Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has called for emptying U.S. jails as part of fighting America's "carceral state" and "structurally racist society," the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.
El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, spent years as a full-throated supporter of the far-left "decarceration" movement, talking about the issue in articles and on his podcast, records show.
In a March 2021 post to his Substack, El-Sayed called for "de-jailing the criminal legal system"—claiming it would save lives. His post called for eliminating cash bail, which El-Sayed said disproportionately impacted black people "in our structurally racist society."
"What if we understood prisons weren't meant to protect people from 'evil-doers,' but were designed as a form of counterinsurgent warfare waged by the state and wielded as a weapon against the very possibility of radical social transformation?" he offered listeners of his podcast in October 2024.
Proponents of decarceration argue that the United States is, at its very roots, a "carceral state" that imprisons a disproportionate number of black men due to racism, and that this is a modern version of slavery. Decarceration became fashionable in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd, when calls to "defund the police" were taken seriously, the show COPS was canceled, and local newspapers stopped publishing mugshots on their websites.
In April 2021, El-Sayed made his case in The Lancet, a prestigious, 200-year-old medical journal, as a coauthor of a study on the "association between county jail incarceration and cause-specific county mortality."
"Our findings suggest important points of intervention, including disinvestment from carceral systems," he wrote.
El-Sayed also used the COVID pandemic as a way to justify emptying jails and prisons.
"The CDC Must Adopt Decarceration as a Matter of Public Health," blared the headline of a May 2020 article by El-Sayed warning that unless jails were emptied, 100,000 would die.
The article approvingly cited a letter signed by "117 organizations and nearly 600 public health-affiliated individuals" which called for "reduc[ing] the prison population by agreeing to the early release of anyone within 18 months of their release date" and "automatic release of all people serving a misdemeanor sentence."
The letter has since been taken offline.
"We really need to think about what it looks like to [do] decarceration you know, at scale right now," El-Sayed said on the Decarceration Nation podcast broadcast on April 6, 2020.
The podcast is hosted by Joshua Hoe, a former University of Michigan debate coach who pleaded guilty in 2010 to soliciting a 14-year-old girl for sex in an online chatroom, the Free Beacon previously reported.
In 2020, El-Sayed spoke at a webinar called "I Don't Want To Die In Prison." The event was hosted by "groups working to #FreeThemAll," which had released a "timely report on the impact of COVID-19 on people in prison in Michigan"
The webinar was billed as a forum "to discuss the report findings and the road to decarceration and abolition with Abdul El-Sayed."
"Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons and to keep people out of jails and prisons is policy that we need to be investing in particularly right now," El-Sayed said, before adding, "This doesn't end when the pandemic is over."
He condemned the American "carceral state" as a series of "horrors" and "mistreatments"
El-Sayed was joined on the panel by a rogues' gallery of "activists", including Martin Vargas, a registered sex offender convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl, and LaWanda Hollister, who served 34 years in prison for second-degree murder, the Free Beacon previously reported.
Radically reducing the American prison population to remedy perceived racism against black people has long been an obsession for progressives.
Zohran Mamdani, another Muslim progressive who runs in the El-Sayed lane, won in part by campaigning on a promise to close Rikers Island and regularly visits violent inmates there for photo-ops (Rikers has actually been formally slated for closure since 2019).
While El-Sayed's positions on Jewish people and his relationship with Hasan Piker, a volcanic antisemite, have dominated most headlines, the candidate has never walked back his extremist views on decarceration. This is in contrast to many liberal politicians who've recanted statements made—during the George Floyd unrest—supporting defunding the police or eliminating cash bail.
El-Sayed is locked in a tight race against former GOP congressman Mike Rogers for the Michigan Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D.). Both sides consider the contest critical to control of the chamber.
