New Domain!

Dear CCC Followers, After 12 years of blogging, California Correctional Crisis is changing domains!
Please bookmark https://www.hadaraviram.com/california-correctional-crisis/ to find all your old favorites as well as new posts about COVID-19 and everything else.

Best,

Hadar

Triggers and Vulnerabilities Video Talk

Triggers and Vulnerabilities: Why Prisons Are Uniquely Vulnerable to COVID-19 and What To Do About It

When I reviewed the causes and effects of the 2008 Financial Crisis for Cheap on Crime, I relied partly on a series of lectures given by Ben Bernarke, Director of the Federal Reserve. As he explained it, the Great Recession was a case of "triggers and vulnerabilities:"

The triggers of the crisis were the particular events or factors that touched off the events of 2007-09--the proximate causes, if you will. Developments in the market for subprime mortgages were a prominent example of a trigger of the crisis. In contrast, the vulnerabilities were the structural, and more fundamental, weaknesses in the financial system and in regulation and supervision that served to propagate and amplify the initial shocks. In the private sector, some key vulnerabilities included high levels of leverage; excessive dependence on unstable short-term funding; deficiencies in risk management in major financial firms; and the use of exotic and nontransparent financial instruments that obscured concentrations of risk. In the public sector, my list of vulnerabilities would include gaps in the regulatory structure that allowed systemically important firms and markets to escape comprehensive supervision; failures of supervisors to effectively apply some existing authorities; and insufficient attention to threats to the stability of the system as a whole (that is, the lack of a macroprudential focus in regulation and supervision).

The distinction between triggers and vulnerabilities is helpful in that it allows us to better understand why the factors that are often cited as touching off the crisis seem disproportionate to the magnitude of the financial and economic reaction. 

Bernarke's distinction between triggers and vulnerabilities is useful to the current crisis as well. Today we learned that a man behind bars in Chino is the first acknowledged COVID-19 casualty in CA prisons, and that 59 of his fellow prisoners have tested positive. As of today, we've also seen the first positive test in the San Francisco jail system. It's all going to mushroom from here. 

Several of my colleagues (see especially here and here) are making the important argument that the spread of COVID-19 in prisons is a very big deal, to the point that not addressing it properly could negate much of our social distancing effort outside the prison walls. But what is it about prisons that make them such an effective Petri dish for the virus to spread?

Think of COVID-19 as the trigger, and think of the disappointing--even shocking--reluctance of federal courts to do the right thing as another trigger. These triggers operate against a background of serious vulnerabilities, some of which preceded the decision in Brown v. Plata and some of which emerged from it.

First, what gets called "health care" in CA prisons really isn't. Litigation about it took a decade and a half to yield the three-judge order to decarcerate, and until then, horrific things were happening on a daily basis. Despite ridiculous expenses, every six days, a CA inmate would die from a completely preventable, iatrogenic disease. The cases that spearheaded Plata, including the story of Plata himself, were emblematic of this (see Jonathan Simon's retelling of these stories here.) 

It is important to think again of what it was, exactly, about overcrowding that made basic healthcare impossible to provide. First, medical personnel were, and still are, difficult to hire and retain. California has gigantic prisons in remote, rural locations, and it is difficult to attract people willing to work healthcare in these locations. Housing, clothing, and feeding so many people in close proximity meant not only that violence and contagion were more likely to occur, but also that the quality of these things--diet, especially, comes to mind--was extremely low. Every time someone had to be taken to receive care, the prison would have to be in lockdown, which meant more delays and big administrative hassles. The administration and pharmacies were total chaos. People would wait for their appointments in tiny cages for hours without access to bathrooms. People's medical complaints were regularly trivialized and disbelieved--not, usually, out of sadism, but out of fatigue and indifference in the face of so much need. Moreover, the scandalously long sentences that a fourth of our prison population serves mean that people age faster and get sick, and make the older population an expensive contingent in constant need of more healthcare and more expense.

The outcome of the case--reducing the prison population from 200% capacity to 137.5% capacity--was mixed in terms of the healthcare outcomes. But it also yielded four important side-effects. First, it exposed the inadequacy of county jails for dealing with a population in need of both acute and chronic healthcare. Second, it created big gaps in service between counties that relied more and less on incarceration. Third, because the standard was the same for the entire prison system and relied on design capacity (rather than, following the European model, on calculating minimum meterage per inmate), it yielded some prisons in which overcrowding was greatly alleviated alongside others in which the overcrowding situation was either the same as, or worse than, before Plata. And fourth, because of the way we dealt with Plata, we became habituated to resolving overcrowding with cosmetic releases of politically palatable populations (i.e. the "non-non-nons") rather than addressing a full fourth of our prison population--people doing long sentences for violent crime and getting old and sick behind bars.

So, now we face this trigger--COVID-19--with the following vulnerabilities:

1. We still have a bloated system, because the Court used the wrong standard to create minimal space between people for their immediate welfare.
2. We're now dealing with lots of small systems that answer to lots of different masters and have different priorities and ideologies.
3. We already have a lousy healthcare system behind bars, which could not be fixed even with the release of more than 30,000 people, and that was *without* a pandemic going on.
4. We have gotten used to doing a "health vs. public safety" equation that doesn't make sense and biases us against people who committed violent crimes at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. In fact, we are so married to the idea that we can't second-guess mass incarceration, that the newest preposterous suggestion has been to protect people from COVID-19 by... introducing private prisons into the mix. 

Stack these vulnerabilities against the trigger, and what you have is an enormous human rights crisis waiting to happen in the next few weeks. It's already started. 

And if you wonder whether this can be contained in prisons, well, it can't. Guards don't live in prison, obviously; prison staff has already been diagnosed positive in multiple prisons. Stay at home all your like, wear your home-sewn masks all you wish; we have dozens of disease incubators in the state and apparently very little political will do do anything to eliminate them.

What should we do about it? Follow the excellent roadmap that Margo Schlanger and Sonja Starr charted here, primarily point four: get over your icky political fears about public backlash and let older, sicker people out--even if they committed a violent crime twenty or forty years ago. If you are a governor or a prison warden with some authority to release people, do as Sharon Dolovich implores in this piece and use your executive power to save lives.  

Cause of Death

Source here.

Today I came across this sobering table, which struck me as important not only for the obvious reasons. You'll note that homicide is nowhere in the top-ten list of causes of death for Americans. If you look at the CDC reports for causes of death in 2017 based on vital statistics, you'll see homicide ranked anywhere between #106-108 (interestingly, "legal intervention" is ranked 109.)

Yet, to browse through the list of Netflix and Prime Video shows we are offered to numb our souls from the pandemic experience, you could be mistaken to believe that a much higher proportion of Americans succumb to homicide. And to me, this suggests that the current debate about who to release on the basis of "public safety" is guided more by folk devils than by real concerns.

Assuming that you include people in prison in the overall category of human beings whose lives and health matter (if you don't, thank you for reading this far--we probably don't speak the same language and I hold no hope of convincing you, nor should you hope to convince me), it should be obvious that COVID-19 poses a much greater risk to public safety, broadly defined, than homicide.

Now, releasing people convicted of violent crimes is not really a trade-off between COVID-19 deaths and homicide deaths, given that the folks most at risk healthwise, as I explained yesterday, are old and sick and also happen to have committed violent crime decades ago.

So, if there is reluctance to release the folks colloquially known as "violent offenders"--many of whom would barely have a technical write-up or two for the last two or three decades--it's not really coming from concerns for public safety, is it? It's coming from concerns for palatability and an idea that this is the right time for abstract ideas for retribution.

If I put the state's resistance to do the right thing here together with the mismanagement of homeless populations, it almost seems like, at our time of need, we've simply decided that the bottom rung or two in the American class ladder don't matter. And they do, which makes my heart hurt.

In Tricycle Magazine, Chenxing Han writes so beautifully:

The Buddha is often likened to a physician. He diagnosed the unsatisfactoriness of the human condition and revealed its cause. The Buddha was no doomsayer, however: his teachings were treatments that promised a cure, an ultimate freedom from that which ails us. SARS-CoV-2 is a truth-teaching virus. It has revealed to me a deep well of fear: of my loved ones dying, of dying myself (or, during more mundane moments, of running out of brown rice). More incisively, it has revealed society’s disturbing inequities and gross iniquities, forcing us to confront the truth of how the most vulnerable among us—the poor, the disabled, the unhoused, and the otherwise marginalized—bear the brunt of this crisis.   

What this cruel teacher will teach our state about caring for its most vulnerable wards remains to be seen--hopefully before it is too late.

Yes, We *Have* to Release People Originally Convicted of Violent Crime: The Last Hearing of Susan Atkins

Susan Atkins wheeled into her last parole hearing in 2009, accompanied by her husband,
James Whitehouse. Photo credit: Ben Margot for the Associated Press.

Latest news on prisoner release: A couple of days ago, the three-judge Plata panel denied relief for procedural reasons (TL;DR "we are not the appropriate forum for this - go to the original courts.") As good people are scrambling to put together writs for those courts, I wanted to address something that I *thought* would be obvious, but apparently isn't.

In the aftermath of putting up my petition to release prisoners, I've been hearing commentary that we should limit the releases to "nonviolent criminals." I use the quotation marks because the definitions of what is and is not "violent" and "nonviolent" is not as clear as people think, and because someone's crime of commitment is not necessarily an indication of their violent tendencies at present, nor does it predict their recidivism.

In Cheap on Crime and elsewhere I described the post-recession efforts to shrink prison population, which targeted only nonviolent people; reformers understandably thought that such reforms would be more palatable to the public. The problem with this kind of policy, though--as this excellent Prison Policy report explains--is that these kind of reforms ignore the majority of people in prison, who happen to be doing time for violent crime.

In addition to this, if we are looking at releases to address a public health crisis, we have to release the people who are vulnerable to the public health threat. And who, in prison, is most vulnerable? Aging and infirm prisoners.

The math is simple. Out of the prison population, folks who were sentenced for a violent crime are the ones most likely to be (1) aging and (2) infirm. Aging, because the sentences are much longer; and infirm, because spending decades in a hotbed of contagion, with poor food and poor exercise options, does not improve one's health. We know that a considerable portion of the health crisis in California prison is iatrogenic; not so long ago, Supreme Court Justices were horrified to learn that a person was dying behind bars every six days fo a preventable disease. So, a person who has spent decades in prison is more likely to be vulnerable to health threats. Such a person is also more likely to be older (by virtue of having been in prison for 20, 30, 40 years!) and therefore far less of a public risk of reoffending than a younger person who's been inside for a few months for some nonviolent offense.

So, if there's any reluctance to release people who are (1) old, (2) sick, and (3) more likely to contract a serious form of disease that will (4) cause more suffering and (5) cost more money, it's time to look in the mirror and ask ourselves - why?

Is it really because of a mission to protect the public? Because old, sick people are not a safety risk to the public.

So, is it perhaps because we think of these releases not as an essential public health action, but as some kind of "reward" for people who we think are "worthy" or "deserving"?

The correctional system's ignorance of old age and sickness is a topic I know something about. In Chapter 6 of my book Yesterday's Monsters I describe the 2009 parole hearing for Susan Atkins, one of the Manson Family members who participated in the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends in 1969. Forty years later, in her early sixties and ravaged by an inoperable brain tumor, Atkins--a devout Christian with a clean disciplinary record for decades--was wheeled into her hearing on a gurney. At her side was her 17-year husband, lawyer James Whitehouse, who represented her in the hope that she be allowed to spend the last few months of her life by his side.

The Parole Commissioners' treatment of the case was shockingly obtuse. They started by offering the barely conscious Atkins a hearing aid (as if she could hear them), analyzed old psychological reports from her file, and addressed her educational and rehabilitation "prospect." They even mocked her husband for being able to afford palliative care for his wife. Incensed by this facetiousness, Whitehouse exploded:

For the record, she’s lying in her gurney here. She is paralyzed over 85 percent of her body. She can move her head up and down. She can move it to the side. She used to have partial use of her left arm, partial limited use, meaning she can’t wave to you. She can’t give you a thumbs up. She no longer can point at you, I believe. She can’t snap her fingers. And this is the evidence. . . . We haven’t been able to get her in a wheelchair for well over a year. Permanent speech impairment—“does not communicate, speaking or writing”—complex medical needs, assistance needed eating, bathing, grooming, moving, cleaning, permanent speech and comprehension impairment due to underlying medical problems. . . . That’s the only evidence regarding her medical condition. And all those things have to do with what we are supposed to be looking for the future of behavior. In light of that, is there anything that her commitment offense has to do that’s probative to what she’s going to be doing in the future as far as you know? That’s a question.

The Parole Board refused to release Atkins, arguing that "these Manson killings and the rampage that went on is almost iconic and they have the ability to influence many other people, and she still has that ability as part of that group." Atkins, who had no ability to do anything at all, died alone in prison a few months later.

If this outcome feels okay to you, ask yourself: what's it to you? Do you have an idea of deservedness, of a price to pay, of just deserts? Do you think your idea of an appropriate time spent behind bars bows to no one, to nothing, not even to old age, sickness, and death?

Do you feel comfortable sentencing thousands of California prisoners to death because of these ideas of deservedness, or appropriate retribution, that you have? Will these ideas give you comfort when CDCR has to reckon with thousands of preventable deaths of human beings, just like you?

And if your answer is, "well, they didn't consider that when they killed their victims, right?", I have news for you: The victims are not coming back. They've been gone for decades. It's horrible, and tragic, and we can't fix that. Certainly not with another tragedy.

Get in touch with our common humanity. Write to the Governor. Sign my petition. Do something.

Gov. Newsom, Please Release More Prisoners to Prevent CDCR from Becoming a Mass Grave

Dear Gov. Newsom,

Many thanks for your tireless work on behalf of Californians in their hour of need. I can only imagine the multiple emergencies on your agenda and the many proverbial fires you must put out to "flatten the curve" and give our emergency services a fighting chance against the COVID-19 pandemic.

I appreciated learning about your recent commutations, as well as about the plans you have put in place to release 3,500 prisoners from CDCR custody. It is a good start, but, unfortunately, it will likely be merely a drop in the bucket.

Less than a decade ago, the Supreme Court found healthcare conditions at CDCR so appalling that, every six days, a person behind bars died from a preventable, iatrogenic disease. The Court attributed this massive failure to deliver anything that could be even remotely called "health care" to overcrowding in prisons, and supported the federal three-judge panel recommendation to release approximately 30,000 prisoners. That has somewhat improved the situation, but even with massive efforts toward a turnaround on the part of the federal receiver, we are still seeing woefully deficient healthcare--interminable lines and wait times, people treated in cages in which they have to wait for hours, "group therapy" consisting of a semicircle of cages.

And that's without a pandemic going on.

Gov. Newsom, our prisons are a Petri dish for contagion and disease. It is impossible to provide minimal health care to this many people with a highly contagious virus on the loose.

The Public Policy Institute of California, relying on CDCR statistics, reports that 23% of California inmates are 50 or older. Aging prisoners may be contributing to California’s prison health care costs—now highest in the nation. The state spent $19,796 per inmate on health care in fiscal year 2015, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. These costs were more than three times the national average and 25% more than in 2010. Moreover, many California prisoners serve extremely long sentences: Approximately 33,000 inmates are serving sentences of life or life without parole. Another 7,000 are “third strikers,” fewer than 100 of whom are released annually after serving about 17 years. Fewer than 1,000 of these inmates are released every year, typically after spending two or more decades behind bars.

Isn't decades in prison enough? How much retribution or deterrence do we still need for people serving sentences of 30, 40, or 50 years, that we must keep them behind bars for longer in the face of a lethal pandemic?

Robust research about aging in prison confirms that people age much faster behind bars than they do on the outside, and they are much more vulnerable to disease--partly because of confinement conditions and partly due to faulty health care.

The scale of releases we should contemplate is in the tens of thousands, not in the thousands. If you do not act now, within a few short weeks, the CDCR will become a mass grave.

Please, don't let the current litigation be the only push to do the right thing. You have done the right thing so many times--as Mayor of San Francisco and as our Governor. The prisoners are Californians, too. They can't vote from prison, but they are your constituents and you must consider their welfare.

Please, act now, before thousands of lives are lost.

Readers, please join this open letter by signing my Change.org petition.

Health Measure or Oppressive Social Control?

One of the hottest stories from quarantined Israel is the fierce Haredi (Ultra Orthodox) objection to the closure of mikvaoth (ritual bathhouses.) Almost two weeks ago, Ha'aretz reported:

Another issue of concern is immersion in a mikveh, a ritual bath, especially for women, who must immerse every month under the rules of family purity. 

“The mikvehs for women’s immersion are under constant supervision, so there is no reason to fear keeping the mitzvah of purity properly,” the Rabbinate’s document states. However, “anyone who must be in quarantine must postpone her immersion until she is permitted back out.” 

Indeed, keeping the mikvaoth open is strongly suppported (!) by Israel's health minister Ya'acov Litzman, himself a haredi man. Decrees published late at night confound the Israeli public with contradictory policies: the decree was to close the mikvah for men, but keep it open for women. If you're looking for a patriarchal angle, here it is: women's access to the mikvah to purify themselves after their monthly period is a prerequisite for having sex, and is therefore in the best interest of their husbands. Then, they changed course and reopened the mikvah for men also, apparently under the pressure of Ultra Orthodox groups who wanted to ensure access to this prerequisite for visiting holy sites (in itself a can of worms in the context of quarantine.)

The most recent development is Litzman's insistence to keep the mikvaoth open because "it is inconceivable that people should be allowed to take their dog out for a walk and the mikvaoth will be closed." When Netanyahu said, "what can we do, the virus does not respect religion," Litzman replied, "well, we will."

Setting aside the absurdity of a health minister who apparently does not care for the health of Israeli citizens, particularly those of his own congregation, and who will not use his insider influence to talk the Rabbis into saving their own followers, I was starkly reminded of a similar dark period in history--namely, the tragic days of the 1980s, in which San Francisco was in the throes of the AIDS epidemic and the numbers of the stricken rose every day. Young people were going to funerals incessantly, caring for each other in desperation against an indifferent administration, and waging battle on two fronts - against the disease and against homophobia.

When Mervyn Silverman, then the Director of Health in San Francisco, decided to close the bathhouses--a hotbed of gay liberation and sexual activity--he encountered vociferous objections from many in the gay community. The New York Times from 1984 reported:

Dr. Mervyn Silverman, San Francisco's Public Health Director, said at a news conference that the 14 establishments ''have been inspected on a number of occasions and demonstrate a blatant disregard for the health of their patrons and of the community.''
He said the establishments were among 30 businesses investigated by undercover health officials since an April ordinance went into effect banning ''unsafe'' sexual activity at sex parlors and bathhouses. The 14 that he ordered closed have not complied with the ordinance, said Dr. Silverman, who has been under pressure from Mayor Dianne Feinstein to order the shutdowns.
The authorities posted closing notices effective at noon on the sex club buildings. If a notice is ignored, the city would go to a judge to obtain a court order shutting down the operation.
Dr. Silverman's announcement came just a week after the department released figures showing an increase in reported AIDS cases in San Francisco, where officials estimate that 15 percent of the city's population of 700,000 is homosexual.
Last month 39 new cases of AIDS were reported, for a total of 723 since July 1981. Eighteen AIDS patients died in September, the department said. According to the Centers for Disease Control, a Federal agency based in Atlanta, 6,122 AIDS cases have been reported throughout the United States and 2,734 of those patients died.

Gay liberation activists considered this a thinly veiled effort to push the community, who had just recently achieved a modicum of acceptability, back into the closet. In the context of a similar debate in New York, the AP reported:

″My generation sees this (opposition to the bathhouses) as endangering hard-fought, hard-won and well-deserved advances. What they don’t realize is that this was before the virus came along,″ said Caiazza, whose West Side medical practice has become more and more devoted to AIDS in the past three years. 

Fascinatingly, there are still people who believe--today, after all those years--that the closure was an unnecessary homophobic move. Gayle Rubin writes:

Proponents of bathhouse closure, such as Randy Shilts, argued that their program was an obvious common sense measure to save lives. They portrayed the debate about closure as one pitting public health against civil liberties. Shilts in particular wrote as if public health professionals were in agreement on the desirability of closing the baths, and that only political considerations were preventing them from doing so. (Shilts 1987)
On the contrary, bathhouse closure, far from being an obvious public health measure impeded by political pressure, was a case of political pressure overwhelming public health considerations. Public health professionals were not unanimous about the necessity or desirability of closing the baths, which stayed open in most other cities. It is ironic that while there are still no legal gay bathhouses within the San Francisco city limits, establishments in nearby municipalities such as Berkeley and San Jose have continued to thrive.
It is arguable that what mattered in the long run was changing behavior, not its location. Closing the baths may have actually impeded the progress of safe-sex education. Even in situations where the ownership did not cooperate, safe sex was spreading, like the epidemic itself, from person to person, through sexual contact, as men would engage each other in discussions of what they were or were not about to do. Wholesale closure eliminated opportunities for sex education along with opportunities for sex. At the baths, the concentrated populations of those at high risk for AIDS provided opportunities for educators to disseminate condoms along with written guidelines for AIDS risk reduction. (Murray & Payne 1988; Bolton 1992)
The social costs of closing the baths were treated cavalierly. Those who pushed for closure appeared to assume that nothing important or good ever happened in the sex palaces. They failed to recognize the baths and sex clubs as important institutions that served many needs within a diverse gay male community. (Brub 1996) The major gay baths had deep pockets and expensive attorneys, and could afford a protracted legal fight. By contrast, many of the leather clubs were relatively small operations in which a dedicated owner had invested most of his capital and a great deal of personal commitment, and they could not afford prolonged litigation. Calls for closure quickly claimed most of the specialized leather, SM, and fisting sex clubs even before any city actions were taken, and as the agitation intensified, most of the men who ran the leather clubs elected to shut down and limit their losses. The wider social and economic fallout from closure was also substantial. While the owners of bathhouses were frequently vilified as greedy capitalists (and some undoubtedly were), the debates never grappled with the importance of the baths to gay male social life or the economic impact of closure on the gay economy.

I vehemently disagree with Rubin: Closing public bathing facilities in the face of a pandemic, whether they cater to the haredi or the gay community, is not a "case of political pressure overwhelming public health considerations." If anything, the vociferous insistence on the opposite policy is a textbook example of precisely that. While it may be true that people who hate haredim or who are deeply homophobic find a measure of schadenfreude in the resulting harm to community morale--and the pain of that should certainly be acknowledged--when saving lives is at stake, we absolutely must do what we can.

It's instructive to read Silverman's aftermath thoughts about the closures, as he laid them out in an interview in 2004:

What was unique here was that people could come there and have multiple partners, as many as 20 or 30 a night. Most men, heterosexual men, could not understand how this was possible, but if you are the recipient, then obviously you could have as many partners as you can tolerate. And if you had 30 partners, and one or more of those partners was HIV positive, there was a good chance, not necessarily every night or whatever, but you were placing yourself at great risk -- unknowingly, of course, in the early years -- at risk for getting infected. ...
The mayor at that time said, "If you save one life, then it's worth closing the bathhouses." At the time that this was going on, it was my feeling that we wouldn't save one life; we would lose many more, because the bathhouses represented 5 or 10 percent of the gay community on any regular basis. That's who frequented those bathhouses. That left you with 90 or 95 percent of the community you needed to reach, because if you could make the bathhouses disappear overnight, you weren't going to make the transmission of this virus disappear overnight. One had to think of the entire community, and how do you reach that community and get a behavior change?
Interestingly enough, before any of the drugs were discovered and out in general distribution, the rectal gonorrhea rate in this city dropped from 100 percent that we had figured that we had before down to 15 percent. There was an 85 percent drop. The reason I bring that up is in the early years, that was what we were using as a surrogate marker. We didn't have HIV identified or the test, so we figured if someone had that, there was a good chance they may have whatever this new disease was. This dropped 85 percent before any drugs, and the reason it dropped was the exposure that the Health Department and working with the gay community had in getting the message out and getting behavior change, a behavior change never seen before.
If you have an obesity clinic, a smoking cessation clinic, a drug substance abuse clinic, where you're trying to get people to stop, and you get a 20 percent success rate, ... you feel you've had a success. We're talking here about an 85 percent drop in rectal gonorrhea. That meant that from a public health perspective, we must have been doing something right.

Had Litzman not been, essentially, a mouthpiece for Rabbis who flout state law and regulation, he could have been a bridge that reaches across the abyss with empathy and compassion for the community's plight. There is still an opportunity to do this, because every day that the mikvaoth remain open is another victory for the contagion. I write this being fully aware of the fact that I'm not on the receiving end of such measures, and that--as opposed to Rubin--I didn't live through the worst of the AIDS epidemic and perhaps that dulls my appreciation for the psychological blow that the closures had on the community. While emergency measures must be taken if lives are to be saved, we can do so as we express sensitivity to people's communities, sense of collective identity, and allegiance to community norms.

There is an additional point that matters a lot. Recently, Cianna Stewart, who worked on the front lines of AIDS prevention in the 1990S, wrote a piece comparing her personal experiences of the two pandemics. She found many similarities between the two experiences, but some important differences:

• this timeline is much faster
• this virus is much easier to spread
• a racist/xenophobic backlash operates differently from a homophobic backlash because while individuals are being racist against Chinese (and perceived Chinese) people, as a society we have a different understanding of how racism is wrong, in contrast to the societally-supported moral outrage against gays and bisexuals which was widespread then and still lingers to this day (it’s also different that now we have a President who is actively stoking the racism where before the Presidents primarily engaged in homophobia and racism by omission)
• the coronavirus is spread through everyday activities, while HIV is spread primarily (although not exclusively) through vilified behavior and actions veiled in secrecy (for example: it’s generally easy to have conversations with family about wanting to play basketball or hug people, but generally hard to talk with family about longing for unprotected sex)
• COVID-19 has the potential to spread through families and there are many stories about families in grief about not being able to be with their dying loved ones, in contrast to people getting kicked out of their families for being gay and/or when they contracted HIV (I will note that in the early days of the AIDS crisis there was a lot of fear and misinformation about routes of transmission and some families wanted to be with their dying but were afraid or prevented from doing so)
• people don’t have to get infected or know anyone who’s infected in order to feel their lives are being torn apart by this pandemic because it already has had a broad economic impact that is likely to get worse, and in the short term is devastating for so many individuals and in the long(er) term may push us into a depression and is likely to restructure our global economy
• many people in epidemiology circles have been predicting a superflu pandemic like this for a long time and we shouldn’t act like it’s a surprise

To the extent that the decision to close the bathhouses in 1984 is still controvesial, a decision to close the mikvaoth should be consensual precisely because of these factors: the fast spread of the virus, the contagion, and the spread through everyday activities that cannot be stereotyped as prioritizing one group over others.

Mr. Litzman, while it is too late for too many people, it is not too late to save lives in a community ravaged by this virus. Close the mikvaoth now.

UPDATE: Litzman and his wife have both tested positive to COVID-19 and thus forced government officials into quarantine - this after being the only minister refusing to have his temperature checked at the entrance to the Knesset. Israeli doctors are demanding his resignation.