Even after everything I had survived, and everything I had reported on, and everything you have read in this book, the first year of the pandemic taught me more about the casual cruelty of prisons than the ten years before it had. For months, I stayed up late into the night, texting with guards in California, messaging with terrified families from Florida, and talking to prisoners on their contraband phones. They sent horrifying pictures of the deteriorating conditions: moldy food you wouldn’t feed your dog, decaying cells you wouldn’t put an animal in, videos of sewage running down the walls,
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