From Truthout:
March 11 marks the fifth anniversary of the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, urging countries to “double down” on protective actions. But for incarcerated people, many of those protections remained out of reach. When COVID-19 hit the United States, the millions of people incarcerated here were dealt structural blows from every direction. From the virus’s rapid spread behind bars, to the denial of adequate care, to authorities’ use of COVID as a justification for even more punitive policies, incarcerated people faced a devastating intersection of disease and systemic abandonment. In many quarters, the story of that abandonment has been quickly forgotten and even erased.
Thankfully, investigative journalist Victoria Law, a longtime Truthout contributing writer and author of five books (including Prison By Any Other Name, which she coauthored with me), has stepped in to ensure that the history of COVID’s rise behind bars is meticulously and trenchantly documented. Her powerful new book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration, is a profound chronicle of systemic neglect, structural violence, multitentacled injustice and inspiring resistance undertaken in times of great peril. In this interview, Law discusses how this shattering chapter in history has impacted people behind bars — and how they have responded with action.
Maya Schenwar: The initial period of COVID was a time when so many norms went out the window, including for those of us here in the outside world. But many people in prison experienced the pandemic in unique and amplified ways. In Corridors of Contagion, you chronicle some of those stories. What were people experiencing inside that might be different from what many of us experienced out here?
Continue reading here.
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