After Cook County Jail emerged as an epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis this month, with one inmate dead and more than 275 infected, a coalition of civil rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court seeking the immediate release of medically at-risk people. On April 9, a federal judge rejected the request for releasing prisoners but ordered Cook County sheriff Thomas Dart to improve sanitation and carry out new social distancing measures in the overcrowded facility.
Sharlyn Grace, executive director of Chicago Community Bond Fund, says that while she was “heartened by the recognition [by the federal court] of the danger people in Cook County Jail are facing,” she warned that “if the county does not decarcerate quickly, more people will die. The size of someone’s bank account shouldn’t determine whether or not they survive this pandemic.”
On April 6, three weeks after he ordered the closure of restaurants and bars to impose social distancing, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed an executive order enabling the Illinois Department of Corrections to issue temporary furloughs to prisoners “medically vulnerable . . . to contracting and spreading” COVID-19.
