I, like many other people currently incarcerated, thought that COVID-19 was some made up apparition created by the government as some sort of paradigm only for the outside world, like a matrix. Take the red pill if you don’t believe, go back to living life in oblivion as they would have liked for you to believe; or take the blue pill and believe that you must play an important role in some fictitious scheme: the task – do your part to assure everyone’s safety around you. It’s highly likely that the reason for our reluctance to believe was due to our lack of physical connection to the outside world. Nonetheless, as the numbers of loved ones perished and this awful disease began to swell, nonbelievers such as myself made a detour and took the blue pill. Our fear of what was to come gripped our rationality.
Questions of what part we must play to mitigate the aspere results of COVID-19. But the only part accessible was to wear a mask and pray for my loved ones and everyone else around me, and hope that we all got through this as safe as possible. But it was too much to ask.
The prison’s administration began stringently warning us about properly covering our mouths and noses. At these warnings, my eyebrows would occasionally furrow in confusion, as their warnings seemed to convey vague cautionary warnings and provisions only circumscribed around us. Saying things like: “We would like to go home to our families, so if you’re caught improperly wearing a mask you will be dealt with accordingly.” These concerns are relatively discernible. But I reflected on what was said later, because I’ve never been too quick on the draw in understanding the ambiguous comments of certain people, made at certain times. However, the comments made no sense to me, rather the sense they made was that my being was as tedious as the excess grass cut from the ground during a routine lawn mowing. I mean, I would hope my life was seen as pertinent, despite my circumstances that is. But my life aside, what about those serving time for non-violent offenses who are due home sooner than some? Why wasn’t the comment used in vice versa? And instead of the administration warning us to cover our mouths, why can’t we express the same feelings of our concern of staff infecting us with a disease that only they could transfer to individuals who have been incarcerated for more than two years? I thought we were to walk through this together, not walk on one another.
I’ve been incarcerated going on fourteen years and, as of December the 21st, I tested positive for the coronavirus. I don’t understand – fourteen years I’ve been confined behind barbed fences and stone walls – and I have some questions. Like, how’d I contract something like this if I was stripped of the title of being a member of society?
For four or five months the NBA ran their league inside of what they termed as their bubble. The idea was so successful that the season concluded with zero positive COVID-19 tests. After fourteen years, I should have been protected by my own bubble, twelve fold. So who’s truly at fault in my contracting the virus… is it me? Or is it the prison’s greed, the prison’s ineptitude, or its neglect to see inmates as human beings because of their disillusioned power? I’ll just be frank: when you’re not allowed alcohol pads, bleach, but handed diluted chemicals, I would say I don’t think it’s me.
If I’m told when to lock down, given times of when to wash, when to eat, possessions I can and can’t have, what kind of health services I’m required to receive, what then is the prison system actually doing to guarantee an inmate’s safety, besides the unfair rules regularly implemented, designed to keep us following a schedule equipped to their shift changes? What are they doing?
I will say this: I’ve always known they cared little about my life, I know they’re okay with turning a blind eye to the childish and malignant misconduct of prison staff. I’ll give you a description of this behaviour. A corrections officer once took a plexiglass mirror that I purchased from commissary and broke it for reasons I still can’t even find to excuse his means. In 2015, I learned from a prison officer that the investigator at Mansfield Correctional Institution had spread a rumor that I claimed I was an institution snitch, which placed me in peril. In 2017 at Rosa Correctional Institution, an officer sat in front of me and ignorantly told me that my child would inherit my prison possessions. In this instance, I wasn’t too offended, because I don’t have kids. What brought on his aspere words was my failure to read a waiver form before signing it. This insignificant error caused his heart to reveal hate that had been brewing in him for years. In the middle of 2020, the mailroom staff of the facility that I’m currently located lost evidence that I intended to use in a litigation. I was given vague explanations and threatening responses to my complaints. The prison complex’s ineptness to handling human beings has been fully exposed, completely, in this year of COVID-19.
After contracting the disease, originally I notified the national guardsman (who participated in going unit to unit checking inmate vitals) that I was having awkward headaches, headaches I’d never felt before in my life. Afterwards, my name was taken down, however, nothing was done. Four days later, my symptoms worsened – rough headaches, coughs, fatigue, dizziness, chills, and pain in my back. I informed the institution staff again and I was then tested. Three days later, I was sent to quarantine after the positive results. It took four days for someone to acknowledge my complaints.
The nurse who tested me seemed anxious, and though I was already feeling horrible, her worry made me uneasy. I asked her: “Are there any COVID cases inside the prison?” Her response left me in surprise: “There’s a lot of cases.” I was shocked because we hadn’t been given an update by the institution, which is something they’d done early on when the outbreak began in March. Because of their lack of transparency, I didn’t know what was going on with me until I informed staff that something was wrong. Other inmates kept their symptoms to themselves, but I wonder, for seven days I resided among other inmates before the institution decided to quarantine me. The regard for those other inmates was completely ignored by staff.
But then I began to question their all-around actions; how they were handling the sudden outbreak in prison, with their serving our meals in freezing weather as if we were in Russia, or their ignoring the fact that positive cases had cellmates who weren’t being tested. Then I realized, though there was nothing they could do about our conditions, they cared little about the spread and more about concealing the numbers being revealed to the public.
They knew there was no comprehensible way inmates could bring the virus in to the institution, but their selfishness and inculcating misconduct of routine cover-ups blinded the staff to such fallible conduct. Five days in quarantine, I saw no nurse, and when one did appear on the sixth day, he assumed those who were back there in quarantine were without symptoms, how wrong he was; two were without symptoms, but six others were in sickened conditions. If I’m subject to catching this virus again, and the lack of care and prudence still exist, then I should just start writing up my last will and testament.
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