By Matt Fair

Law360 (April 10, 2020, 2:29 PM EDT ) As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to spread, Pennsylvania's governor on Friday inked an executive order aimed at granting temporary sentence reprieves to as many as 1,800 prisoners in order to free them from state correctional facilities.

Gov. Tom Wolf said in a statement that the order, which would apply to nonviolent prisoners considered at high risk for the novel coronavirus, was designed to help curb the spread of COVID-19 in correctional facilities where social distancing measures are nearly impossible to implement.

"We can reduce our non-violent prison population and leave fewer inmates at risk for contracting COVID-19 while maintaining public safety with this program," Wolf said. "I am pleased to direct the Department of Corrections to begin the process to release vulnerable and non-violent inmates at or nearing their release dates in an organized way that maintains supervision post-release and ensures home and health care plans are in place for all reentrants."

So far, only a dozen cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed among inmates at a single state prison outside of Philadelphia, but Wolf's statement said there was significant concern that the virus could start to spread to other facilities as well.

The temporary program that Wolf ordered the Department of Corrections to implement on Friday would apply to inmates who have been identified as nonviolent and who would otherwise be eligible for release within the next nine months.

It would also apply to prisoners who are considered at high risk for the virus and who are within a year of their release date.

Under the order, the released prisoners would be transferred to community correctional facilities or placed on home confinement.

The governor's office said that between 1,500 and 1,800 prisoners would be eligible for release under the program's parameters, but that the actual number of individuals who are released would likely be lower.

It's expected that the first prisoners could be released under the program as soon as Tuesday.

"While we need to release inmates to protect them and to allow us space to mitigate the impact of the virus in our system, we also know that we need to prepare inmates for release," Secretary John Wetzel of the DOC said. "Our reentry plans will include several days of release planning with the inmate, preparing and connecting the inmate to treatment programs in the community, release transportation and a complete medical screening to ensure that we are not releasing sick inmates. We'll also provide them with an appropriate medication supply and connect them to medical providers in the community."

The American Civil Liberties Union has been pushing for weeks for a broad release of prisoners on both the state and county levels out of concern that correctional facilities would "become petri dishes that overwhelm both correctional and healthcare systems."

While the group asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to use its so-called King's Bench authority to take drastic action to reduce the state's prison population for the course of the outbreak, the justices declined to do so on April 3.

Instead, the high court directed president judges in individual counties to work with stakeholders and their correctional institutions to comply with the coronavirus safety guidelines from the CDC and other public health officials and to identify ways to reduce prison populations if necessary.

Some counties have already taken action to reduce their own correctional populations, including Allegheny County's release of hundreds of low-risk, nonviolent offenders from its facility in Pittsburgh.

--Additional reporting by Matthew Santoni. Editing by Alyssa Miller.

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