KEVIN HAYE S & SUSAN LI
when stan li, 67, called his daughter on her 19th birthday, he had to put a sock over the phone for protection against Covid19. “He has a very . . . he had a very Buddhist outlook on life, take it as it is, so he’d never complain about anything,” says Susan Li. But she knew to be worried when he admitted that he’d lost his sense of taste and smell. “Two weeks after my birthday, he was declared dead,” she says.
Afterward, Susan connected with Kevin Hayes, her father’s 58-year-old cellmate at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.
Hayes himself tested positive for Covid after Stan did, but was not symptomatic. He was sent into solitary confinement for 21 days to isolate. In lieu of space to quarantine prisoners, correctional facilities have increasingly relied on solitary.
Jacq Williams, a criminal-justice-reform advocate, says there’s no safe amount of time to keep a person in solitary. “According to the Geneva Conventions, over 15 days constitutes torture,” she says. “The damage has been extreme.” Hayes is serving 25-to-life, but has already done 28. He hopes he’ll live to visit the grave of his son, who died in 2017, and to help out with his grandson. “He’s 14, he’s at the age when things happen,” he says. “He’s a good kid, and it’s not like I’m a stranger to him, but his father is dead and I want to help fill that role.”
“We’re not just statistics,” says Susan. “My father was a lot more than the way he passed away. He was a full human being [who had] a community, a family, people who cared about him.”
Cynthia remembers her brother Leonard as a prankster and a sharp dresser who wore alligator shoes and liked to bake cakes for family and friends. She is outraged by his death in April. He’d paid his debt, had been paroled and deemed no longer a threat to society, but the state would not expedite his release to protect him from Covid-19. They grew up in a large religious family in Brooklyn that felt the whole of his absence for 25 years. “The family goes through the correctional process also,” she says. “The whole family goes to prison.”