When I learned that my grandparents had gotten their first doses of the COVID vaccine, I cried with relief. After a year of unceasing trauma, loss, and fear, it felt like the first sign of a turning tide. Then I started to wonder about current and former clients, and people I had heard call into…

The COVID-specific resentencing found under compassionate release offers a unique opportunity for humanizing a defendant. It is important to recognize, however, that humanizing defendants in a dehumanizing system will never solve pervasive structural problems like anti-Black racism, mandatory minimums, society’s refusal to examine prisons, or the global pandemic…