What a strange couple of weeks, with more to come. If I’ve learned anything from the past few days, it’s how vulnerable a controlled, incarcerated population is to the risk of contagion. On the advice of numerous authorities whose opinions I trust, we decided to cancel both the Rikers workshops and the budding Westchester-Manhattanville partnership last Friday, and though I was disappointed I totally get the reasoning.
This week, as most if not all of us know by now, the country has started to fall in line with the fact that we are on the front end of a global pandemic. My college, like many around the country, moved to an online teaching model for at least the next two weeks. The Westchester DOC notified the college this week that they are suspending our partnership until further notice. The NYC DOC issued a blanket statement about programming saying to exercise our best judgment, and my onsite program coordinator deferred to our judgment.
In a difficult decision, we decided not to go in today. Perhaps I’m writing this dispatch as a form of penitence, because I honestly feel awful about it. One of my longest-running workshop members, a 72-year-old visual artist who has spent two years awaiting trial because the complainant has never shown up, was given a protracted trial this week and found guilty—his daughter let me know earlier this week, and said he was asking if I would be there this Friday. We’ve been in an up cycle recently as we’ve begun to adjust to the shifting population due to bail reform. Fellow facilitators upstate have reported widespread misinformation being distributed to the people they work with about what’s happening on the outside, which they have tried to counter in their visits. As volunteer facilitators, we are needed probably more than ever.
My program coordinator has been completely understanding when my co-facilitators and I have told her our decision, saying we should “protect yourselves and your families during these trying times.” But—and this is important—I’m actually not thinking about myself or my family when I decide not to go right now. I operate on the absolute determination not to be Patient Zero for an outbreak in an enclosed facility with people whose health and immune systems have been compromised by our criminal justice system.
We now, in our limited body of knowledge about the COVID-19, know with relative certainty that this virus is relatively harmless to the young and the healthy, but potentially deadly to the old and the infirm. Almost all, if not all, of the COVID-19 deaths in the US have been concentrated in a nursing home in Washington state. My guy who was convicted this week—the 72-year-old artist—once called the facility where he’s housed on Rikers Island a Five-in-One Facility, functioning as a jail, homeless shelter, old folks home, mental health center, and hospital. I will not to be the one to bring contagion into the de facto infirmary of the nation’s most notorious jail. And I feel horribly about it.
Now, as my family and many of yours go into self-quarantine for at least the next couple of weeks, the only thing I can do is research, write, and communicate. I’ve been developing a longform piece about my 72-year-old artist with his family and working on a book proposal on what we talk about when we talk about criminal justice reform, and I’m giving myself permission, in this brief historical moment of social isolation, to reflect without action for the next two weeks. And I hope to share the bounty of that labor with you on the flipside of this national emergency.
Be well, friends.
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