Many people have argued that the US court system is failing for decades. Now that covid has hit, and the poor management of US courts, jails and prisons has been stressed to the point that continuing normal practices was going to kill a large percentage of people arrested for any reason and the prison guards who work there, the failures have transformed into publicly visible problems.
1. Jail conditions have always been bad. The jails are already crowded for normal conditions - in many jails the only way to isolate/quarantine someone is to literally put them in solitary confinement cells, and aside from that being an actual inhumane practice, it doesn't scale. So covid positive inmates were just kept in the normal population (sometimes they tried to separate them into covid cells and non-covid cells) which made it spread incredibly fast, and quickly overwhelmed any medical facilities inside the facility. Normal transport puts officers into close contact with prisoners, which means it's not easy to transfer them to somewhere else, and nowhere else had space anyway.
So today, in some places people aren't being held in jail until trials for non-violent crimes because the decision has been made that increased low-level crime is an acceptable trade-off when the other option is the government directly causing the deaths of people simply for being arrested. I think that if those are the available choices, they have picked the right one - but obviously those should not be the choices!
2. They aren't walking out of court. They aren't even getting to court for a trial for months and months. Something like 95% of US convictions are arranged in plea deals because the court system is literally not capable of holding trials for everyone with criminal charges - and that was before covid stopped all courts for a few months and slowed them down so that there are massive backlogs even from normal. This partly causes the first problem, because the long wait times builds up the large population of people who haven't had a trial yet. We aren't putting in more and more money, so as this population gets larger (and includes completely innocent people, remember!) we either give them worse and worse conditions in jails, or let more of them out of jail to wait for their trial.
The situation with medical care in prisons has long been severe and COVID has only made it very apparent. In state and county systems it is very common for prisons to have not a single doctor and nurses only on part-time contracts.
With the many complexities of COVID, we have a situation in this state where prisoners are now routinely failing to make court appearances because the jail did not have the resources to transport them to the courthouse, and nowadays the even more extreme situation that prisoners are missing court appearances because the jail did not have the resources to get them into a room with a working computer for a Zoom conference.
While defense attorneys are increasingly making the argument that this constitutes a violation of constitutional rights, and judges are clearly fed up with the numerous delays this is causing, there is very little will to actually address the problem because it would be expensive.
1. Jail conditions have always been bad. The jails are already crowded for normal conditions - in many jails the only way to isolate/quarantine someone is to literally put them in solitary confinement cells, and aside from that being an actual inhumane practice, it doesn't scale. So covid positive inmates were just kept in the normal population (sometimes they tried to separate them into covid cells and non-covid cells) which made it spread incredibly fast, and quickly overwhelmed any medical facilities inside the facility. Normal transport puts officers into close contact with prisoners, which means it's not easy to transfer them to somewhere else, and nowhere else had space anyway.
So today, in some places people aren't being held in jail until trials for non-violent crimes because the decision has been made that increased low-level crime is an acceptable trade-off when the other option is the government directly causing the deaths of people simply for being arrested. I think that if those are the available choices, they have picked the right one - but obviously those should not be the choices!
2. They aren't walking out of court. They aren't even getting to court for a trial for months and months. Something like 95% of US convictions are arranged in plea deals because the court system is literally not capable of holding trials for everyone with criminal charges - and that was before covid stopped all courts for a few months and slowed them down so that there are massive backlogs even from normal. This partly causes the first problem, because the long wait times builds up the large population of people who haven't had a trial yet. We aren't putting in more and more money, so as this population gets larger (and includes completely innocent people, remember!) we either give them worse and worse conditions in jails, or let more of them out of jail to wait for their trial.