'I’m being treated as though I'm not a person': Fear and disease inside San Quentin

March 3 started out as a normal day for San Quentin Prison University Project students. At the time, news of the novel coronavirus was reverberating around the world, but the students — many of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent or drug-related offenses — still trickled in to their Tuesday evening composition class, eager, engaged, and ready to write. But then they noticed that their volunteer teacher, Rebecca VanDeVoort, sounded sick that evening. The students were worried that VanDeVoort had come down with the virus, and that they would too. She was eventually able to assure them it was just seasonal allergies, but her students’ fears that an outbreak would spread within the prison would soon be realized.

Following the transfer of 121 inmates from the California Institute for Men in Chino in late May — a prison where there’s been more than 1,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 — the virus took hold of San Quentin.