What inmates teach us about surviving COVID-19
With the current pandemic, there are lessons to learn and even inspiration to take away from the incarcerated community that can benefit us all.
Having served 13 years in prison, our friend Matt Hearn draws an important lesson from incarceration. “We’ve been conditioned to do without a lot of luxuries. At the end of the day, what’s important is your mental health and stability.”
Hearn describes prison lockdowns: Confined to one’s cell, all privileges stripped. No phone, no exercise yard, no commissary supplies. “The facilities don’t feed you a lot,” Hearn said, “so food gets scarce real quick.” That, combined with the fact he had to eat on the corrections staff’s schedule, taught him to always keep on hand a supply of nourishment: rice, beans, oatmeal. Being forced to focus on physical necessities (food) helped him maintain his mental health.
Hearn learned the ironic upside to lockdown: the freedom one finds in prison. Hearn found his when he learned to embody what many of us claim to know — to focus on the things one can control. As human beings, “We don’t have control over anything but our intention,” he said. “During a lockdown, as long as I had enough food to make it to the next day, I had a lot of freedom with what to do with my time.”
Today Hearn is a sought-after personal fitness trainer in Oakland. Not only has he overcome extreme isolation, but he is living proof that learning to deal with it can even be transformational.
When it comes to doing time, Ernest Kirkwood has a long history to reflect upon. Kirkwood served nearly three decades in prison. He describes a hallmark of the prison lockdown as being the suddenness with which it can occur.
Like with COVID-19, “You’re a whistle-blow away from a lockdown. And it can go on indefinitely.” The lockdown continues until corrections staff has searched the entire facility, and/ or resolved the problem. “Most people learn to get used to it,” Kirkwood says.
In addressing the pandemic’s effects in correctional facilities right now, he shares that “thousands of people in prison are very nervous and scared right now. A prison or jail dormitory is a bucket of germs.” In fact, many incarcerated persons are housed in three-tiered beds stacked in cavernous rooms, a sea of humanity in which the concept of anything like “social distancing” is nonexistent.
But on the positive side, the strength he gained through lockdowns allowed Kirkwood to earn early release from parole and serve his community. The mayor of San Francisco twice appointed him to the city’s Reentry Council. He co-founded a Toastmasters-style meeting in a women’s unit of San Francisco County Jail.
Like Hearn, Kirkwood shows us that no matter how severe the periods of isolation, we can survive them, and even thrive.
As you reflect on your own isolation, one way you might turn it around is to communicate with those who are even more isolated than you. Individuals who don’t have smartphones or the ability to do video calls, or even the luxury of social distancing. If you are so inclined, you can write a letter of support and solidarity to an incarcerated person through sites like www.writeaprisoner.com or through www.defyventures.org.
Communication with the outside world gives incarcerated persons an outlet and a connection they might not otherwise have. And it gives all of us the chance to gift that which is perhaps in shortest supply now: Human connection and hope.
Ultimately, as difficult and uncomfortable as our own “lockdown” remains, we must remember that, as Hearn and Kirkwood teach us, when we look beyond our isolation we realize that there are people we can still touch, and possibilities for the future that we need only imagine.
Ed Kressy is a former incarcerated person and the author of “My Addiction and Recovery: Just Because You’re Done With Drugs Doesn’t Mean Drugs Are Done with You.” Paul Lamb is the executive director of Defy Ventures of Northern California.