The following article is the latest piece supported by Solitary Watch’s Ridgeway Reporting Project, written by Abraham Santiago, now an Intensive Care Unit clinical technician, author, and advocate. In this piece, Santiago, who spent 20 years incarcerated in Connecticut’s prison system, reports from his personal experience working in the prison’s medical unit, risking his life to care for sick people during Covid-19. Below is an excerpt of the article. You can find the full feature on Stat.

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I doubt people outside prison walls give a thought to what happens when one gets sick or old behind bars. Do they wonder who nurses the sick and the injured, who holds the hands of the critically ill and dying in prisons? 

In Connecticut state prisons, much of that work falls to certified nursing assistants who are incarcerated themselves. I was one of them: While incarcerated at Connecticut’s maximum security prison, MacDougall-Walker, I trained, and became, a CNA. For two of my 19 years in prison, I was a caregiver inside the prison infirmary. 

I was serving as a CNA during one of the worst prison health care crises in U.S. history. On March 10, 2020, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont signed declarations invoking both a civil preparedness emergency and a public health emergency in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Days later, the state went into lockdown. 

By the early fall of 2020, with the pandemic raging, the Connecticut Department of Corrections (DOC) announced that a medical isolation unit used to care for Covid-19 positive, symptomatic people would be moved from Northern Correctional Institution to MacDougall. It became the central hub for prisoners with Covid-19 in the state. What followed was nothing short of a public health catastrophe. By the spring of 2023, nearly 12,000 prisoners contracted the disease, and 30 men had died. Of those 30, many took their last breaths in the infirmary at MacDougall-Walker. Often, the only person with them for their final moments was another incarcerated caretaker or me.

A 78-year-old man to whom I had grown close died on the morning of Sept. 9, 2021, in the infirmary at MacDougall. He was the first incarcerated man under the care of the DOC to die from Covid-19 that year. He’d been serving a 40-year sentence for the rape of a child. 

Prior to working in our infirmary, I would not have even spoken to this man because of the crime that led to his imprisonment. But I soon learned that while very angry, he could also be brilliant and funny. He was not an easy person to deal with, but nonetheless I looked forward to seeing him every day. 

Shortly before his death due to Covid-19 complications, he asked me to hold his hand. He’d been in prison for more than 30 years. Old, frail, blind, and bedridden, he was afraid and lonely. Turning to me for comfort, he awakened in me thoughts of the loneliness we prisoners all feel.  Here was a man whom society had thrown away, a man deemed irredeemable, helping me feel and become redeemable. The warmth of my touch on his cold hands brought him comfort. My jokes and counsel brought him a little joy. When he died that night, a fellow CNA held his hand and spent the last seconds of his life with him. I secretly cried for days after he passed away. I missed him very much.

Like me, Vernal “Preacher” Davis, 58, was a prisoner CNA at MacDougall during the pandemic. Davis became both a mentor and partner to me in the infirmary. He had become a licensed CNA while imprisoned in 2015. Davis, who was released in May 2022, said the reason he became a CNA was simple: “I was always a taker in life, and I wanted to give back.”…

Read the full article on Stat.