The New York Times: Blame the Justice Department for Andrea Circle Bear's Death

Andrea Circle Bear of the Cheyenne River Sioux will never get to watch her baby grow up. She died more than three weeks after having an emergency C-section while on a ventilator, a victim of the coronavirus and a cruel justice system that saw fit to send a woman eight and a half months pregnant to a crowded federal women’s prison in Fort Worth. She had received a two-year sentence on a minor, nonviolent drug charge. She had just turned 30.

The government could have predicted and prevented Andrea Circle Bear’s death. Federal authorities were put on notice when the president of the union for correctional officers at the Fort Worth prison filed a whistle-blower complaint last month, claiming the medical center “knowingly and willingly misled the public” by putting prisoners and staff members at risk. According to data published by federal officials, Andrea Circle Bear was the only prisoner to contract the coronavirus at that facility.

But of the roughly 153,000 people being held in federal custody right now, the Bureau of Prisons reports testing only 2,700. Of those tested, nearly 2,000, or 70 percent, have come back positive. This may be just the tip of the iceberg.

It is well known that prisons are significant hot spots for the spread of the coronavirus, due in large part to America’s incarceration crisis. Our country has just 5 percent of the world’s population, but holds 20 percent of its prisoners. We pack people into jails and prisons like sardines, often four to a cell and hundreds to a unit.

When disease enters a prison, it spreads like fire through a dry barn, infecting people in and around the facility, including correctional officers and surrounding communities. Look to the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio: Nearly 80 percent of prisoners there, almost 2,000 people, have tested positive for the coronavirus, along with more than 160 corrections officers and staff members. Five prisoners and one corrections officer have died. Public health authorities report at least 112 cases of “community spread,” including 66 cases in the surrounding area that are directly linked to the prison outbreak.

Even Congress saw the risk, which is why Republicans and Democrats united to include language in the CARES Act giving the Justice Department the discretion to release to home confinement certain prisoners.

Instead, federal authorities issued confusing guidance memos, each more confusing than the next, all amounting to little more than dense language intended to obfuscate delay tactics and inaction, obstruct the will of Congress and the president, and ignore advice from national health experts.

There is a direct link to Andrea Circle Bear’s preventable death. Her case could have taken a number of paths. The prosecutor could have declined to pursue such a low-level, rarely prosecuted drug offense. The judge could have suspended her sentence and allowed her to report to prison after she gave birth or after the Covid-19 pandemic subsided. The Bureau of Prisons could have allowed her to serve her sentence in home confinement. She could have been granted compassionate release.

Instead, with full knowledge of her third-trimester pregnancy and reported underlying medical conditions, federal officials placed Andrea Circle Bear in the path of the coronavirus, endangering her life and that of her unborn child.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, activists and elected officials from the far right to the far left have erupted in anger, mourning the young mother’s death, citing the gut-wrenching fact that her child will grow up without her.

But it’s time to go one step further and insist thatCongress and the president hold the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons accountable. When will the powers that be finally tire of this cancerous bureaucracy that operates as a rogue fourth branch of government? When will Congress and the White House recognize that giving more discretion to the Bureau of Prisons is futile, since it will never use its power as Congress intends? When will the president rein in the bureau for repeatedly defying him and subverting his legacy of criminal justice reform achievement and second chances?

It’s too late to save Andrea Circle Bear, but there is still time to protect thousands of prisoners in federal custody, the corrections officers and other employees who work inside prisons and the countless Americans who live in the nearby communities. In the next federal emergency response package, the president should demand, and Congress must include, language forcingthe Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons to immediately release to home confinement individuals who are not a threat to public safety, starting with those who are pregnant or elderly, who have compromised immune systems or are otherwise at high risk for Covid-19.

Pass this federal legislation, and name it for Andrea Circle Bear, so that she is not forgotten. We could have saved her life, and instead we sent her to the deadliest place on earth right now: an American prison.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/opinion/andrea-circle-bear-coronavirus-prison.html