By Julia Laskorunsky, Kelly Lyn Mitchell and Sandy Felkey Mullins

This report examines the challenges and opportunities that states faced in deciding whether to release people from prison during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on the legal mechanisms available to jurisdictions and the factors that influenced whether they were willing or able to use those mechanisms to release people from prison. Our goal is to illuminate whether back-end release mechanisms can be used to reduce prison populations that have been bloated by the policies of the mass-incarceration era or whether relief from mass incarceration must take some other form. The report presents case studies of six states—Alabama, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Washington—to gain a more in-depth view of how events unfolded during the pandemic. Overall, our study found that the number of individuals released early from prisons during the pandemic was limited due to a variety of factors, including politics, risk-averse decision-making, shifting external pressures, the limited scope of compassionate and medical release statutes and the use of discretion to deny release. In addition, few changes to policy or practice that occurred during the pandemic had a lasting impact on back-end release practices. We conclude that the back-end release mechanisms offer only a modest opportunity to reduce mass incarceration, and the current system is unlikely to make a substantial difference in addressing mass incarceration due primarily to risk aversion. Instead, state-level carceral policies that focus on diffusing responsibility for back-end release and that reduce incarceration in the first place have the greatest chance of achieving long-term reductions in prison populations.

St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 2023. 73p.

By DLA Piper

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. Overnight, prisons became a key public health concern for governments. Prisons – particularly overcrowded facilities and those with poor sanitation, hygiene and ventilation – are known to act as a source of infection, amplification and spread of infectious diseases. Urgent action was required to limit the transmission of COVID-19 to prisoners, staff and the broader community. Recognizing the challenge and potential serious health risks, governments globally took swift action to decongest their prison systems through releasing prisoners and limiting new admissions. This report analyses the approach to decongesting prison systems adopted by governments in 53 jurisdictions across Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North and Central America. The results of those 53 jurisdictional analyses have been summarized into key findings set out in Part 2 of this report and in an infographic at Annexure A.

London: DLA Piper, 2020. 52p.

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.