Examining Prison Releases in Response to COVID: Lessons Learned for Reducing the Effects of Mass Incarceration

By Kelly Lyn Mitchell, Julia Laskorunsky, Natalie Bielenberg, Lucy Chin and Madison Wadsworth

In response to the global pandemic in 2020, states and the federal government began to make non-routine releases from prison in order to reduce prison populations to allow for social distancing in prison facilities. This report is aimed at describing where such prison releases occurred, the legal mechanisms used to achieve these releases, and the factors within jurisdictions that made non-routine prison releases more or less likely to occur. We write this report, not to examine the national response to the pandemic, but to better understand when and how extraordinary measures may be used to effect prison release, and to determine whether there are lessons from this experience that can be applied to reducing the effects of mass incarceration. All but three Democratic-led jurisdictions (21 of 24) made COVID-related prison releases while only about half of Republic-led jurisdictions (14 of 27) did so (Table 4). » Nearly all of the jurisdictions (7 of 8) with the largest COVID-related releases—those greater than 10% of the 2019 prison population—were indeterminate in structure.

Minneapolis: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, University of Minnesota Law School. 2022. 86p.