As one blockmate after another fell ill, John J. Lennon and his fellow prisoners tried to stay safe and care for one another. In this essay for the The New York Times Sunday Magazine, John recounts the arrival of Covid-19 — and its aftermath — to Sullivan Correctional Facility.
EXCERPT
I was in my prison cell in upstate New York one afternoon in mid-January when someone called out, “Suits walking!” The Sullivan Correctional Facility superintendent, a gray-haired man in his 60s named William Keyser, had come into the cell block with a mask strapped to his face, accompanied by a pair of deputies. Now he stood in the belly of the block in his suit and tie, pulled down his mask and announced that he was putting us under quarantine.
I’m incarcerated with some 400 men in Sullivan, a 36-year-old prison about 100 miles north of Manhattan. During normal times, prisoners can spend several hours a day outside our cells, even in maximum-security facilities like this one — attending programs, exercising, swinging mops, swapping packs of cigarettes, hustling. But with the winter cold settling in, Covid-19 deaths in New York prisons had spiked over the previous two weeks to 29 as of Jan. 14, and authorities had suspended most prison programs and movement.