Left in the Dark: COVID Behind Bars

“To be slammed down in prison is normal, but our treatment this past year has been inhumane. From the start, we were treated as if we had an infectious disease, even though the officers were the ones bringing COVID to us — we don’t go anywhere.” As this opening sentence suggests, “Left in the Dark: COVID Behind Bars,” assembled in the digital magazine The Drift, presents short first-person accounts of the experiences of American inmates during the first and second waves of the pandemic. These testimonials highlight the worsening material conditions of people behind bars.

April Harris, from the California Institute for Women, describes the experience of quarantining in solitary confinement after testing positive for COVID, with limited access to necessities such as showers or even masks, surrounded by the harrowing sounds of others in quarantine screaming or begging to be released. Fear of quarantine compelled inmates to hide symptoms from guards, further fueling the spread of the virus in overcrowded cells.

At the Washington Corrections Center, Christopher Blackwell’s experience of neglect — which led to up to 90% of his unit contracting the virus — made him realize that his life was deemed inconsequential by wider society. Meanwhile, prisoners like Arthur Corey Devon at the Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York and Joel Castón at the District of Columbia Jail in Washington, D.C., affirm their determination to resist pandemic conditions. Devon continues his activism through the Inmate Liaison Committee (ILC), an organization advocating for prisoners’ human rights, while Castón draws strength from his spirituality.

These short, diaristic COVID prison stories reveal the harsh reality of inmates trapped in unsafe conditions, abandoned by an unsympathetic administration as a virus spreads. At the same time, they highlight the inmates’ agency through storytelling, as their first-person accounts capture their struggle to maintain their humanity in a society that sees them as second-class citizens.