My COVID-19 experience has been one of horror and hope. I have seen pain as well as possibility and promise.
I have yet to test positive for COVID-19, but I experienced symptoms and recovered from it before they finally got around to testing people. I didn’t get terribly sick, but many others did.
According to the COVID Prison Project, more than 607,000 incarcerated people in the U.S. and Puerto Rico have tested positive for COVID-19 as of Aug. 10, 2022. Nearly 3,000 incarcerated people have died from the virus, along with nearly 300 people who work in prisons.
Controlling COVID-19 has been a challenge across the U.S. as more than 1 million Americans have died from coronavirus. But I believe prisons could have done a better job protecting prisoners and officers.
The pandemic caused anxiety, fear and paranoia that will last for a long time. Many of us aren’t the same and will never be the same. You can’t see that much death and sickness and be normal. But maybe we can build a new normal, where we understand each other in a different, healthier way.
Since the pandemic started, many of us have learned we are more similar than we thought. We learned our differences were small, trivial and sometimes even fictional.
In a racially charged environment like prison, race has started to feel much less divisive. That is something that I haven’t ever seen in California prisons, and I have been in the criminal justice system for 37 years.
Seeing a new level of humanity has been beautiful and inspiring. And this doesn’t just go for inmates. Even some officers have displayed a new side of their humanity. One recent example was the time an officer resuscitated an inmate, saving his life.
Many lessons can be learned from the COVID-19 experience, but I think the most important lesson is that we all deserve our humanity. Mass incarceration strips away one’s humanity — for inmates and officers. But with this unexpected COVID-19 crisis, we have been introduced to kinder sides of each other.
Hopefully this can become our new normal.
(Additional Reporting by PJP Team)
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.