Guess What? The COVID Releases Are a Scam.

Here’s the headline from the piece in today’s WSJ by my friend Sean Kennedy, a Visiting Fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute:  You’re More Likely to Catch Covid at Home Than in Jail.  The sub-head is:  Early release policies have had no effect on transmission behind bars. But they have contributed to a crime wave.  I thought these two paragraphs were particularly revealing:

While hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans were on lockdown this spring, progressives were demanding that criminals be allowed to go free. So far, almost 100,000 inmates have been released from prisons and jails around the country—with more to come. It can be no coincidence that crime is on the rise in states where these mass releases took place….

Some savvy jailbirds saw a golden opportunity to win their freedom. Inmates at North County Correctional Facility in Castaic, Calif., sought release by deliberately infecting themselves with the coronavirus. At least 21 of 50 prisoners who were caught on video drinking hot water from the same cup eventually tested positive for Covid-19. It isn’t clear whether they got their wish.