Even the Jan. 6 Mob Defendants Deserve Proper Treatment
Densely packed prisons and jails, after decades of mass incarceration policies, provide fertile breeding grounds for the deadly virus. The death rate from COVID-19 in prisons is more than double that of the general population, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
More than 2,800 have died of COVID-19 in state and federal prisons across the country and almost 438,000 have been infected, the Initiative reports in October.
In Cook County, hundreds of people who have been convicted and sentenced to prison are being held in the overcrowded Cook County Jail while Sheriff Tom Dart argues in the courts with state prison officials over his request to have the state take 500 inmates off his hands.
Dart has said the extra inmates have cost his department more than $38 million, some of which has been covered by the federal government during the pandemic. But state officials don’t want the inmates on their hands either.
Back in Washington, the buck-passing over jail conditions doesn’t stop, but it recently gained more attention with the addition of a predominantly white Trump-supporting population in what long has been a mostly Black and poor population.
It also seems to have raised a new awareness of how sluggishly the corrections system can operate to serve defendants of any color.
“Does no one care?” Lamberth asked of jail officials as he called their treatment of Worrell “incompetent” and “inexcusable.”
That’s not to say that Worrell is a model citizen with an airtight complaint. In a court filing, federal prosecutors said he has “invented” many of his medical needs. His claims of poor treatment for his cancer, prosecutors argue, have “repeatedly been contradicted or unsubstantiated by the medical records” of the doctors who have seen him.
Still, he has a right to be heard and receive a full examination of his allegations, even as prosecutors are pursuing the charges against him. Those are his rights, ironically under the same Constitution that the Jan. 6 mob tried so desperately to violate.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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