'It's over, baby': NJ begins releasing inmates who survived COVID spread in prisons

"I'm coming out!" Lissette Cardoso shouted through a second-floor window of a beige, nondescript halfway house in Paterson. Four family members stood on the street in the cold outside.

They'd been waiting for more than 10 years.

Cardoso walked out of the halfway house just before 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, after a decade-long prison term for a string of convenience store robberies.

Her sentence ended three months early and with a kiss to her boyfriend — through their masks — amid a flood of hugs and tears.

"It's over, baby," Luz Salamanca, Cardoso's sister, said as Salamanca's daughter kissed Cardoso's cheeks. "It's over, you hear me?"

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Cardoso was one of thousands of people expected to leave state prisons and halfway houses on Wednesday under a first-in-the-nation law reducing sentences for inmates who served time during the coronavirus pandemic.

State officials said 2,261 inmates would be released throughout the day, marking a single-day drop of 15% in the state prison population.

The drastic decline was lawmakers' response to the coronavirus's devastation in New Jersey prisons. The death rate inside Garden State prisons was the highest in the nation, according to the nonprofit criminal justice newsroom The Marshall Project.

'They've been waiting for this'

Releasing a large wave of people in a single day was not without problems. Reentry advocates reported that police were called on them Wednesday at Hope Hall, a halfway house in Camden.

Advocates trying to get inmates reentry information were told to leave, according to Ron Pierce, a democracy and justice fellow with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, and Antonne Henshaw, who runs a peer-to-peer reentry organization under the name NuEntry Opportunity Specialists. Both men, who served their own sentences years ago, said the police intervention appeared to temporarily stall the release process.

“We left because we didn’t want to be the ones holding up people," Henshaw said. "They've been waiting for this.”

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Police were called because the advocates were on private property, which is only allowed with Department of Corrections permission, according to Dan Sperrazza, a spokesman for Volunteers of America Delaware Valley, which operates Hope Hall and offers reentry services. Sperrazza said no releases were delayed.

A 50-minute drive away, Marisa Gagliardi arrived to pick up her fiancé, Sam Lloret, from South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton. Lloret was sentenced to a nearly six-year term for a robbery in Haddon Township in 2015.

Gagliardi said she was told to arrive by 10 a.m. By 4:30 p.m., she was still waiting in her car and had not heard when Lloret would be released. Meanwhile their house was still decorated for Lloret's homecoming party. The couple's kids were waiting, Gagliardi said.

There were other families waiting in their cars, too, she said, additional evidence that the state has "forgotten" incarcerated residents.

"I'm 1,000 feet from him," Gagliardi said Wednesday afternoon, on the verge of tears. "This is the closest I've been to him in nine months and I still can’t go see him.”

State's response to COVID in prisons

While Gov. Phil Murphy has scored high marks with the public for his handling of the virus overall, prisons remained a trouble spot.

Murphy and his administration were criticized for moving too slowly to test the incarcerated population and reduce the number of people locked up, both efforts seen as key ways to slow the contagious virus's spread in a setting where social distancing is nearly impossible.

In fact, all but one of the 52 COVID-related deaths in state prisons were reported after Murphy in April created a framework for people to be released.

Lawmakers and prisoner advocacy groups said Murphy's plan allowed the corrections commissioner, Marcus Hicks, too much discretion and that more people should have gotten out.

Ultimately lawmakers put forward a bill, S2519, that reduced sentences by up to eight months for inmates who served during the public health emergency. According to the American Civil Liberties Union and Prison Policy Initiative, the effort is unique in the nation because it changed state law instead of leaving action up to the executive branch.

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Only inmates who are within a year of release are eligible for time off their sentences, and those convicted of murder and some sexual offenses are not allowed to get out early. The law will also give inmates time off if there is another public health emergency.

"We now have a system in place that allows us to be prepared the next time there is an infectious disease that causes pandemonium in our prison systems," said Alexander Shalom, senior supervising attorney and director of Supreme Court advocacy for the ACLU in New Jersey. "And that puts us really far ahead.” 

But the law wasn't easily passed. It was delayed for weeks in Trenton because of concerns that the state cut funding for reentry programs just as it was about to embark on an unprecedented release effort. Ultimately that state aid was replenished, and Murphy signed the bill into law last month, greenlighting up to 3,000 releases over the next three months.

The bulk of those inmates were to get out Wednesday.

Cardoso, 37, was one of the earliest. After leaving the halfway house in Paterson, she planned to spend the day with her family. 

"I'm really very proud of her," said Cardoso's aunt, Evelyn Vittes. "She didn’t waste her time. She went to school, graduated. I have six or seven diplomas at home. From here on, it’s only good things.”

A test of support systems?

While many New Jerseyans were awaiting election results early Wednesday, an informal army of advocates, religious leaders and reentry professionals flooded transit centers, hoping to catch people as they were released.

Each inmate met with a social services worker before being released to connect them with resources, according to Department of Corrections spokeswoman Liz Velez.

The department also gave people with a financial need a food stipend, packages of food or "an emergency supportive stipend to those who have indicated the greatest hardship," she said.

Velez said on Tuesday afternoon, the eve of the releases, that she did not have numbers of how many people had been given identification cards or enrolled in benefits like food stamps or Medicaid.

Releasing a large number of people all at once has prompted concern among some reentry groups and officials, who said the Murphy administration was not providing them enough information to identify who needs help.

On Tuesday, Sen. Michael Testa, a Cumberland County Republican who opposed the releases, raised concern that inmates being released had tested positive for COVID and would put the public at risk.

Only 11 were COVID-positive, and they would not be transported to public transit stations where possibly hundreds of other people would be taken, according to the Department of Corrections.

“Two thousand prisoners in one day — that is just going to clog the system,” Testa said Tuesday, adding that there is “no way they can handle that number of [parole] violation. It’s complete malpractice on their part.”

But advocates noted that everyone being released would have gotten out within months even if the law had not passed, meaning the demand for services would be the same.

Reentry services generally need to be bolstered, regardless of whether people were released early in a group because of the pandemic, said Amos Caley, a pastor of the Reformed Church of Highland Park and the state leader of New Jersey Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement, which is broadening its mission to prison reform and renaming itself the New Jersey Prison Justice Watch.

"People come home all the time and they feel neglected and they feel completely out in the cold," Caley said. "We have the opportunity now, because there’s so much more attention on it, to say these are not the unique needs, these are the constant needs people have coming home.” 

'It’s paralyzing, the fear'

Nicole Guyette lugged several bags of belongings out the front door of the Millicent Fenwick halfway house in Paterson about 8:30 a.m. Her brother was there to meet her, to drive her home to do something she's done just once and looked forward to for a dozen years: Spend a night with her son.

Guyette was 18 when she said she accidentally shot another young woman after a dispute that started with name-calling in Newark. Guyette testified during her trial that a gun she had accidentally went off, killing Sujeiti Ocasio, 18, who had just graduated from high school. Guyette was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, but the term was reduced after appeals up to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

"I am truly sorry for everything that happened," Guyette said in an interview. "I can’t take it back. These 12 years it has always been through my mind, and it always will.”

Guyette was pregnant at the time of the shooting, and gave birth to a son while incarcerated and awaiting trial. She spent one night with the boy at the hospital after he was born, she said.

Since then, their relationship has existed through supervised prison visits and phone calls. In the meantime, Guyette earned a college degree and began working on a second one before coronavirus restrictions shuttered the halfway house and made taking classes a challenge, she said. 

There were no COVID-positive cases at Fenwick house, according to the Corrections Department. But every time someone showed symptoms of a common cold, fear rippled through the facility, Guyette said. 

“It’s paralyzing, the fear," she said. "It's truly paralyzing to think you will never get the chance to make amends, to see family.” 

Guyette, now 30, said she is looking forward to homeschooling her son, who stayed with a family member while she completed her sentence. On her first night home, they didn't plan a lavish dinner — but would get food from Chipotle, the boy's favorite.

Her son was Guyette's motivation while in prison and will be her priority going forward, she said.

“One time in the hospital I was able to sleep with him," she said. "I've never been able to sleep with my son, to stay with my son. We’re going to wake up in the morning and help him with school. I just can’t wait to do those things. To be in love with him and be able to be there for him.” 

"This is my opportunity to be a mom," she said.

Staff Writer Colleen Wilson contributed to this story.

Stacey Barchenger is a reporter in the New Jersey Statehouse. For unlimited access to her work covering New Jersey’s lawmakers and political power structure, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: sbarchenger@gannettnj.com Phone: 732-427-0114 Twitter: @sbarchenger