Eden Fesseha, Zoë Hopkins and Ife Omidiran work with the Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Advocacy.
“Thank you all for the love. This matter is urgent. I have a timeline of April 30.” These were the final words in a letter written by Michael Mauney (aka Country) asking people to call the Massachusetts district attorney’s office in support of his early release. Country is currently incarcerated on a parole-eligible life sentence at Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk. Roughly one year ago, he had a heart attack, and he has since been diagnosed with heart disease. Right now, Country must be both hopeful and terrified. In light of the coronavirus outbreak inside Massachusetts Department of Corrections facilities, Country’s case may be screened for the possibility of an expedited release on parole. But if the parole board does not agree to his release, his underlying health conditions could make an encounter with COVID-19 lethal for him.
The rise of COVID-19 inside jails and prisons is terrifying for Country and many other incarcerated individuals. Incarcerated people, already contending with the dehumanizing conditions in prisons and jails, must now also contend with the very rapid spread of a disease from which they cannot defend themselves. As health experts, activists, and others predicted, prisons and jails have incontrovertibly become epicenters for the coronavirus. The rate of infection for people incarcerated in the New York City Department of Corrections is 8.72% as of May 27th, compared to the overall 2.50% infection rate in the city. Even worse off are federal prisons, where 70% of those detained have tested positive for COVID-19.
The very nature of prisons and jails has led to the massive scale of the outbreak within these institutions. They are overcrowded facilities where people are constantly sharing space, from bathrooms to dining halls to dormitories, so it is impossible to practice social distancing. Additionally, access to health care and medical/sanitary supplies is limited. For example, in a survey by The Marshall Project, of 24 states asked whether their jails and prisons had any ventilators, only Texas responded affirmatively. Furthermore, incarcerated people who contract COVID-19 must rely on the staff at prisons and jails — where medical neglect has long been reported — to respond to their needs.
Many have framed the spread of the coronavirus in prisons and jails as one of the many failures of a broken prison system. Yes, prisons fail incarcerated people and their families, and they have broken our sense of humanity by normalizing carceral violence. But as prisons and jails become hotbeds for the coronavirus, it is apparent that what we generally understand as their failures are embedded in their design. Incarceration tears people away from their communities and denies them meaningful connection. It is state violence that claims to be justice. It is a mechanism of violence in which physical death is omnipresent: The latest reports reveal that at least 4,980 people died in U.S. correctional facilities in 2014. It causes unimaginable trauma, wreaking havoc on the mental health of those incarcerated, sometimes leading them to suicide. We need a different approach that is not rooted in the carceral state, because the violence of prisons and jails is not incidental. Death — be it social, civil or physical — is fundamental to their existence, with incarcerated folks being cast to the periphery by a society that has deemed them beyond hope.
As the coronavirus has prevented the on-campus work that we usually do, the Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Advocacy is reimagining its support of incarcerated people during this time. Much of our recent action has centered around bail: In the hopes of enabling more people to physically leave jail, HOPE has compiled a list of bail funds to which we encourage people to donate. We have also been conducting call-a-thons to policymakers, advocating for early release for as many people as possible. On a more fundamental level, organizing during a pandemic has reaffirmed to us that anti-prison work is life-affirming work.
After all, even before the coronavirus crisis, prison abolitionists have acknowledged that prisons do more harm than good. The Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Advocacy is dedicated to working toward healing through education and transformative justice, a philosophy and practice that seeks to mitigate harm by examining it and intervening at its root cause. HOPE functions as two related but separate branches: the education program and the advocacy program. The education program sends Harvard students to tutor in local prisons and transitional living facilities. The advocacy program seeks to reduce and call attention to the harms of mass incarceration through direct work with community groups and different subprograms including Radical Books to Revolutionary Communities (a program that gives books to incarcerated people) and a scholarship program for people affected by mass incarceration. Ultimately, both arms of HOPE work together to center care instead of punishment, furthering our mission of rethinking justice as education and support, not criminalization.
As we work to address the harms of mass incarceration, particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, we are simultaneously committed to the long-term goal of abolition. We are committed to resisting language and logic that reinforce existing notions of criminality, like discussion of limiting release to “non-violent offenders”: Such language enables the idea that prison and its violences are acceptable punishment for some people, suggesting that justice is best served by locking those people up. It ignores the social and economic conditions that generate violent crime and the ways in which the carceral system actually creates more criminals. We support the fundraising efforts of organizations like Black and Pink aiming to get soap and other hygiene products to incarcerated individuals, because harm reduction is essential as long as people are still locked up. We support the efforts of some cities and states to release people early on a case-by-case basis, which is certainly a win for those released. But we also recognize that it is not enough to give people soap or to release only a small portion of those incarcerated. The COVID-19 crisis is highlighting the fact that prisons and jails do not keep us safe — they are sites of extraordinary, racialized violence and often, death. Piecemeal concessions and reforms will not change that.
The current global protests uplifting the Black Lives Matter movement have once again shed a light on state violence, in this case the violence of policing. These protests in the midst of the pandemic have once again brought renewed urgency to our work as prisons and police are codependent institutions that together form the carceral state. In HOPE, we envision a world without prisons and police. Prison abolition and transformative justice orient us to a future where all people, including incarcerated people, are deserving of compassion, love, and the right to live. A future where we respond to people who don’t practice social distancing by seeking to understand, not by calling the police to punish them with jail time. As this pandemic further shapes our lives, it’s clear that, rather than being an equalizer, it has laid existing inequalities bare. Now more than ever, we need radical imagination to bring about a new normal — one driven by community care and justice.
Image Credit: “Concertina Wire & Tower” by Steve Snodgrass is licensed under CC BY 2.0