Everything Felt Like a Punishment

On March 24, 2020, the Illinois Department of Corrections reported its first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in three facilities: Stateville Correctional Center, Sheridan Correctional Center and North Lawndale Adult Transition Center. It wasn’t long before the coronavirus spread, killing nearly 100 people incarcerated in Illinois correctional facilities.

The Weekly sent incarcerated students in Northwestern University's Prison Education Program at Stateville questions about their experiences during the pandemic and feelings about the vaccinations. Thirteen wrote back. All knew at least one person who had contracted the virus. Four who responded said they tested positive for COVID-19; four others experienced symptoms but were not tested at the time.

“I have seen people I laughed with behind these walls die within the last year because of this virus,” wrote thirty-five-year-old Benard McKinley.

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Incarcerated individuals are five and one-half times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 and three times more likely to die from it than the general public, according to the University of Chicago Law Review Online. Among the 1,091 incarcerated at Stateville, 303 have tested positive for coronavirus and at least thirteen have died.

In an effort to mitigate prison infection rates, Gov. J.B. Pritzker began granting clemencies in March 2020.

In January, Pritzker announced that corrections workers and incarcerated individuals would be included along with residents over sixty-five, first responders and education workers in Phase 1b of the state’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan, which began on January 25. The Illinois Department of Corrections began vaccinating prisoners in mid-February.

Despite receiving educational materials about the vaccine, distrust of prison officials and strained relationships with prison medical services complicate some the thirteen students’ feelings about getting vaccinated against COVID-19.

But while they are not entirely enthusiastic about the vaccine, they fear the alternative is worse.

“For me it’s not a matter of trust per say,” William La’Roy Peeples Jr., fifty-six, wrote in his response. “It is about me feeling safer taking it, than trapped behind steel and concrete with the virus running rampant and having zero protection from it.”

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Cloutier said that until recently those who were showing symptoms were sent to an area of the prison known as F-House. That’s a problem, he said, because F-House was also where Stateville's kitchen workers, who prepare food for the entire institution, were incarcerated.

It had been closed in 2016 because of health and safety concerns—none of which were rectified, according to the watchdog group John Howard Association of Illinois—but was reopened in May as a COVID-19 isolation unit.

"Initially they gave us disinfectant and bleach every day,” said Peeples. “But they soon stopped doing it, or when they did it was so diluted it had no real effect."

Most troubling for some of the thirteen Stateville students is the risk prison staff pose. According to them, staff were not required to get tested for COVID-19 until January. And now, some are refusing to get vaccinated.

“I asked a female correctional officer today was she gonna take the vaccine if offered,” wrote McKinley. “She replied she had already turned it down.”

Stateville Correctional Center and IDOC did not respond to repeated requests for additional comment or information.

“By not adhering to their own rules proves my life is not their priority,” said forty-year-old LeShun Smith, “the staff brought the virus in.”

A recent study found that once COVID-19 enters an ICE detention facility, it can infect between seventy-two and ninety-nine percent of detainees within three months. While Illinois prisons may not be as crowded as detention facilities, the epidemiological risk factors faced by people incarcerated by the state are still staggering. IDOC reported a statewide prison population of more than 29,000 as of December 31, 2020. More than half of those incarcerated in Illinois are Black; racism has created systemic barriers to health care access and placed higher disease burdens on Black Americans, making them more susceptible to contracting, and dying, from the virus.

“Long before the pandemic, medical treatment in prison were way less than subpar,” Smith said. “Even after exposure they continue letting us fall by the wayside because we’re convicted criminals. They believe that our conviction nullifies our rights as U.S. citizens.”

Read Benard McKinley's letter Read more letters ⤵︎

While prisons are required to provide medical care for incarcerated people, it is not unusual for incarcerated people to receive inadequate health care that has at times resulted in death. The problem is compounded by the fact that forty percent of incarcerated people have chronic health conditions.

Travis Dortch, fifty-three, who has Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, said he gets his medicine late, sometimes going weeks without it.

“I would complain—but my will and spirit is broken to just have the little I have,” he said.

Many prisons require requests to go to a medical unit be made in writing, which prison officials can take up to five days to respond to, according to the Prison Fellowship. Time is something those infected with COVID-19 do not have.

Broderick Hollins Sr., forty, was hospitalized for COVID in May before being moved to Stateville’s medical unit for twenty-seven days. He remains on medication as he recovers but said he still fears for his life.

Hollins wrote that nurses are among the only Stateville prison employees who enforce mask-wearing and that when individuals held there are tested for coronavirus, the nasal swabbing often is not done properly. But he remains hopeful that he will make it to his June 2022 parole date healthy, even though he believes prison officials consider those held at Stateville to be “just money, not humans with loved ones.”