04/08/2020
[FULL DISCLOSURE: The author is a member of DSA BloNo]
Sheriff Jon Sandage fired back at activists in his briefing before the Mclean County Board’s Justice Committee meeting Tuesday, April 7th. “To make a pointless political statement, in a time of crisis, not only insults me, but also threatens the safety of our friends & neighbors.” Sandage was responding to many local activists demands to decrease the population of the jail as much as possible during the COVID-19 pandemic to prevent a hot spot of infection occurring that would spread throughout the entire county.
For the past several weeks, local groups like the Bloomington-Normal chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA BloNo), Illinois Peoples Action (IPA), and Black Lives Matter Bloomington-Normal (BLM BloNo) have been calling on Sandage to decarcerate temporarily, and they have directed supporters to contact the jail, state’s attorney, and Chief Judges offices to make these demands known. Sandage complained outsider groups of “social justice warriors” were causing an unsafe environment by “increasing tensions” in the facility, for both staff and inmates. “When outside influences attempt to cause unrest in a corrections environment, you have gone too far,” Sandage said ominously.
Sandage used repeated straw man fallacies to characterize decarceration advocates.
First off, we are not outsiders, Sheriff: we are your neighbors, your constituents, the people you serve. The operation and consequences of the jail are absolutely the concern of Mclean County taxpayers. The people calling your office are the people you work for in Mclean County.
Sandage continued his flimsy mis-characterization of his opponents by saying activists are ignorant of the justice system. “I have received repeated demands to free prisoners from those claiming to be social justice warriors, who don’t even understand how the justice system works. The Sheriff runs the jail, however, randomly releasing inmates would put me in contempt of every [judicial ] order issued that each inmate be held. While some believe I should ignore these orders that pertain to literally every inmate that is in jail for more than 48 hours, my staff and I do not violate judges orders.” Sandage then went on to lecture everyone about the current justice process in Mclean County is operated through the Criminal Justice Coordination Council (CJCC).1 Sandage championed the CJCC by claiming that in the previous 30 days, the jail population was reduced by 1/3rd.
But, activists aren’t asking him to disobey every judges order and let all the inmates run free in the wilderness. Activists are asking him, along with other members of the CJCC, to perform all necessary legal and administrative actions to continue to decrease the population.
Nor has any person advocated for releasing everyone in the jail. Obviously, people who have been deemed a threat to themselves or others by a judge should remain in jail, including murderers and weapons dealers. The demands of decarceration activists are specifically with regards to nonviolent inmates and pre-trial inmates who have not been deemed a safety risk by a judge.
There is this desire during the pandemic to retain a sense of normalcy in life. Institutions like government are key sites of normalcy, maintaining essential health, safety, and infrastructure demands. These functions are essential to maintain during the pandemic otherwise society and the economy would grind to an absolute halt. But, despite the desire of normalcy in maintaining society, if this normalcy is unable to adapt during a crisis as dire as this, it runs the risk of holding everyone back and maintaining not the normalcy necessary for functioning society, but the blind status quo that is fundamentally ineffective with regards to a global crisis.
Sandage thinks the normalcy of the jail is necessary to maintain Mclean County society during the COVID-19 pandemic. He maintains that all guards and staff are having their temperatures checked regularly for any sign of the disease (though they are not testing directly for the disease), that staff is wearing protective gear and frequently wiping down surfaces. “I am confident with the medical staff to deal with COVID-19 cases,” Sandage says. What Sandage is unwilling to admit (partially because his department profits from a higher jail population) is how truly serious this pandemic is and the risk the jail serves for the community. On March 24th, Cook County tested its first two cases of COVID-19. Within two weeks, that number jumped to 355: 263 inmates and 92 staff. 12.5% of infected inmates have serious enough symptoms they need to be held in the medical wing of the jail. 5% required hospitalization. Already one inmate has died.2
At the same time, Governor Pritzker issued Executive Order 2020-21 calling on the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) to release inmates temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic. The order reads:
This order could release up to 13,000 inmates “including many who were convicted of nonviolent offenses, are elderly, at elevated risk of getting ill, or have already served most of their sentences.” This order was in response to 40 IDOC employees and 62 IDOC inmates testing positive for COVID-19.
Even a former Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, John Sandweg, is calling on the federal government to decarcerate detention centers calling attention to confinement centers particular vulnerability to infectious disease. “The nature of these facilities is such that it’s really impossible to engage in the social distancing that we’re all practicing right now.”
So, we have Cook County ground zero for an outbreak, the Illinois governor about to release 13,000 inmates (literally a third of Illinois’ entire prison population), and national detention center experts who have worked through previous pandemics saying we need to decarcerate immediately or risk an even greater crisis, yet Sheriff Sandage thinks his jail has got this taken care of. This isn’t normalcy folks, it’s blind status quo. When Sandage says he’s confident in his staff to deal with COVID-19 cases, what he’s really saying is he’s confident in the Mclean County taxpayer to pay the medical bills and pay the possible wrongful death suits from inmates or staff who die.
It’s the county residents, or the “outsiders” as Sandage calls us, who will suffer because of an outbreak at the jail. Checking temperatures frequently is not sufficient when an infected person is asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic for days while still spreading the disease. Sandage says he has 140 employees who are essential that need to be at the jail to maintain the jail. That’s a 140 employees who are not social distancing, in close contact with vulnerable populations, and traveling to the same grocery stores and restaurants as we are. If these employees are truly so essential, then let’s treat them as such. Reduce their hours, minimize their contact with the jail, and give them paid time off so they can spend more time social distancing with their families without losing pay. We could actually do this, but only if we reduce the jail population even further. This isn’t some political ideology Sandage can just dismiss stubbornly; this is the question facing civilization across the globe, a question entitled, “How are you going to flatten the damn curve?” and a question Sandage is clearly unwilling to entertain seriously.
- The Council is made up of the sheriff, states attorney, public defender, county administration, county board members, members of the defense bar, general public, and judges of the 11th Judicial District (the 11th Judicial District includes the following counties: Ford, Livingston, Logan, McLean, and Woodford.
- https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/04/06/cook-county-jail-detainee-dies-of-coronavirus-sheriffs-office-says/?mc_cid=c506ca67fa&mc_eid=a65d667b2a&fbclid=IwAR2tnGpik_t0j_p5cV1tj0MII-CnBsqgPuG_ElvPIf4UDlc0njoBeoJUcKM
