Justice during pandemic: Police seek to protect public and prisoners

For an incarcerated person, visits from family and friends are “like life support,” says Jeremiah Bourgeois.

Those visits, he continues, “help you maintain your humanity” – and he would know, having spent 27 years in prison in Washington State.

But when the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic March 11, those visits were one of the first things to stop. As tough as it is on incarcerated people and their families, it will protect public health, experts say. Mr. Bourgeois admits that, at first, he didn’t see it that way.

“I thought it was more a matter of not wanting the virus to come out of the prisons,” rather than protecting those inside, he says. “I’m so used to people not caring about what happens to prisoners.”

The pandemic that has infected more than 400,000 people around the world and brought the global economy to a near standstill is