To be clear, even if we still had parole in North Carolina, there is no assurance of safety in this pandemic. Without parole, many prisons have few means to reduce prison populations, thereby increasing the risk of infection with COVID-19. And North Carolina faces an additional hurdle of its own making- the abolition of parole, implemented in the Structured Sentencing Act of 1994. COVID-19 exploits each of these weaknesses. Before the pandemic, prisons were already overcrowded-staff undermanned, overworked, underpaid, and undertrained-and prison healthcare was spotty. But these safety measures, which also include mandatory cloth masks for prisoners, increased access to cleaning supplies, social distancing requirements, and disinfectant fans, reassured no one. There were memos to prisoners, wardens, and staff, screening procedures for entering the prison, and a COVID-19 Daily Briefing with a list of active coronavirus investigations in the state prison. He left a thick stack of stapled papers on the table, a surprising amount of information for a bulletin board usually littered with one paragraph memos. These restrictions will be assessed after that 30 day period." Effective immediately, all personal visits and volunteer–based programs are suspended for the next 30 days. Then, as the virus spread through Washington and New York, daily White House briefings displaced talk of Democratic primaries, and news broadcasts grew ominous, a corrections officer made an announcement on every cell block: On the inside, at Raleigh's Central Prison (CP), at first we joked about zombies and the apocalypse as cruise ships contaminated with the coronavirus found reluctant harbors.
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