinformation and half-truths for policy goals helps no one in these times.
Thomas J. Dart is the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois.
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