The Brennan Center for Justice, a New York University Law School law and public policy institute which is greatly financed by George Soros, submitted a letter to the governors of all fifty states urging them to use executive motion to “release as lots of men and women as possible from incarceration” due to coronavirus fears “provided they do not pose critical public basic safety threats.”
The letter called for the governors to grant full clemency to convicted felons, allowing their immediate release or to grant “good time credit” or equivalent programs to reduce overall
incarceration. For criminals who have been convicted of crimes but not yet sentenced, the Brennan Center called for them to be left out of prison for the duration of this health crisis.
Left-wing mega-donor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations has been the Brennan Center’s largest funder, giving the Center $7,466,000 from 2000 to 2010 while also giving NYU $2,819,540 during this same time period, a total of $10,285,540.
The letter cited serious medical concerns:
Unfortunately, behind correctional walls, social distancing is not an option and hand sanitizer is, in many cases, a prohibited item. Worse, incarcerated people often live in dormitory-style rooms with dozens of beds placed only a few feet apart, and share cells with one toilet, sink, and soap (if they have access to it). Cramped in close quarters, our nation’s correctional facilities are essentially petri dishes for disease transmission. These conditions present grave dangers to both incarcerated people and the public servants who work in the facilities as guards, counselors, and medical staff. Prisons and jails nationwide are already experiencing outbreaks of Covid-19. In Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the number of positive Covid-19 cases tripled from 33 to 134 within the span of 7 days. One of the people that contracted the virus described the jail as “Disneyland for coronavirus.”7 Across the New York City jail system, 231 incarcerated people, 114 correctional officers, and 23 health care workers tested positive.
But other sections of the letter indicated that the Brennan Center was using the current pandemic as a means of forwarding a political agenda through the back door by calling for an overall and permanent change in policy:
Our own research has shown that state prison sentences are often too long to begin with, and that roughly 14 percent of imprisoned people have “served sufficiently long prison terms and could likely be released within the next year with little risk to public safety.” Moreover, researchers have shown, time and time again, that the likelihood of recidivism plummets as people age. One seminal study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that “offenders over sixty years old at the time of release had a recidivism rate of 16.0 percent” —roughly a quarter the rate of people released before age 21.
The NY Post reported that Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the release of 1,100 parole violators last week, while the city has let 300 inmates out of Rikers and put them up in hotels. Lawyers are seeking the release of at least another 530 from federal facilities, and public defenders are seeking to get approximately 400 more out. While the city’s district attorneys have consented to the release of some inmates — 272 in Manhattan; about 200 in Brooklyn; 80 in Queens and 63 in the Bronx
Last Thursday, Attorney General William Barr issued a directive calling for vulnerable inmates to be sent home following it up with a memorandum to move inmates out of Oakdale, La.; Elkton, Ohio; and Danbury, Conn., facilities, which have been among the hardest hit with COVID-19.
“We are experiencing significant levels of infection at several of our facilities,” Barr said. “We have to move with dispatch in using home confinement when appropriate to move vulnerable inmates out of these institutions.”
Those moved to home confinement must first be placed under quarantine in prison for 14 days before home confinement to make sure they are not infectious, Barr’s memo said.
“Some offenses, such as sex offenses, will render an inmate ineligible for home detention,” the directive added. “Other serious offenses would weigh more heavily against consideration for home detention.”
Last week, an op-ed titled “The coronavirus crisis shows it’s time to abolish the family” written by Sophie Lewis was published in Open Democracy, a media backed by Soros. In her article, Lewis identified the culprit behind the spread of the pandemic as private property:
…the unspoken and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic: private homes.
Nuclear households, it seems, are where we are all intuitively expected to retreat in order to prevent widespread ill-health. ‘Staying home’ is what is somehow self-evidently supposed to keep us well. But there are several problems with this, as anyone inclined to think about it critically (even for a moment) might figure out – problems one might summarize as the mystification of the couple-form; the romanticisation of kinship; and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe space that is private property.
The author goes on to question whether “patriarchal parenting” and marriage can benefit health, claiming that “queer” (i.e. homosexuals) are not safe in a “capitalist” family environment. As a solution, the author advocates illegally seizing unoccupied properties since “comfortable housing is a birthright.” She goes on to call for the release of all patients in mental health facilities, prisons, and “refugee camps” (i.e. border detention centers). Her solution is to house these people in “hotels and private palaces” (i.e. private homes).
In summation, Lewis blamed not only coronavirus but all of society’s woes on one culprit; the family:
Even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’ It minimizes costs for capital while maximizing human beings’ life-making labor (across billions of tiny boxes, each kitted out – absurdly – with its own kitchen, micro-crèche and laundry). It blackmails us into mistaking the only sources of love and care we have for the extent of what is possible.
We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.
Source: Israel in the News
