In the early days of February 2020, news about the novel coronavirus started to spread at Wallkill Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in New York’s Hudson Valley. Marcus—who at the time was serving the last few months of a thirteen-year sentence—first heard about COVID-19, like many of his peers, from one of the TVs in his housing unit’s dayroom. He remembers hearing stories about infections spreading in China and Italy.
A few weeks later, on March 5, 2020, the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) issued the first of a series of memoranda announcing new measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 in New York prison facilities. The first memo, barely a page long, minimized the threat represented by COVID-19. It stated that “80% of infected individuals have very mild illness,” and simply recommended that incarcerated people themselves adopt a few personal hygiene tips, from washing their hands frequently to avoiding touching their eyes. Not even ten days later, on March 14, came a memorandum signed by then-commissioner Anthony J. Annucci, announcing the suspension of in-person visits in all New York prisons for a month.
Marcus still vividly remembers how the mood in the facility shifted following the announcement. By March, he said, both TVs in his unit’s dayroom were constantly broadcasting COVID-related news, and the growing infection rate in the state had become the main topic of conversation for people at Wallkill. “It was just like every hour the numbers were rising, rising, rising: this is how much people were dying,” he said. “And once people were seeing that, then it started to get through their minds: ‘Oh, this is something that we should take seriously.’ So now you got guys arguing about how everybody should be wearing masks, how everybody should be wearing gloves, how the officers need to be wearing this.”
Marcus is one of over twenty formerly incarcerated individuals whom we interviewed in depth about spending that first pandemic year behind prison walls. Our participants’ accounts document how prisons and jails in New York, as in other states around the country, quickly became major epicenters of COVID-19—with several correctional facilities, including Rikers, recording some of the largest single-site outbreaks nationwide.
There was nothing surprising about jails and prisons in New York, and around the country, turning into major hot spots of infection from COVID-19. Public health experts had warned early on in the crisis that under conditions of such close confinement, prison facilities were bound to become epicenters of virus transmission. That was what Karl experienced firsthand at Otisville Correctional Facility, a medium-security facility located in Orange County, New York. Otisville is known for housing a large population of elderly people, who are likely to have multiple chronic health issues. During those months, Karl said, older incarcerated people were often among the most zealous in trying to protect themselves against contracting COVID. Yet everybody remained exposed to infection, no matter what they did:
In Otisville, there are no cells. It’s a dorm setting. You have multiple people living right next to each other. Sometimes there are small barriers between the beds, but it’s not really a full barrier. It’s not like you’re closed in a room from each other. I was on the south side, in one of the middle dorms, and we had double bunks. There was no real social distancing. There were certain people who tried to socially distance on their own. But then most of the times, we live in the same room, so how can we social distance? Like, OK, we don’t sit at the table in the dayroom together, but when I go back to my cube, you’re right there. You cough, you sneeze, you fart, I smell it. What real social distancing can you do?
Incarcerated New Yorkers not only were facing a higher risk of infection, but were also more vulnerable to developing severe COVID-19 due to the higher incidence of underlying illnesses. This was the case for Robert and Josh, who served over three decades in New York prisons before they were released in the winter of 2022. Robert, in his late sixties at the time of the interview, was suffering from multiple chronic conditions, including diabetes and hypertension. Josh was in his seventies by the time he came home and was dealing with the consequences of glaucoma.
In their interviews, the two men described what it was like to seek medical care inside prison, even before the pandemic. In most facilities, Josh explained, a nurse was only available some days during the week, usually just a few hours in the morning; to be seen, one had to sign up the night before for “sick call,” which sometimes would take place as early as 4:00 a.m.:
Sick call is on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, so if you are dying on Wednesday, Saturday, or Sunday, well, you better be really dying, because if you put in for a medical emergency sick call, and the nurse doesn’t think it is an emergency, they are going to write you up. You can even get a $5 ticket. One day, I was in Otisville, I don’t know what it was, but I started to get spots all over my legs, and they started to actually bleed. So, I go to my officer, and I am like, ‘Listen, man, I want to go to sick call.’ So, it was on a Tuesday night, and I am listening to him on the phone talking to the nurse: ‘Is this really an emergency?’ And I am saying, ‘Yes, I want to be seen.’ So, I went up there, and she was like, ‘Oh, this is just a rash. It could have waited until the morning.’ I got a $5 ticket for that and fifteen days’ loss of commissary.
Similarly, Robert told us about the challenges he faced every time he needed to see an outside specialist for his diabetes, which had become more severe starting in the early 2000s. “The biggest problem inside prison is that everything is, ‘Here’s ibuprofen,’ ‘Here’s the Tylenol pill,’ or, you know, a Benadryl,” he explained. “It’s never, ‘Let me send you out to see an outside doctor.’ And even when they’re sending you to a specialist, and then the specialist will recommend them to do something, they are not doing it.” Between the substandard care that was provided by the prison medical system and the unhealthy food that Robert was forced to eat, his health deteriorated rapidly: “I was thirty years old when I went in. By the time I got to be forty-five, I was having all kinds of problems: hypertension, prediabetes, arthritis in this joint, that joint. By the time I was fifty-five, I was screwed.”
Once the pandemic hit, this same failing system was suddenly tasked with dealing with an unprecedented medical crisis. In a way, Josh and Robert explained, it simply continued to operate like it always did: “as a Band-Aid fix.” Several interviewees recalled receiving insufficient care, or being refused medical attention altogether, after developing COVID-like symptoms. Both Robert and Karl recounted how no doctor ever visited symptomatic individuals who had been quarantined at Otisville or Green Haven Correctional Facility (a New York state prison in Stormville) during the early months of the pandemic. While Karl had relatively mild symptoms, some of those who had been quarantined with him were visibly sick: “They were vomiting, going to the bathroom on themselves, couldn’t even get up out of the bed to use the bathroom. That’s how sick they were.” Still, he continued, “the most that health staff would do was to come and take your temperature, and if you said you had a headache, they would give you some Tylenol. That was the extent of the care you got.”
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While Josh never contracted COVID, the lapse in treatment he experienced during the last year of his incarceration had a severe impact on his health. “From 2011 to 2020, I had been going out of the prison for treatment for my eye,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden, it stopped. When I came home [in February 2022], I was going blind in my right eye. I lost 90 percent of vision. I had to get surgery for both my eyes. And the doctor was like, ‘If they had continued the treatment, you could have saved the eye. Now you are lucky if you’ve got another four or five years.’”
Since coming home, both men have been trying to make up for decades of poor medical care, unhealthy living conditions, and low-quality food, all of which had become even worse during the last stretch of their incarceration due to the disruptions caused by COVID. For Josh, that meant spending most of his time at doctors’ appointments: “I went to so many doctor’s appointments in this last year that I can’t go to the doctor until April because my insurance won’t pay for it. I’m serious. If I show you the schedule of doctors I went to, it’s, like, ridiculous. And it’s just, like, you know, more medications. I’m on so much medication now. It’s, like, pathetic. It really is. And it’s, like, ‘Why couldn’t I get that care in there when I’m under your care and custody?’”
Beyond the organizational features of prison life, it was the intrinsic logic of carceral governance that made it all but impossible for incarcerated people to receive authentic care during the COVID-19 pandemic. As many of our interviewees told us, this health crisis did not radically transform but rather reinforced carceral practices of oppression and dehumanization.
Several reported that during the early months of the pandemic, those who contracted COVID-19 were being transferred to special housing unit (SHU) cells in lieu of medical quarantine. When Karl fell sick with COVID-19 in April 2020, during the first wave of infections at Otisville, he was quarantined under conditions that he described as closely resembling those of solitary confinement:
I woke up one night with a fever, chills. I was hot one minute, cold the next. So, I went to sick call that morning. They took my temperature. I had 106 temperature. They quarantined me right away, but where they quarantined me was the problem. [They put me] in their box. The room had the old toilet and sink together, but it looked like it hadn’t been cleaned or maintained as it should. It was horrible. The windowsill was full of dirt, garbage, and debris. It was unhygienic. It was dirty. . . . I had limited access to shower, because it depended on which officer was working. They treated us like we were in trouble, and we were in the box. We had no access to hot water. We could not make soup, tea, or coffee, because you had to depend on the officer to bring you a bowl or a cup of hot water. And if they felt like it, they brought it, but they usually didn’t get it. Most officers treated us like we were in trouble and being punished. We were sick.
Even when COVID health measures were finally put in place, they were often applied in such a way that made clear that their primary purpose was not to promote the safety or well-being of the incarcerated population but rather to further discipline and harass them. Karl recounted how social-distancing rules in the mess hall quickly turned into a “tactic to harass people.” At Otisville, he said, nobody was taking the temperatures of people coming into the mess hall, corrections officers often failed to wear their masks, and several “civilians” routinely came to work with flu-like symptoms. Yet, officers were quick to jump on incarcerated people for not respecting social distance while waiting in line to get their food or for sitting too close to each other at dining tables.
None of that felt particularly surprising or new to Robert: “In all the facilities I have been in, for the most part, that’s the culture. Prisoners are treated as less than human. So COVID is just something new that they are now able to hold over the prison population’s head. That never fails to happen, you know, that we have something that is out of our control that is used against us. It’s leverage.”
Our interviewees denounced the extraordinary conditions they faced during the COVID-19 crisis—but most also emphasized how the neglect and abandonment they experienced was nothing new to them. Even as COVID has largely receded in prisons and jails throughout New York, incarcerated people are still forced to endure debilitating conditions with long-term impacts on their health. The pandemic simply reinforced logics of carceral control, ultimately intensifying the entanglement of imprisonment, disability, and chronic illness amid the ongoing US carceral crisis. As Robert put it: “Prison was still prison. The oppression continued.”
Adapted from How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic, edited by Mara Mills, Harris Kornstein, Faye Ginsburg, and Rayna Rapp, reprinted with permission from NYU Press.
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