While prison officials insist they’re doing their best in the face of an unprecedented crisis, Governor Greg Abbott has mostly ignored the pandemic inside the Texas prison system.
By Michael Barajas
May 13, 2020
Two months ago, as the threat of COVID-19 began to rapidly alter life on the outside, Sam says changes were happening more slowly inside the Wynne Unit, a state prison in Huntsville, where he’s currently incarcerated. Even as cities banned mass gatherings and told people to stay home, life in lockup remained mostly the same. That is, until late March, when the first Texas prisoners and prison employees began testing positive for the novel coronavirus. Sam remembers that officials banned activities like basketball at recreation at about the same time they started blocking visitors. Then came clumsy attempts at social distancing in a place designed to pack people together. At one point, corrections officers forced inmates to spread out in the chow hall tables even after cramming them all together in the line for food. “It’s kind of silly, but there’s really no way social distancing can be accomplished in this environment unless they removed half the inmates,” Sam wrote in a recent letter.
Sam, whose real name I’m not using to protect him from retaliation, was one of several incarcerated people who wrote to me in recent weeks suspecting they had COVID-19 but weren’t counted in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s (TDCJ) tally. Some say that’s because staff didn’t take their symptoms seriously early on, while others, like Sam, claim they hid symptoms to avoid medical isolation—a type of solitary confinement where prisoners claim they’re often denied basic amenities like cups or blankets. Sam says the majority of the 53 men in his dorm showed signs of infection but concealed it from prison staff, opting instead to wait out the potentially deadly virus on their own rather than risk a trip to solitary.
