A hot dog, a biscuit with a small dab of grits —
that was my breakfast the first day the pandemic hit.
The virus spread through the prison like a quiet tornado,
for reasons only they know.
The first days were so sketchy: their reasons, excuses,
same pass-the-buck that everyone uses.
The test results confirmed 255,
and as I sit here right now, I thank God I’m alive!
They split us into positive pods,
and negative ones, too —
administration was just as lost in what to do!
Temp checks came each night,
and checking our pulse,
but the nurse never had any answers
about any of our results.
Still to this day, I’ve not seen a single piece of paper.
It seems important documents always disappear like a vapor.
A virus so lethal it shut down a nation
has been handled so poorly by this administration.
They bus overcrowded inmates
from another jail to here,
which did nothing but raise all our fear!
So here we are after 19 days
and our lockdown stays.
They bused in those inmates
because a full prison pays!
They still have not sanitized the pod I’m on —
after 10 to 14 days, is the virus really gone?
I got a bag for lunch and dinner today, who knows about tomorrow…
Does anyone have some parole I can borrow?
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Here are our ground rules:
- You must credit Prison Journalism Project. In the byline, we prefer “[Author Name], Prison Journalism Project.” At the top of the text of your story, please include a line that says: “This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project” and include a link to the article.
- No republishing of photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No editing the content, including the headline, except to reflect changes in time, location and editorial style. For example, changing, “today” to “last week,” or San Quentin to San Quentin, California. You can also make minor revisions for style or headline size, and you can trim stories for space. You must also retain all original hyperlinks, including links to the Prison Journalism Project newsletters.
- No translation of our stories into another language without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No selling ads against our stories, but you can publish it on a page with ads that you’ve already sold.
- No reselling or syndicating our stories, including on platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. You also can’t republish our work automatically or all at once. Please select them individually.
- No scraping our website or using our stories to populate websites designed to improve search rankings or gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- Any site our stories appear on must have a prominent and effective way to contact you.
- If we send you a request to remove our story, you must do so immediately.
- If you share republished stories on social media, please tag Prison Journalism Project. We have official accounts on Twitter (@prisonjourn), Facebook (@prisonjournalism), Instagram (@prisonjournalism) and Linked In.
- Let us know when you share the story. Send us a note, so we can keep track.
A Convict’s Request
