There was much chatter on media sites last week about Paul Manafort's good fortune to be released from federal prison in Pennsylvania because of the threat of contracting COVID-19 inside. Donald Trump's former campaign chairman will continue serving his seven-year bank and tax fraud sentence at home.

I'm OK with that as long as every inmate and their circumstances are considered for the same reprieve under state or federal “compassionate release” laws. But they haven't been, especially not in Iowa, which is alone among the states in lacking such a law in the first place. For one Iowan who was just released, it took a federal judge's attention to note the inequities in his incarceration.

At the federal level there are 140,000 people in prison, 38 percent of them African American. Nearly 3,000 federal inmates have so far contracted the potentially deadly coronavirus, and over 50 or so have died from it, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

Among them was a pregnant 30-year-old woman from South Dakota, imprisoned and quarantined in Fort Worth, Texas, for maintaining a “drug-involved” premise. Andrea Circle Bear had a preexisting condition officials apparently knew about. She'd been taken to a hospital but was sent back to prison two days before returning to be placed on a ventilator. Her baby was delivered by C-section several days later, but Circle Bear died. If she'd been kept out of prison, maybe she'd still be alive.

The federal Bureau of Prisons prioritizes for release people who have served more than half of their sentence or have 18 months or less to go. But it doesn't always follow those criteria: Manafort served under 30 percent and has years to go. And he was not in one of the 51 federal facilities with confirmed COVID-19 cases.

As for that Iowa case: U.S. Senior District Judge Robert Pratt recently tried to make amends for a broader system many call rigged. Writing, “This case is about making up for past mistakes,” Pratt on April 29 ordered the release of Daniel Lynn Brown Jr. of Council Bluffs, Iowa, from prison in South Carolina, where he has spent nearly 15 years. “Defendant has made up for his mistakes,” Pratt wrote. “Now the Court must make up for its own.”

At 29, Brown pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute meth and one count of possession with intent to do so. Those offenses should have gotten him 12½ years, but two additional counts of firearms possession tacked on a mandatory 30 more. So Brown got 42½ years. Even the sentencing judge considered that excessive.

In his time inside, Brown had no infractions and by the Bureau of Prisons' account, “exhibited an exemplary rehabilitative record.” He took more than 6,000 hours of programming, taught and mentored other inmates and showed “excellent character, determination, and readiness to be a productive and responsible citizen,” it said.

Before 2018, it would have required the prison warden to grant him a compassionate release. Now, thanks to the First Step Act, Pratt could do it. Among other things, the bipartisan legislation increases avenues for compassionate releases from federal prisons. It gives a prison warden 30 days to respond to an inmate's request, after which the inmate can seek relief in district court.

Pratt, in a phone interview, criticized the “enormously unfair mandatory sentences judges had to hand down.” Compassionate releases are no longer limited to medical conditions, and the threat of COVID-19 in prisons can be considered.

So on April 30, Brown returned to his parents' home in Council Bluffs, went into precautionary isolation, found a job with a construction company and started making amends to his family. He credited Pratt with saving his life.

Brown agrees he deserved prison time but believes judges need the discretion to consider each situation, especially with this pandemic.

Renagh O'Leary, an assistant professor of clinical law at the University of Wisconsin, calls compassionate release laws a very modest prison reform measure that is greatly underused. She says each state is seeing only about four releases a year, based mostly on a terminal illness diagnosis, serious medical condition, dementia and advanced age. Though “advocates across the country are litigating very aggressively to get people out,” O'Leary says, most successes have been at the jail level.

If a prison isn't listed as having any COVID-19 cases (Brown's wasn't), O'Leary said, it may be because of a lack of testing. With inmates eating, sleeping and showering in close proximity, O'Leary calls prisons “the perfect Petri dishes” to spread the virus.

“We've known for a long time that mass incarceration is a crisis,” she said. “But COVID is bringing that home even more.”

COVID-19 is bringing everything home more, from the power differentials that bestow compassion on select lawbreakers to the systemic inequalities that lead to disproportionate incarceration of African Americans.

When the dust settles, it will be on all of us to press lawmakers to address those underlying inequities, reunite families and move to a system of justice that doesn't just put people away but rehabilitates and prepares them for life outside.

Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register.