(The following excerpt was republished with permission from South Side Weekly and Invisible Institute)

Transcript: I was just in segregation. Thirty-five days. I came out Monday, and I was not in this quarantine deck, and they put me on the quarantine deck with people that were over here sick. And I wasn’t sick at all. They needed the space for another inmate that was going to segregation. I think I would have rather stayed there. It’s a lot of people over here sick.

They need to do mandatory checks with the symptoms because some people over here are sick. I haven’t had my temperature checked in months. My celly just left last night with a temperature of 101. And they didn’t come clean or anything. We don’t even have any cleaning supplies right now as we speak.

A sergeant said, it’s not any avoiding it, we are all going to catch it and that there’s nothing she could do about it.

Ezell has been in Cook County Jail since 2018. He recently came out of isolation after 35 days in a segregation cell. He was not showing any symptoms of COVID-19. He was then moved into the RTU, where he has been surrounded by sick and immunocompromised detainees.

By Maria Khwaja and Emma Perez. Originally published on April 15, 2020. 

 
Disclaimer: The views in this article are those of the author. The Prison Journalism Project has verified the writer’s identity and basic facts such as the names of institutions mentioned. The work is lightly edited but has not been otherwise fact-checked.

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