S.B. 460, An Act Concerning Compassionate or Medical Parole and Credits Awarded For Release During an Emergency Declaration

Senate Bill 460 provides that the BOPP shall consider different criteria for considering compassionate releases during disasters, emergency declarations, epidemics and pandemics, and other public health emergencies. These criteria still require a finding that community risk will be low if the person is released, but they take important context into account. By limiting the risk of serious illness or death for people who are particularly susceptible to the then-existing emergency, this bill respects the lives of people who are incarcerated. It also recognizes that incarcerated people are dependent upon the state for their health, since they cannot change their living environments, cannot socially distance, cannot move freely for safety, and cannot otherwise take the actions that people in communities can choose to keep disease-free.

While it is critically important to change the definition to provide more options for keeping people safe during this or future pandemics, we must also acknowledge that providing the government with more options is, alone, insufficient. In the federal system, 98 percent of requests for compassionate release were denied during the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 25 people were granted compassionate release in Connecticut during the pandemic. As of November 2020, Connecticut had not commuted a single sentence since the pandemic began. Several of the people who died from contracting COVID-19 in DOC custody had medical conditions that should have warranted community release. This bill is an important step, but it must be coupled with much greater appreciation of the responsibility that the government owes to keep the people it incarcerates against their will safe and healthy. Connecticut outlawed the death penalty, but through its inaction it sentenced at least nineteen people to die from contracting COVID-19 in DOC custody over the last year.

The ACLU-CT supports Senate Bill 460 as one of the many necessary steps to ensuring that no one ever dies in DOC custody during a public health crisis again. By providing a clear path and more appropriate health risk assessment for times when there is a public health emergency, the revised compassionate release standard could save lives—if only governmental agencies cared to do so. We urge this Committee to support Senate Bill 460, but we also urge the executive branch to do more to prevent unnecessary death in DOC custody during this and future pandemics.