U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Thursday directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to begin identifying older and medically at-risk inmates for release to home confinement, as officials address the spread of the novel coronavirus inside the agency's 122 facilities.

Barr's directive came as two federal jails in Manhattan and Brooklyn had each reported their first confirmed cases of COVID-19, the potentially deadly respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus, and the Justice Department faced increasing calls to reduce the number of vulnerable inmates who might contract the virus.

One inmate at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center had been treated and released by a local hospital, while another at the Metropolitan Correctional Center across the river in Manhattan remained isolated with cold symptoms, Barr said. Facilities in Atlanta and Oakdale, Louisiana, had also reported cases among prisoners, including one who remained hospitalized in critical condition.

All four institutions had been put on lockdown, per BOP protocol, and the agency was investigating contacts the sickened inmates may have had with other prisoners or staff, Barr said.

In remarks during a virtual press conference, Barr said the BOP was considering expanding the use of home confinement for older inmates with underlying health conditions, who had served "substantial parts" of their sentence and no longer posed a threat to the public.

According to Barr, about 10,000 of the nation's approximately 167,000 federal inmates were over the age of 60 and one-third suffered from preexisting medical conditions.

Part of the calculus, he said, was assessing whether inmates would be safer under home confinement than they were inside prison walls, and any prisoner eligible for release would be subject to a 14-day quarantine period to ensure that they don't spread the virus to the broader community.

"But we are now in the process of trying to expand home confinement as part of, you know, trying to control this infection," Barr told reporters on a live video conference Thursday morning.

The BOP has established a task force to deal with the growing coronavirus crisis, and earlier this month closed federal facilities to outside visitors. Barr said new inmates and staff were being screened for symptoms, and new arrivals to the jails were being placed under a two-week quarantine.

The Federal Defenders of New York, however, has argued that those steps did not go far enough to protect inmates from contracting the virus, which had accounted for more than 1,100 deaths in U.S. as of Thursday afternoon.

David Patton, the group's executive director, said Thursday that even if the new guidance were implemented quickly, it likely would have little effect on jails such as MCC and MDC, where the "vast majority" of inmates have not yet been sentenced and "do not appear to be subject to the new guidance."

"We have more than 700 people in those two jails combined who meet the CDC's vulnerability criteria based on age or medical condition," he said in an emailed statement. "The new guidance will likely only impact a tiny fraction of them."

"The clock is ticking," Patton said.

The Federal Defenders has been pursuing emergency bail applications on a case-by-case basis, but attorneys have run into opposition from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office, which has opposed most, if not all, of those requests.

The group was continuing to push for a more comprehensive approach to help speed the release of vulnerable inmates, including the creation of a committee to identify categories of high-risk detainees and more efficiently review requests.

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