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Chesa Boudin, the District Attorney of San Francisco, last spoke to his father on the phone a few days ago, and, like everyone these days, they talked about *COVID*-19. His father, David Gilbert, is seventy-five, but the risks he faces if infected by the virus are far more serious than those confronting many other septuagenarians. Gilbert is confined at Shawangunk Correctional Facility, some seventy miles north of New York City. Should he get sick, he will have to rely on the prison’s staff to help him. “Using the phones or even going to the mess hall is a real risk for him at this point,” Boudin said. “They use very old-school phones that are shared by a large number of inmates, and they don’t work very well. And, so, to have a conversation, you have to get your mouth right up into the mouthpiece that is being used by many, many hundreds of other people.” Gilbert is among the oldest people in the New York State prison system. In 1981, he and Chesa’s mother, Kathy Boudin, who were both members of the Weather Underground, were involved in the robbery of a Brink’s armored truck, in Rockland County, that resulted in the deaths of one of the company’s guards and two police officers. Kathy, who was sentenced to twenty years to life, was released on parole in 2003; Gilbert is serving a sentence of seventy-five years to life. About his most recent call with his father, Boudin said, “We said goodbye at the end, as we do at the end of every phone call, but this one felt different. It felt heavier and more ominous because I know—and he knows—that there’s a very high likelihood that his prison will go on lockdown, or that he’ll be unable to get back to the phones. And because we know that the reason for that is a disease that very seriously threatens his life.” full at https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/chesa-boudin-on-his-incarcerated-father-and-the-threat-of-the-coronavirus-in-prisons from Chesa Boudin's twitter account https://twitter.com/chesaboudin/status/1243271954871676928 related opinion piece by David Leonhardt of The New York Times What Cuomo Hasn't Done: Protect elderly prisoners. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/coronavirus-prisons-cuomo.html _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
