Just published last week, Corridors of Contagion is a searing new book by Victoria Law, an author and freelance journalist focusing on the intersections of incarceration, gender, and resistance (and a contributor to Solitary Watch). Her previous books include Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reform, and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration, and her writings about prisons and other forms of confinement have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Wired, and many other publications. She is a co-founder of Books Through Bars-NYC and the zine Tenacious: Art and Writings by Women in Prison.

As the book cover notes, “Corridors of Contagion brings to light the experiences of five people incarcerated across the United States as they navigate the onset of the pandemic—and the many months, stretched into years, that followed. Journalist Victoria Law combines this storytelling with a trenchant analysis of the structural failures of the US carceral system: failures that made prisons uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks, from overcrowding to solitary confinement, from insufficient healthcare to life sentences…While the pandemic emergency has been declared over, we are continuing to learn more about the extent of its destruction. Corridors of Contagion reminds readers about both the particular horrors experienced by people in cages and the continued role of the US as the world’s prison nation.”

The following excerpt, published courtesy of the author and Haymarket Books, describes how solitary confinement became the default response to the pandemic in prisons and jails across the country. The use of solitary increased five-fold, with devastating impact on the health and sanity of the incarcerated people who endured it. Despite (or in part, because of) such measures, the rate of deaths due to COVID-19 was estimated to be six times higher in prisons and jails than in the U.S. population at large.

Corridors of Contagion is available in local bookstores and at Haymarket Books (where you will receive a 20% discount and a chance to directly support an outstanding independent publisher), Bookshop.org, and Amazon. — Jean Casella

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“It’s really somewhat comforting that everyone is living like me now,” Kwaneta reflected from her cell as spring turned to summer. If she stuck her arm through her cell’s small window, she could feel the sunlight heating her skin, but its beams never reached her face. She smelled the freshly cut grass from the lawn below and heard the songbirds, who woke her before the sun and temperatures rose. She saw feral cats who had learned that the bored women would feed them scraps from their trays through the windows. That month, yellow flowers bloomed in front of the building across from theirs, but she only knew about them from Jack, who yelled descriptions through their shared air vent. Inside her cell, the long-legged nurse could take three steps from her bed before she reached her steel door. Another three steps brought her back to the bed.

“This is like slowly being buried alive,” she told me. “Every day adds a shovel full of dirt.”

Texas holds more than three thousand people in administrative segregation or restrictive housing, the state’s terms for solitary confinement. More than five hundred of those people have been isolated for over a decade. Kwaneta had been in segregation for four years when COVID hit the United States.

The pandemic further shrunk her already-tiny world. Kwaneta and Jack stayed in their cells for months. To avoid the close contact of strip searches and escorts by barefaced guards, they refused the hour of recreation in an outdoor cage offered three times a week. They bathed in their sinks. But when Kwaneta reflected on that time, she realized that she had already become accustomed to staying in her cell for weeks, sometimes months. Officials frequently placed units on lockdown for a variety of reasons—security, lack of staffing, or even an incident as minor as a person on the telephone at an unauthorized time. Sometimes these lockdowns happened backto-back, with officials not even allowing one day of what might pass for normalcy in the prison within a prison.

She hoped that the national lockdown experience—and most people’s inability to cope with enforced isolation—would lead to widespread demands to end solitary confinement.

Meanwhile, she attempted to keep busy, writing letters and reading the many books that her family and friends had sent. Whenever she paused, her neurons filled the mental silence with recriminations and rebukes. “When you are in a concrete box, you’re forced to deal with your mind,” Kwaneta explained. “And your mind will conjure thoughts that scare you.” Her brain replayed every bad decision, every bad relationship, every regret. Drowning in the sea of guilt-laden reminisces pushed her from depression to anger. “Either you blame others and these mental silences transform to revenge fantasies or you internalize the blame, and those mental silences become self-harm fantasies,” she told me. Several times a day, she felt as if she were teetering on the edge. “Change the channel,” she told herself out loud, forcing her mind into a more distracting direction.

Kwaneta has seen what happens when people are unable to change the channel—from sheets fashioned into nooses to pools of blood on cell floors and walls. Guards nearly always respond with pepper spray. Then they handcuff the coughing and wheezing person before pushing them down the corridor to the unit’s medical clinic. There, they are stripped of their uniform, stained orange from the spray, issued a paper gown but no undergarments, and thrust into a cage where a guard watches their every movement. If they need toilet paper, they must ask the guard. If they are menstruating, the guard will give them a pad, but not underwear, forcing them to clench their thighs to prevent blood from trickling down their legs. To get a new pad, they must trade in the soiled one.

During her four years in segregation, Kwaneta counted seven women who succeeded in ending their lives.

Adding to her anxieties was the constant arrival of ambulances, each heralding yet another medical emergency that no one would explain. The ambulances reminded her that, locked away and unable to call home, she had no idea how her family was coping. She wrote letters, but worried that she might inadvertently transmit the virus from the prison to her aging, disabled mother, who was caring for her two daughters. She instructed her mother to put the letters in the icebox before opening them.

When letters arrived from home, she learned that her cousin, also a nurse, had contracted and nearly died from COVID. The two had been close, sometimes working together before Kwaneta’s imprisonment. The family’s early brush with pandemic mortality sent her into a spiral of dread. “My biggest fear isn’t my own death, but my loved ones,” she told me. “I had daymares about losing my mother.” She played out the scenario. A letter would come. She would beg for an emergency call home, hoping a sympathetic guard would be on duty. And who would take care of her youngest daughter?

The extended lockdown also led to smaller food portions. “I’ve never been so hungry in my life,” she recalled. “I had hunger pains for days.” That gnawing hunger made her realize her vulnerability inside prison. Her family had always ensured that she had enough money on her account to buy food at the commissary. She never had to rely solely on the meager prison meals. She had never had to barter sexual acts for food from a guard willing to take advantage of those who lacked outside support. But when the pandemic hit and the commissary closed, she realized that officials could starve them. It was a terrifying revelation.

Texas prisons began distributing masks in early April. The beige masks were sewn at the neighboring Hilltop women’s prison with cotton usually used for T-shirts and strings as stiff as shoelaces. Later, the prison would distribute blue surgical masks, which guards sometimes confiscated as contraband, either mistakenly telling women that they were not allowed to have them or demanding that they not wear the same blue masks as the guards themselves. But the preventive measure brought a trade-off, particularly for those in segregation who could only see a few feet past their cell door window and already had to strain to hear announcements through their solid metal doors and the surrounding commotion. To communicate, women had to yell through their doors and across the corridors, competing with the people with severe mental illnesses screaming incoherently, the din of cups or mirrors hitting the steel doors, and others bellowing their own conversations. Guards and other staff had to yell to be heard above the clamor—and they were not always successful.

During the brief period that guards wore masks—and occasionally face shields—hearing and understanding them became nearly impossible. If those in segregation were unable to hear staff, they missed whatever was on offer. “When the pill lady comes to our pod, she or the officer yells, ‘Pill line!’” Kwaneta explained. “You must be at the door waiting when she walks by. They don’t go backwards, meaning they will not return if you grab your water off the table and miss them.” Similarly, if a person was not fully dressed and at their door when meals were announced, guards would not give them a food tray.

By mid-April, some three hundred thousand people in prisons across the country were in some form of lockdown. Depending on the prison, they might be allowed outside for one or two hours. Otherwise, they were left to idle in their cells, feeling punished rather than protected. The number on lockdown encompassed only people in state or federal prisons who were confined to a cell. It did not count those who had been ordered to sit on their beds in dormitories or the hundreds of thousands in local jails, immigrant detention, or youth prisons.

When summer rolled around, many prisons had been on lockdown for weeks, if not months. In some prisons, administrators even used solitary units to quarantine and isolate those who might be sick. In Arkansas, the prisons’ director instructed the wardens of the state’s twenty prisons to “prepare a portion/area of your punitive isolation areas to house inmates effected [sic] by the corona virus.” But, noted Jennifer James, an assistant professor at the University of California San Francisco Institute for Health and Aging, “lockdowns are not designed to do public health work, they’re designed to punish. That’s really debilitating for incarcerated people.”

Years before the coronavirus catapulted the term lockdown into the public vocabulary, critics, including psychiatric and public health experts, had condemned solitary confinement as torture. In 2011, their criticisms were bolstered by United Nations special rapporteur Juan Mendez, who stated that solitary confinement exceeding fifteen days constitutes torture.

Despite the growing awareness about the harms of extreme isolation, the practice grew. In 2012, more than 89,000 people were isolated in jails and prisons on any given day. By 2019, 122,840 people, or over 6 percent of the country’s jail and prison populations, were locked in their cells for twenty-two or more hours each day.

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In 2020, prison and jail administrators turned to solitary as their primary means of prevention. At first glance, the practice might make sense. After all, cities, states, and nations had shuttered schools, workplaces, and businesses in an effort to encourage people to stay away from one another. But unlike people sheltering at home, those behind bars could not escape human contact or deadly respiratory particles. For some, lockdown increased their dangers. In January, “Nancy,” a trans woman in a federal men’s prison, was moved into a new cell. Initially, she wasn’t worried. She already knew her cellmate, who had never hassled her. Once they were in the same cell, however, he repeatedly pressured her for sex. She dodged him by staying off the unit—attending her work assignment and programs. The COVID lockdown cut off those escape routes. During the next several weeks, he raped her multiple times. Nancy never reported these attacks. Although the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act mandated that prison officials investigate all sexual harassment and assault allegations, these complaints were rarely addressed. If she lodged a complaint, staff would place her in solitary and she would face further danger from her attacker and his friends. The rapes ended when he was moved to another unit for a work assignment. But Nancy’s respite lasted less than a day. Her next cellmate, enraged at being housed with a trans woman and boiling with resentment from his own six years in prison, turned her into his personal punching bag. The beatings stopped after he was placed in quarantine just before his release. Nancy remained in prison and hoped that her next roommate would be less abusive.

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In all prisons, including those in which people are locked down supposedly for their own protection, staff remained a constant threat of transmission. Even when prison administrators attempted to stave off this possibility, other agencies undermined their efforts. In April 2020, Arkansas prisons mass-tested both staff and incarcerated people. But the state’s health department issued a memo instructing asymptomatic staff who had tested positive to continue reporting to work. Four days later, 826 incarcerated people and thirty-three staff tested positive. Later, the Arkansas prison system, which incarcerated roughly sixteen thousand people, had the nation’s tenth-largest outbreak. Similarly, Texas prison officials had initially ordered staff to report to work, even if they had been exposed or tested positive, so long as they were asymptomatic. From the start of the pandemic, health experts stressed that medical isolation should not mirror punitive solitary. They warned that isolating people would deter them from reporting symptoms, cause additional stress, prevent identifying those who had COVID, and ultimately worsen the crisis. Health professionals urged instead that quarantine and isolation be overseen by medical staff and that the patient be allowed their belongings and daily access to medical and mental health staff. Jails and prisons that could not follow these recommendations needed to decarcerate to prevent COVID outbreaks.

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“Solitary confinement has significant medical consequences,” noted Eric Reinhart, the political anthropologist who has studied COVID outbreaks in jails and prisons. People locked in cells frequently cannot flag the attention of the officer on duty. Many people told me that the cell’s emergency call button, if one existed, had long been broken. Their only way to call for help was to bang on the door and shout. Sometimes others in neighboring cells would join in, hoping to create a cacophony that could not be ignored. But, like so much about the goings-on behind bars, there is no data about acute incidents in solitary that go unaddressed. Even when call buttons work, assistance might not arrive in time. Even when staff do respond, they may not actually help. For several years before the pandemic, I had been corresponding with Heather, a trans woman incarcerated at a federal men’s prison. Heather had been physically and sexually assaulted by prior cellmates and had been pressing, unsuccessfully, to be transferred to a women’s prison. When the prison was locked down—first as a COVID prevention measure and then in response to the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the nation—she told me that she considered herself lucky that her cellmate treated her with respect. She turned her energies from transferring to a women’s prison to preparing for her anticipated release date, peppering me weekly with questions about housing options for formerly incarcerated trans women in New York City. In October, I stopped hearing from her. Wondering if she had been transferred, I looked her up on the federal prison database. I was stunned to find her listed as deceased. No cause was given. Shortly after, I began receiving e-messages from her cellmate, who told me that Heather had been in increasing pain all month.

“Whenever Heather tried to get medical’s attention, they wouldn’t even look through the door,” he told me. He assumed that she had had a stroke, but the few times they were able to cajole a nurse into examining her, the nurse ignored anything he said. On the day that Heather died, he told me, a nurse had made rounds in the housing unit offering flu vaccines. Both he and Heather attempted to tell him about her chest pains, but the nurse did nothing. Later that afternoon, when Heather’s chest pain worsened, her cellmate hit the emergency call button. It worked—and brought the officer on duty to their cell. The officer took Heather’s plight seriously and called for medical help. That brought a nurse, who took her blood pressure and pronounced her fine. One hour later, Heather began throwing up blood and bile. Medical staff gave her acetaminophen and a shot of Maalox, but did not bring her to the medical unit for further examination. Several hours later, Heather collapsed and died. Another man at that prison wrote me later. His cellmate had witnessed medical staff stopping at Heather’s cell throughout the day, then leaving without having done anything. He himself had noticed the deadly hour-long lapse between hearing the alarm from her cell and emergency services arriving. As far as I know, Heather did not have a next of kin who could press to learn the cause of her death, let alone attempt to hold the federal prison system—including its medical staff—accountable for its inaction. Instead, Heather became another statistic among the 505 deaths in federal prisons that year.

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