CANDIDATES: We Must Fight for the Most Vulnerable New Yorkers
May 26, 2020
Dear Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins,
We are writing to you as candidates running in the Democratic primary for state Senate and Assembly on June 23. We are running for office because we wish to represent our communities and fight for the most vulnerable New Yorkers — and we are alarmed by the legislature’s current failure to do so.
Across the country, public health experts and state governments have recognized that people in jails and prisons are at extreme risk of illness and death from COVID-19. Already in New York, 16 people incarcerated in our state prisons have died from the virus and nearly 1,800 incarcerated people and staff have tested positive, a number that is surely an undercount as only 2.7% of incarcerated people have been tested at all. This is an issue of public health. It is also an issue of racial justice as 75% of the people who have died in state prisons since the pandemic began were Black or Latinx.
In light of this crisis, we call on you to meaningfully include people in prison in your COVID-19 response by passing Elder Parole (S.2144/A.9040), Fair and Timely Parole (S.497A/A.4346) and the HALT Solitary Confinement Act (S.1623/A.2500). These community-supported bills will reduce the number of people in prison vulnerable to COVID-19, limit the spread of the virus and help ensure that people in prison get treatment, not torture.
We also call on you to oppose weak, strictly cosmetic legislation like S.8244A/A.10386, which purports to give Governor Cuomo and his administration the power to release people from prison during a state emergency. However, this bill does not mandate the release or even the review of a single incarcerated person. It also does not grant the Governor or his administration power that they do not already have through clemency, medical parole and other release mechanisms — power they have failed to use despite the urgent circumstances.
New Yorkers deserve real solutions. With only one week left of the formal legislative session, it is unconscionable for New York’s legislature to ignore the plight of our loved ones, neighbors and constituents behind bars or propose legislation that fails to effectuate any meaningful change. Our legislative leaders must not abdicate power to the Governor who has not issued a single clemency or a DOCCS Commissioner who has responded to this crisis by locking people in solitary confinement despite warnings from health experts that solitary worsens the spread and impacts of COVID-19 by weakening people’s overall condition and by discouraging the reporting of symptoms.
Instead, our legislature must pass Elder Parole, Fair & Timely Parole, and the HALT Solitary Confinement Act. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act would end the torture of prolonged solitary confinement and replace it with more humane and effective alternatives while still allowing for true medical isolation as needed. Elder Parole would allow the State Board of Parole to provide an evaluation for potential parole release to incarcerated people aged 55 and older who have already served 15 or more years, including some of the state’s oldest and sickest incarcerated people. Fair and Timely Parole would provide more meaningful parole reviews for incarcerated people who are already parole eligible. These measures would not only prevent COVID-19 from creating a humanitarian disaster in our prisons, but would also begin to reverse some of the damaging policies that have created mass incarceration and death-by-incarceration.
As candidates deeply embedded in our communities, we call on you to pass urgently needed reforms to save lives behind bars.
Signed,
Jessica González-Rojas, Candidate, New York State Assembly, District 34
Khaleel Anderson, Candidate, New York State Assembly, District 31
Phara Souffrant Forrest, Candidate, New York State Assembly, District 57
Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Candidate, New York State Assembly, District 36
Emily Gallagher, Candidate, New York State Assembly, District 50
Jabari Brisport, Candidate, New York State Senate, District 25
Amanda Septimo, Candidate, New York State Assembly, District 84