Dear Friends, Right now Congressional leadership is negotiating the next COVID-19 relief bill. We urge you to contact your Members of Congress today to help ensure our sisters and brothers who are incarcerated receive protection during this perilous time. An important step will be the inclusion of the Emergency Community Supervision Act, which would save lives and protect incarcerated people by reducing the number of individuals in federal custody as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Already passed by the House as part of the HEROES Act, this legislation would transition vulnerable people and those nearing the end of their sentence from incarceration to community supervision, limit the use of pretrial detention, and limit the use of incarceration as a sanction for a parole violation. More than 10,500 people incarcerated by the federal Bureau of Prisons have already tested positive since the pandemic began, a rate of 5 times the general population. And we know that people in prison are 3 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the general population. Please write to your Members of Congress and ask that this next stimulus bill includes all the proposed language that would help stop this health pandemic from needlessly taking the lives of incarcerated people and those who work in our nation's jails and prisons. Sincerely, Rev. Ron Stief
Executive Director |
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