As COVID-19 cases approach 2.5 million worldwide and nearly 40,000 deaths in the U.S., one of our prison guards here at Seagoville Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) thought it funny to wear a facemask with skeletal teeth sketched on it. I suppose he convinced himself it was humorous, that he might himself be the agent of death for many of us here who are vulnerable to the virus. This particular guard, incidentally, only wore the skeletal mask while supervising our daily midday exodus to and from the chow hall with our meal trays. While making his rounds in the unit during our lockdown or counting us he chose not to wear a mask at all, skeletal-evoking or otherwise.
A pornography ‘sex offender’ (now known as a “clicker” in prison slang) was actually released from Danbury FCI – one of the institutions seriously affected by the pandemic – after applying for release and being ignored by staff, even though he is an at-risk person. Apparently, courts claim that, in crisis situations, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) administrative remedy process – an admittedly useless bureaucratic procedure – can be bypassed to save time. It is important to note that this offender was five months from the door and was in prison on a supervision violation, not a new pornography charge. While the court flavored the release paperwork by adding that the offender’s original ‘crime’ was ‘serious’, it supposedly didn’t consider it ‘serious’ enough that he should die for it.
That’s certainly not the case for most of the BOP’s low-security inmates who continue to remain in unsafe lockdowns. I don’t know about other institutions, but here they are vacating one unit to create a quarantine area, which can only mean they know how unsafe the lockdown approach is and how bad things might get. Sexual fantasies accompanied by masturbation and drug selling are the ‘serious’ crimes most inmates in the low-security compounds are incarcerated for. Those who commit such offenses are ‘dangerous’ people, possibly deserving to die, certainly not deserving of mercy or freedom. Perhaps all guards and staff should wear skeletal-evoking facemasks: they are all agents of possible death, potential carriers of coronavirus.
And yet, many federal prisoners – those who have been incarcerated for decades for these ‘serious’, non-violent, non-contact offenses – really are not even motivated to leave prison any more. Many of them have nowhere to go, especially now. After five years, an inmate becomes an unwanted stranger to family and community. Nothing is waiting for them out there. They are felons. Particularly if they have been labeled ‘sex offenders’. They are toxic. No one will want anything to do with them. They will be unemployable. They will not easily find a place to live. They are pariahs. Prison has become their home, and dying here alone from some contagious virus – it’s not such a bad thing, really. Those they manage to speak to on the outside, tell them they’re better off inside. Freedom means nothing anymore.
Outside prison walls now, no one is free. Most cities are on lockdown. And those citizens that are clamoring for an end to it out there don’t realize that the virus doesn’t care about race, politics, economies or religions, and that the world is not what it was before. Demonstrations and placards and shouting slogans will not slow it down or stop it. The virus is an unknown quantity that is redefining what freedom is, what is important, what is profitable, redefining who we are as a society and who we’d like to be. We can look ahead to a vaccine but we don’t know enough about the corona family viruses to know if all a vaccine might do is slow down one mutation while another one develops. Like us, the virus is a living entity, competing for resources on this planet. Like us, it needs, above all, to survive. If it kills some of us to do so, so be it.
For many in the world outside prison walls, discovering what it means to lose freedom is difficult. They continue to gather and flock like misguided birds. People out there complain about having to stay inside their homes. They are antsy. Not being able to go outside. To go shopping. To go to a movie. To go to a restaurant. They’re getting it now. Yes. That’s what it feels like to be incarcerated. After less than a month, they can barely stand it. They’re protesting in the streets. They’re climbing the walls. Shouting at the politicians.
Imagine being forced to live like that for a year. For a decade, or two. Imagine staying in that confinement until death.
Too easily and too often, and for too many reasons, Americans send their fellow citizens into prison and banish them from society and deprive them of freedom. It used to be that only the most intractably violent among us was locked up. Now it’s hard to distinguish many in the inmate population from the rest of the ‘free’ citizenry, and has been so for a long time. No misdeed or moral infraction escapes severe punishment, sometimes made to last a lifetime.
The virus may change many things, but if it does not alter how our society views crime and punishment, it will have changed nothing crucial. Slowly in American society, freedom is becoming irrelevant, misunderstood, and even undesirable. All freedoms are being curtailed and the virus may just provide an excuse for that trend to continue and intensify. Maybe all of us should wear skeletal-invoking facemasks to mark the death of Constitutional rights. It’ll be like the Day of the Dead in Mexico. This social virus, the sickness that propels American society to demand some impossibly perfect ‘public safety’, is far worse and more lethal than the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a virus that kills the spirit. For this disease, there is no vaccine, no medical treatment, and no plasma infusion.
COVID-19 has brought us to the edge of a cliff. Hopefully, it will not push us over the edge but allow us instead to stop and have a good look around from a new vantage point at how we’ve gotten here. And if we’re really fortunate it will afford us all a chance to reflect on the meaning of freedom, of crime and punishment, and show us a way to get ourselves back to sanity.
For now, the lockdown continues.
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