In the fall of 2019, people began dying at Parchman—nine, twelve, twenty. There’s nothing new about Black men being killed violently in Southern prisons. In the same season at Elmore, in Alabama, drug addiction was taking lives, too. Some who die in Parchman or Elmore lived most of their lives in prison. Others who survive prison are released without a home to return to. Have you noticed how often people who were once incarcerated describe their time locked up as being “away”? Like another dimension. When prisons are now where slavery was, what is that place? Has time warped? Or just betrayed
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