ROSLYN SMITH

the first time Roslyn Smith was confronted with selfcheckout at the grocery store, she thought she was going crazy. It made no sense. “I was like, ‘How do you do that?’ ” Then again, even crossing a street felt foreign following her release from prison, in 2018, after serving 39 years. She was 17 when she went away. She’s now 58.

“I lost so much,” she says. “I lost my uterus. I had a hysterectomy while I was in there. I lost so much. I lost experiences of growing up, of going to a college. Of seeing the world, traveling. [When] I came home was the first time in my life that I got on a plane.”

Smith worries about all the friends she has who are still on the inside. “They didn’t give them hand sanitizer. They didn’t let them social distance. The officers would not wear masks,” she says. As of April, more than 660,000 people in detention facilities had been infected with Covid-19 nationwide, and almost 3,000 had died, according to

The New York Times.

Smith, who got her bachelor’s degree while she was in prison, now works as the program manager for the Beyond Incarceration program at V-Day, an activist collective focused on ending violence against women. She says she tries to stay positive but is angry and sad about how sexism and racism in America combine to take away the freedom — and lives — of women of color.

“It all goes back to this slavery mentality that black and brown people are stupid,” she says. “They’re less than, you know, they’re monsters. They’re violent. It just saddens me.”