A Sentence That Isn’t Supposed to Be a Death Sentence

Author: HELPUS

My daughter is at McRae Women’s Facility. She calls me and tells me she’s scared to die in there.

That’s the thing I carry. Not the numbers, not the reports. Her voice on the phone telling me she’s scared to die in there.

There’s a tuberculosis outbreak at McRae and at Pulaski. Only the staff are able to get masks. The women ask for masks, and the staff are being told they’ll be fired if they give them one. That’s what my daughter tells me. Fired, for handing a woman a mask. So the masks are in that building. They’re just not for the women.

She tells me they’re testing positive and then putting the inmates back in the dorm with the positive readings. Back in with everybody else. The same dorm, the same bunks, the same air.

She hasn’t been tested herself. They’re only testing certain inmates. Not all of them. She’s living in there with people who’ve tested positive and she doesn’t know her own status. She can’t tell you if she has it. Nobody will tell her.

One woman has died. My daughter knows the prison told that woman’s family it was pneumonia. That’s what the women inside believe happened. That’s what I believe too. A woman died, and her family was told pneumonia.

They’re scared. All of them. My daughter is scared, and the women around her are scared, and there’s nothing they can do about it from inside. They can ask. They can ask for a mask and get told somebody will lose their job for giving it to them. That’s not much of a choice to hand a person.

They covered it up for a long time. That’s how it feels from out here. Long enough that they let an audit walk through that facility knowing they were exposing them as well — people walking through those dorms, breathing that air, nobody telling them what they were walking into.

I’ve been reporting it. That’s what I can do from where I am. I’ve been sending emails to the state corrections official since last week. I have not gotten one response. Nothing. No answer to my emails at all. In my view he’s covering it up too, and all I can tell you is what I’ve seen — emails sent, and silence coming back.

It’s not just me. Other families are reaching out as well. We’re all concerned for our kids. We compare notes and we’re hearing the same things from inside. Women calling their mothers, their families, telling them the same story. So it’s not one woman saying it. It’s families, one after another, all saying it.

The facility was overcrowded already. That’s part of this. There aren’t enough officers to oversee all of those inmates, so some of the women are left to fend for themselves. Left to figure it out on their own. You put a sickness in a place like that, with that many people and not enough staff to watch them, and what do you think is going to happen.

So I keep asking the same question. How do you receive a sentence, and it’s not a death sentence, but you go inside and you could possibly die? Nobody sentenced them to that. That’s not what the judge said. That’s not what the paperwork says. But that’s what’s happening.

It’s stressful. That’s the word I keep coming back to. Stressful. Sleepless nights, worried about my daughter. Lying awake thinking about a dorm I’ve never been in, full of women I’ve never met, and one of them is mine.

People on the outside don’t see that part. They see a sentence, they see a facility, they see a name. They don’t see a mother on the phone, night after night, hearing her daughter say she’s scared to die in there.