While some cities free people from jail and stop arrests, others are much more business as usual

From the article:

In some cities, officials and the courts have worked together to release people from jail, stop bringing new people in and generally lower the risk of outbreaks in jails and prisons. In other locations, hardly anything has changed. As those differences play out in real time, public defenders and activists worry they are working against the clock as the danger of a jailhouse epidemic looms.

[...]

[Houston Sheriff] Gonzalez and others moving to reduce who is caught in the criminal justice system now are working along two lines. One is individual concern for vulnerable people in custody. The second is public health in the general sense, since some research suggests that even if coronavirus is contained among the general public, prisons and jails could act as quietly simmering reservoirs of infection, seeding outbreaks well into the future.