Freed From Prison, Dead from COVID-19, Not Even Counted
DURHAM, North Carolina—On May 20, two prison guards pushed a wheelchair carrying 79-year-old Alan Hurwitz into the airport here. Convicted of bank robberies a decade before, Hurwitz had been freed from a nearby federal prison by a judge who found him no threat to society—and at high risk of contracting COVID-19.
A week and a half later, Juan Ramon, 60, also boarded a plane at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, this time bound for Miami. He had been serving a two-year sentence for identity theft and had many health problems, which prompted his release by another federal judge.
Though officials at the Butner federal prison had opposed their release for weeks, the men were finally on their way home.
But they did not escape the virus. The prison did not test either man for COVID-19—and they carried it with them onto the planes. Within days, one was dead.
Their stories highlight systemic problems in the Bureau of Prison’s botched response to the coronavirus pandemic. About 7,000 prisoners in the care of the U.S. government have contracted COVID-19; 94 have died. More than 700 infected correctional officers have carried the virus back and forth between their communities and their workplaces.
Nowhere in the federal system has the outbreak been as deadly as at the giant Butner complex about 15 miles northeast of Durham. Twenty-five prisoners there perished from COVID-19, the most of any federal lockup. Butner is also the only BOP prison to have a confirmed staff death.
Butner is emblematic in other ways. Prison officials
