The vote-counting is mercifully nearly done, but another counting, a far grimmer one, continues unabated: the daily tallying of coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
The country’s two initial rampant hotspots — nursing homes and prisons — are being hit once again by a tsunami of infections, and COVID-19 is again killing old people trapped in institutions that do not have the funding or the political attention to properly protect their wards.
For my column last month, I interviewed Joe Garcia, a man serving a life sentence in San Quentin State Prison in California, about the way in which COVID-19 has changed daily life for incarcerated people. He spoke of the interplay between the spottily-enforced protocols instituted by the prison’s administration to prevent transmission of the coronavirus and the unofficial norms of behavior that the men behind bars actually follow. In today’s column, I continue sharing Garcia’s insights on life in prison in the time of the pandemic.
Garcia’s first parole hearing will come in 2029, when the state of California will consider whether to set him free on account of a 2017 law that allows for the release of people “who are 60 of age or older and who have served a minimum of 25 years of continuous incarceration.” The coronavirus crisis, devastating as it was for correctional facilities in general and San Quentin in particular, had one silver lining: it supercharged already existing efforts to decarcerate the country. While Garcia is far from impressed with the pace of releases from San Quentin so far, he is more encouraged by what he perceives to be a changed attitude on the part of parole boards.
“It’s obvious that the parole board system is streamlined right now,” he says. “It’s not so much that they’re being lenient — they just used to be overzealous with certain people sometimes and prohibit them from getting parole. I think they’ve loosened up on that kind of mentality. They’re allowing a lot more people to be found suitable (for release). From March until now there’s probably 20 guys that I knew well, talked with every day and relied on them for all kinds of stuff, and those guys are gone. They were all lifers. They were found suitable and they’re out on the streets right now. That to me is a beautiful thing.”
San Quentin is still overcrowded, and social-distancing measures effectively consist of lockdowns and the same kind of isolation that prisons around the world use as a form of punishment for those they find to be recalcitrant. Garcia, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 this summer, does not actually mind the isolation.
“When I was put on quarantine, I had almost two months alone in the cell, which was the first time I’d been alone in years. Now I’m again alone in the cell. I’m a life sentence, and all I really ask of them is to leave me alone in this cell so I can be by myself and not have to worry about another person. I’m a germaphobe and a neat freak. So even without the coronavirus, just sharing a sink and a toilet with somebody else who doesn’t disinfect and clean everything all the time is really grating on me. And then of course in terms of mental health, when you have cellmates, they want to talk to you all day. So I prefer being alone in a cell,” he says.
That is not to say, however, that Garcia seeks solitude at all times. He has found a calling in journalism, working for years for the San Quentin News, the country’s most celebrated prison newspaper, and now serving as the Journalism Guild Chairperson in a facility that also boasts a magazine and the Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted Ear Hustle podcast.
Journalism has allowed him to methodically investigate something he’d always felt was there: the sense of community that people who are imprisoned together develop. “This is probably the biggest change that’s happened in me as a person,” Garcia explains. “It’s the way that we interact with each other and the way that we care about each other. I committed a murder, I went to prison, and, unbelievably, I see the good nature that all humans inherently have, which I’d never believe in before I came to prison. I always thought that everyone in prison was a scumbag. And then I came in (and found) guys who are gang members, murderers, drug dealers, what have you, and yet there’s so much good in them still. Don’t get me wrong — most of the stuff that gets glorified in the media does happen to some degree. There is violence, there are stabbings, there are rapes. But they happen at such a small level. The big picture is more that of a community.”
“People are realizing the fallacy of their old ways. There’s so many guys who start looking at themselves and think, ‘How did I end up here?’ And they actually do start fixing themselves. And if you can imagine the lack of education and the lack of all the privileges so many people have — that’s a really uphill battle to actually start trying to fix yourself. I mean, you have millionaires out there who go to therapy two or three times a week. And the idea of fixing themselves is an uphill battle for them. So imagine what it’s like for us to try and fix ourselves.”
Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of Journalism at UMass Amherst. He writes a monthly column on immigration and incarceration. He can be contacted at razvan@umass.edu