The Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has decided to reduce the number of prisoners in its jails by more than 600 due to the growing coronavirus pandemic.
There are no confirmed cases found of the virus in the jails. But still, 21 inmates have been quarantined at Men’s Central Jail, five are in quarantine at Twin Towers Correctional Facility and a further nine at the Correctional Treatment Center.
‘All of them are receiving the necessary level of care,’ Villanueva said at a news conference Monday.
‘I’ve used the authority that I have to reduce that population,’ he continued.
Villanueva released inmates who had less than 30 days of jail time left to run on their sentences. Arrests have also dropped from a daily average of 300 to 60.
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California urged the Sheriff’s Department to speed up the release of the inmates.
‘People in jails are highly vulnerable to outbreaks of contagious illnesses. They are housed in close quarters and are often in poor health,’ the union said.
Restrictive responses, such as lockdowns, would be dangerous for those insides, putting their health and safety at risk,’ the ACLU wrote. ‘The only meaningful way to keep people inside and outside of the jails safe from COVID-19 is to decrease the total number of people who are incarcerated.’
The Legal Aid Society also said it had received reports from clients within the jails that they have no basic sanitation measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Some said they did not have even soap or hand sanitizer in their housing units.
Legal Aid Society’s Tina Luongo said: ‘City Hall must place an immediate moratorium on arrests, and for the hundreds of clients we have languishing in DOC custody pretrial or because of a parole violation, we call for their immediate release.’
‘These facilities are literal breeding grounds for infectious diseases such as COVID-19. The continued incarceration of our clients during this health crisis could very well carry a death sentence.’
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‘Public-health authorities are unanimous: We must clean communal areas with disinfectants, and thoroughly and frequently wash our hands with soap and water to slow transmission of this virus,’ Luongo said.point 297 |
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Asked about the jails at his Sunday press briefing, Mayor Bill de Blasio said: ‘The folks in our jails are in our jails right now with a lot of specific precautions.point 141 | There’s distancing initiatives going on.point 183 | Very careful checks on health care.point 213 |
We’ll have more to say about that.point 34 | That’s one of the areas that’s going to come up next on the agenda, but I’m very concerned about it.point 133 | But that doesn’t mean we don’t need a functioning jail system.point 197 | ’ point 206 | 1
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