Absence of Light: The COVID-19 pandemic shows neglect of prisoners’ health

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Editor’s Note: Absence of Light is a project created in collaboration with incarcerated people at Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, New York.

When the pandemic first hit, a lot of prisoners assumed that the administration of the facilities would assure that they would take the best measures possible to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Such hopeful thinking was far from reality.

I watched as visitations, programs and recreation were practically eliminated. The administration never had a strategic plan. Which was scary, to say the least.

Why were prisoners so hopeful? Partly because, prior to the pandemic, cleaning supplies were in abundance. Porters moved about sanitizing the galleries pre-COVID.

Many prisoners theorized that the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s union and its coworkers used COVID-19 as a cover to enforce the very things they maliciously wanted to do all along.

Many prisons became a lawless place behind the scenes and sometimes out in the open.

In Auburn Correctional Facility, I watched as hope, ambition, dedication and life itself began to fade from prisoners’ faces. “They want us to catch it,” many claimed. “They stole everything for themselves,” others expressed. “They don’t know what to do,” a few observed.

I saw guards come around with a gallon of some type of watered down bleach, pour 3 ounces inside a measuring cup and pour it into the mop buckets located in the galleries. Not caring if the map bucket still had dirty water in it from the night before.

Survival kicked in for most prisoners.Those who had resources in society began to ask for more soaps and shampoos. We unified to help each other stay sanitized.

The guards who observed the unification began to despise it instead of encouraging it. They began harassing prisoners to disrupt the flow of our system.

By the time masks arrived, a memorandum was issued mandating that they be worn by guards as well as prisoners. The prisoners saw the memo and followed it, but a majority of the guards didn’t care.

So much more could have been done to accommodate the prisoners. Take, for example, our shower situation. Every gallery has two. No one is allowed to utilize them, with the exception of porters. When you ask a guard for a shower, they respond by saying, “They don’t pay me to do that.”

At recreation, there are well over 100 prisoners in the yard. With the new “restrictions,” showers are limited to five people. Wth one hour of recreation, you can estimate how many prisoners won’t shower.

One day I couldn’t help myself, and I stopped a guard to ask a question. “Set aside the blue and the green for a moment. Human to human. Do you think what we’re being provided with is adequate?” 

“Hey man, I’m just here to get a check,” he said. A majority of guards share the same perspective. It is what it is.

If a facility’s operations are a reflection of its administration, what is currently going on since the pandemic began leaves prisoners across the state in danger of negligence.

Cliff Graham is a Syracuse resident incarcerated at Auburn Correctional Facility.