Oklahoma prisons have stopped widespread COVID testing even as cases spike normantranscript.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from normantranscript.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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COVID-19 built new walls that further isolated Oklahoma’s prisoners from the rest of the world.
It started last March. The Department of Corrections turned away visitors. Prisoners began losing access to outdoor space and they could no longer go to classes and common areas. The changes were safety precautions.
Se’Nae Starnes has young children and before the pandemic she was already limited to seeing them on the weekends. She says when COVID-19 hit even that was taken away.
“Like, my daughter especially, she’s not able to write and read and be able to communicate that way,” Starnes said. “So we have to be creative and draw pictures because we weren’t always able to get to the phone.”
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The Department of Corrections stopped allowing visitors in its buildings last fall to prevent spreading coronavirus. Earlier this month the agency decided it was safe enough to allow prisoners’ family and friends to come back.
Ellen Stackable, executive director of Poetic Justice says the Oklahomans behind prison walls miss their families.
Poetic Justice is an organization that offers therapeutic writing classes to incarcerated women.
Stackable asked six women in her program from Eddie Warrior and Mabel Bassett Correctional Centers whether they’d agreed to take the vaccines. All but two said ‘yes.’
“One of them has asthma. And she said, I would rather take a chance with a vaccine than take a chance with not being able to breathe,” Stackable said.
The OU Carceral Studies Consortium announced Wednesday it donated 130 books to an Oklahoma women’s correctional facility struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Inmate families protest as COVID-19 spreads in state prisons By: Keaton Ross Oklahoma Watch December 15, 2020
Diedre Adams holds a sign for her son during a protest outside the Department of Corrections’ Oklahoma City headquarters on Dec. 11. (Photo by Whitney Bryen/Oklahoma Watch)
An upset prison guard walked into Stephanie Avery’s housing unit.
Avery, a former Mabel Bassett Correctional Center inmate, says the officer pulled her mask below the chin, approached a group of women and shouted “I don’t care if you get sick.”
Weeks later, Avery and 112 other women housed at the prison tested positive for COVID-19 in mid-August. Though her symptoms were mild, Avery says a few women on her pod had trouble breathing and were hospitalized.