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Exactly how do you handle a prison population during a pandemic?
On one hand you have a humanitarian crisis with many enclosed. On the other hand which get released - all? non-violent convicted persons?
Simply cannot let all of them on the streets. Especially Cali prisons with massive gang membership, some of the most violent as well. Some of these offenders are a menace to society, such is the lack of prison reform.
It's a no-win situation IMO. All it takes is one released felon to commit something so heinous and the media and political fallout would be ridiculous.
It's really not that difficult. First, you start with non-violent crimes that never should have been imprisoned in the first place like drugs and prostitution. In Federal prisons, War on Drug BS lock-ups are about 47% so that alone would make the difference but of course the Feds love their War on Drug machine so we'll focus on states.
In states like California that can be tricky to estimate but its probably around 8-15% let's say based on 2017 data. Then you take a lot of research into criminology that finds "crime is a young man's game". California prison population over 50 is about 23% from the earlier source (2017) so making an assessment from criminologists on individuals and you can probably add another 15-22% to that non-violent drug crime.
"Research demonstrates that increases in already long prison sentences, say from 20 years to life, do not have material deterrent effects on crime....From a public safety perspective, this makes no sense. Decades of research by criminologists demonstrate that nature’s best cure for crime is aging — crime is a young man’s game. - Criminology Prof. Daniel Nagin, CMU
So taking all this together you have a very reasonable 23-35% estimate of prisoners you could release from California and not see any bump in crime.
It's not a difficult issue to parse if you allowed the criminologists who studied the data for decades to do it.