There was life before the pandemic—short drive-thru lines, flying for work travel, shopping for groceries—and then life after the pandemic, where a quick Teams or Zoom call from our dining room is easier than getting on a plane, where six people in the drive-thru doesn’t seem unreasonable, and where we use an app to order groceries that are bagged up and ready for pickup at ten o’clock in the morning.
The pandemic also left us with something called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or the CARES Act: an 880-page document that went into effect in April of 2020 and touched pretty much everyone in the country since it authorized those $1,200 stimulus checks, extended unemployment, and even placed a moratorium on foreclosures and tenant evictions.
There is also a part of the CARES Act that involves federal inmates. Here, in mostly minimum-security prisons, during the federal COVID-19 state of emergency, qualified inmates would be transferred to serve their prison term in home confinement. There are certain parameters for approval of this aspect of CARES Act; for example, you have to be nonviolent, you have to have served 50 percent of your sentence, and there has to be a health reason to transfer you.
The authority to determine and manage those who qualified to be transferred from prison to home confinement using the CARES Act was given from Attorney General William Barr to the Bureau of Prisons. The BOP would have complete power to determine who was eligible for this part of the program, and therefore, prevent contagion and move more vulnerable prisoners to home confinement.
Based on all available metrics, the federal prison aspect of the CARES Act has been a success. Of the 12,000 inmates who have been released to home confinement, fewer than 12 have violated the terms of their release. That’s a failure rate of .001. And the program has reduced the strain on overcrowded prisons.
Donovan Davis Jr. is an inmate at the minimum-security Coleman Federal Camp in Coleman, Florida. Davis requested home confinement under the CARES Act in November 2021. He met the requirements set by the Bureau of Prisons. Davis has been a model inmate, has an outstanding disciplinary record, has had multiple medical issues—diabetes, morbid obesity, asthma, and he uses a CPAP machine, placing him at a much higher risk of death should he contract COVID-19. He checks all the boxes for release under the CARES Act. Yet 15 months after his request, with the CARES Act window about to close, Davis is still in prison.
Why?
Simple. Davis is making too much money for the prison to let him go. And because the Bureau of Prisons determines who gets approved, it is not in the bureau’s financial interests to release Davis.
Federal Prison Industries, Inc., or FPI, does business as an organization called UNICOR, which was created 1934 and provides prison labor for inmates within the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Davis has high level expertise as a heavy equipment mechanic and operator. He works roughly 40 hours per week in the institution’s Facilities Department. Davis does everything from repairing the UNICOR factory’s forklifts and the institution’s zero-turn lawnmowers to trimming hundreds of trees and clearing the acreage surrounding the camp—the low-security and medium-security prisons as well as the penitentiary.
Davis is paid $0.65 an hour for his high-skill, high-expertise work. That means there is a positive cost savings on the Bureau of Prisons’s books compared to having to source this work to someone outside the prison system. In fact, according to a progress report filed by his case manager, Juan Coriano, and former unit manager, Paula Floyd, they acknowledge that Davis has saved the UNICOR factory approximately $250,000, as well as saving the Coleman complex an additional $1,050,000, by working for $0.65 an hour, compared to having the prison pay a professional mechanic or landscaper 30 times that rate.
“That’s $1.3 million in savings,” says Brian Horwitz, Davis’s attorney. “I mean, why would they get rid of this guy? He’s invaluable slave labor.”
Horwitz goes on to say, “Mr. Davis was convicted of a nonviolent, white-collar crime, and both of his co-defendants, who were more culpable than Mr. Davis in the fraud, have already been released from the Bureau of Prisons’s custody.” Davis was convicted of a three-man-conspiracy involving a $12 million Ponzi scheme. He was sentenced to 17 years.
So why not just stop working while in prison? This idea has been suggested to Davis, even by his own wife, Christy. “Don has staff members at the prison telling him to stop working,” said Christy Davis. “If you stop working, they might let you go.”
However, if Davis, or any inmate, refuses to work, the inmate is placed in an area of the complex called the Segregated Housing Unit (SHU), while also receiving disciplinary reports that result in loss of privileges such as phone calls and visitations with their family.
In 2021, Davis did not completely qualify for the 50 percent time served requirement under the CARES Act, but he did qualify in every other way. A Coleman staff member, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the BOP, stated that they requested the 50 percent requirement to be overridden in Davis’s case. The Central Office denied the request. “He meets all of the other criteria,” said the staff member, “but they denied him for no reason that I can think of.”
By August 2022, Davis did meet the 50 percent requirement and therefore completely qualified for release under the act. Once again, he requested home confinement, and once again, he was denied. Based on a source within the BOP, “Davis was denied due to ‘public safety issues.’”
“This makes no sense,” said attorney Horwitz. “Davis has a community status security level and he’s being housed at a minimum-security camp with no perimeter fence. He’s not a risk to anyone.”
“They give him the keys to the facility’s vehicles, and he’s allowed to roam the complex,” says Davis’s wife, Christy. The Coleman complex is the largest BOP facility in the country, boasting 1,600 acres. “If he were a danger to the public, none of that would be possible.”
“His medical problems are serious,” says Christie, Davis’s wife. “According to the pulmonologist, he has damage to his lungs that needs to be treated. . . . He’s not going to get that treatment in prison.”
“The real issue is Mr. Davis’s constitutional right to equal protection is being violated,” says Horwitz. The equal protection component of the Fourteenth Amendment precludes the arbitrary application of policy to protect inmates from being treated differently from other, similarly situated individuals based on their membership in an identifiable or protected class such as race, religion, sex, or national origin. “Based on the similarly situated white inmates receiving home confinement, yet Mr. Davis, a black inmate, being repeatedly denied the same placement, I believe that the BOP is applying the CARES Act in a discriminatory manner.”
What doesn’t help Davis’s current situation is that the BOP is currently in the process of moving vehicles in need of maintenance from around the country to the Coleman complex—specifically for Davis to repair. This means Davis is now needed more than ever.
“He’s fixed BOP equipment from all over Florida,” says Davis’s wife. “And now the central office is rerouting heavy equipment from the southeast region for him to repair. They’re denying him the CARES Act, so he can save them millions of dollars.”
Davis’s case manager, Coriano, and former unit manager, Floyd, stated in their progress report: “Inmate Davis meets the criteria listed in the Attorney General’s COVID-19 pandemic memorandum.” Unfortunately, the decision isn’t up to Coriano or Floyd.
But let’s look at some other CARES Act cases in comparison.
Michael Riolo, a healthy Caucasian inmate convicted of a $44 million Ponzi scheme, was released to home confinement after serving 50 percent of his 24-year sentence, under the CARES Act.
Frank Amodeo, a Caucasian inmate with no health issues, defrauded the U.S. government out of $200 million. Amodeo was released after serving 50 percent of his 22-year sentence, under the CARES Act.
Ron Wilson, a healthy Caucasian inmate, incarcerated for defrauding nearly 800 victims out of an estimated $90 million in a Ponzi scheme, was released after serving only 50 percent of his 20-year sentence, under the CARES Act.
Frank Vennes, a healthy Caucasian, convicted of a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme, his second offense, was released at 50 percent of his sentence under the CARES Act.
What does all this mean? There are only two possible conclusions.
The first is that Davis is the modern-day equivalent of Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption, where a corrupt prison system has too much financially to lose to release the cash cow they currently have incarcerated and will keep him locked up purely for financial reasons, in spite of his personal health risk.
The second possible conclusion is that the prison system is completely racist.
It has to be one or the other.
Photo by Marco Chilese on Unsplash