Weeks after passing the stimulus package, the IRS made a recent determination that convicted, incarcerated people were not eligible to receive stimulus money. This extremely disheartening for me as a prisoner human rights advocate and community organizer because after seeing that incarcerated people were not written out of the legislation I was excited to look for ways to organize my community around making sure that imprisoned people got access to the support needed for them to stay safe and to stop the spread of the coronavirus in prisons were the number of cases has been rapidly growing.
While I worked with a team of organizers across the country to put together materials to distribute to incarcerated people instructing them on methods to use in order have access to stimulus funding, it seems like public officials were doing the opposite. Not long after investing time, money and energy into putting together these materials; just before they were going to be sent to my incarcerated subscribers of the Right2Vote Report; the IRS released their determination that there were three categories of folks who could no longer receive stimulus support. Those groups included: the deceased, the undocumented and the incarcerated.
I’m writing this article to vent my frustration as well as to list reasons why incarcerated people should receive stimulus money in the hopes that advocates will voice their concern to officials as to why incarcerated people aren’t receiving the support that they desperately need during this crisis. If stimulus money is a pool of funding exclusively allocated towards providing relief to those suffering as a result of an unprecedented health crisis, why are incarcerated citizens purposefully being left to die?
People in prison more than qualify as individuals in desperate need of relief, we’ve already seen numbers of coronavirus cases in prison shoot up into the thousands over the past couple months due to the corrections department failure to properly manage the populations that they are responsible for protecting. We all know that it is virtually impossible for people in prison to practice social distancing or many of the recommendations promoted by the CDC and rat and this is solely due to overcrowded, under-sanitized facilities that we’ve built in mass across the country.
Another purpose of stimulus money is to boost the economy. For some reason many fail to see the essential role that people in prison play in America’s economic structure. Slaves, which include prisoners according to the 13th amendment of the constitution, have been a critical thread in the American fabric since the country’s inception. We can see how valuable incarcerated members of our economy are as we’ve turn to their labor forces in the hight of the Coronavirus crisis: recruited to make masks, bottle hand sanitizer and sew together hospital gowns. The state New York went as far as placing inmates onto Hart Island to manage the masses of infected bodies shipped there for incineration. Public outrage pushed the state to replace inmates with contracted workers. Why hasn’t public outrage expanded to fully protect prisoners from dying themselves?
My hope is that this publication can reverse that trend. People in prison need access to hygiene products, medications and cleaning supplies just as much we we do on the outside, but these all come at an exorbitant cost when being paid pennies an hour. People in prison need access to stimulus money, just as much as we do on the outside. Knowing how much incarcerated people have been cheated out of wages for decades to do the work that we’re desperate to have done for the benefit of public health and our economic vitality, how is it that we could carve them out of receiving stimulus support?
It’s true that not all people in prison are employed, but for those incarcerated folks who do not work they depend on their families support to get access to the products the need to pay for: these include money to talk on the phone, soaps, deodorants, commissary foods, winter clothes, and many other items. Their families are forced to foot this bill, many families of whom have increased financial instability as a result of the crisis. Regardless of the source of their income: whether is be employment, family, gambling over games of cards or selling their artwork; people in prison must pay taxes on what they purchase whether it’s a bottle of vitamins or a honey bun, they pay taxes on that item…talk about taxation without representation.
Along with that people in prison need to have access to stimulus money because the stimulus money that their loved ones receive is nowhere near enough to also cover supporting the incarcerated person. Revenue streams of support that incarcerated people have depended on, have been disrupted: mothers with incarcerated sons, husbands with incarcerated wives and children with incarcerated parents are finding it even more difficult to continue to support their incarcerated loved one under the pandemic conditions. How is it that we could write over two million people in desperate need of support out of our main pathway for support?
The only way that our federal government can do this, without it being a complete shot in the hearts of all those directly impacted by the recent IRS decision is if they carve out another method for supporting incarcerated people directly during this time. It cannot be left up to the states to manage their incarcerated populations. The federal government needs to come out with specific recommendations or demands that each state must meet in order for their corrections department to adhere the requirements mandated by the federal government. Those requirements should include:
- Releasing all individuals who are past their earliest release date
- Suspending any truth in sentencing laws which contribute to dangerous overcrowded conditions
- Releasing all medically frail, vulnerable populations
Simply being incarcerated during this pandemic makes you dangerously more vulnerable to the coronavirus. Incarceration rises the probability of contracting the coronavirus exponentially. In order for officials to show that it is not their intention for millions of people to die in cages from the coronavirus, they must reduce the amount of people who are in prisons, jails and detention centers during this pandemic. If the federal government is willing to be explicit about writing incarcerated people out of stimulus support, then they also need to be explicit about writing incarcerated people into some other form of direct support.
For us to stand by and watch hundreds of people die from close quarters during a viral outbreak is a way of reinstating the death penalty. We are watching death by incarceration take place at unprecedented levels and if that is not our intention, it’s our responsibility to call on prison and public officials to do what needs to be done in order to protect people in prison. We can no longer be a people waiting on the sidelines, we are all at home watching and waiting, now we need to be demanding.
If public officials refuse to release masses of people, moving out of mass incarceration into a decarceration era, then they should provide some other type of protection and relief to people confined to cages during this health crisis. Remember, people in prison are still paying for hygiene items, phone calls, medications, vitamins and cleaning products. Remember, many people in prison are afraid to eat in the dining hall and have to fully rely on commissary foods to make their meals, every meal of the day. Every item they purchase is taxed so they must not only be represented, they must be supported, especially in this time of crisis.
