See my newest article at DIGBoston which begins 

“The DOC has failed to control the virus.”

Prisoners’ Legal Services attorney Bonnie Tenneriello made that argument on Feb. 9, in the continuing PLS Superior Court case against the Department of Correction and the Mass Parole Board. An emergency motion was filed in October ordering the DOC to establish a home confinement program for sentenced prisoners, but there has been no significant decarceration since March, claims PLS, and they are still litigating the case.

Tenneriello lambasted the DOC in her opening for their multiple failures: they have not created a home confinement program; they have failed to reasonably release people who are sick and dying; and they are not following a new decarceration law approved by the legislature in December. As she built to her claim that both the DOC and the Parole Board are guilty of deliberate indifference, Tenneriello charged that since March, ‘Twenty-one people have died and over 2,800 people have been sickened by COVID.’

Another failure also was spotlighted in this hearing before Judge Robert Ullmann, who is trying the case: per Tenneriello, while COVID has been “raging,” 53% of DOC staff and correctional officers (COs) have “refused the vaccine.”  MORE