Tomiekia Johnson's account of being incarcerated during COVID-19, along with the stories of other incarcerated people, were covered in a recent article in The New York Review of Books, "Confinement and Contagion." Excerpt below:

"In February, Tomiekia Johnson’s mother, father, sister, and daughter came to Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), a state prison in the small city of Chowchilla, for their monthly visit. Tomiekia had been reading the news about the spread of the coronavirus and told her family to prepare for catastrophe. “They were…unmoved,” she wrote to me in August. “They gave me the side eye. Now here we are.”

On March 16, visits to the facility were paused. Tomiekia, who is forty-one, and her thirteen-year-old daughter had to make do with phone calls, punctuating their brief, monitored conversations with expressions of reassurance and affection: “You know I love you, right?” “Yeah, mama, I know.” In early April, a prison nurse tested positive, Tomiekia told me, which resulted in a brief quarantine of certain units. Hand sanitizer and disinfectant spray were made available on demand, but the CCWF population, which tops two thousand, still mingled on the parched grass yards of the sprawling compound.

Then, Tomiekia wrote, “people started to realize they could die here before making it home.” Panic set in. Women inside began to talk about lawsuits, anarchy, and escape plans. Tomiekia counseled others and thumped her Bible. She saw the virus, she told me, as yet another challenge—after the domestic violence she had suffered, the killing of her husband that she maintained was an accident, the loss of her career and every material possession, the trial during which she saw her character demolished, the separation from her child. “We’re being tested to the ends of our being,” she told me. “To the last threads of our might.”

...

Tomiekia, in California, had worked as a 911 operator and then graduated at the top of her police academy class before becoming a California Highway Patrol officer. She was a bowling league champion and a devout churchgoer. When her husband beat her, she told no one; she was ashamed. In 2009 Tomiekia reported that her husband attacked her and that, as they both groped for a gun in her purse, she shot him in what she insists was an accident. After her conviction, her bewildered father told reporters, “She overcame all the obstacles that a Black person can overcome.”

Tomiekia regretted pursuing a career in law enforcement. Officers who shoot unarmed Black civilians are often defended by their colleagues, prosecutors can decline to bring charges, and grand juries rarely indict. In contrast, Tomiekia wrote me, she went from “beloved poster child to enemy number one…quick as Superman’s outfit change in a phonebooth.” She felt ostracized at work, a prosecutor spent years building a case against her, and a judge handed her two life sentences. “I wish I had known the system is a colonist pipeline that preys on the weakest, poorest, underserved, undereducated, marginalized people, mostly Black, in America,” she wrote. “I was working as a first contact of the pipeline while simultaneously the demographic it was designed to imprison.”

...

In California in August, cases were rising. Units around the one Tomiekia was assigned to were locked down, and a growing number of people tested positive. One woman wrote to me that temperatures topped 107 degrees inside. Another reported that the tap water was running warm. People who had been exposed to the virus were being rounded up and removed from their regular housing. Tomiekia had faith that God would bring her “out of the circumstances shining,” she told me. Still, late at night, she sat in a corner of her cell, “where no one else sees me, no one else knows,” she said. “I try to cry quietly.”"

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