Lockdown In Lockup: A Prisoner At Sing Sing On Life During The COVID-19 Crisis
Mohammed Monsuri is an incarcerated student and musician who is serving a 25-year sentence at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y. In this essay, dictated to journalist Daniel A. Gross, Monsuri writes about the impact of the coronavirus inside the prison system. You can hear him in conversation with Robert Pollock, his friend and manager of PEN America's Prison Writing Program, at the audio link above.
On March 11, at around 10:30 a.m., I was walking back from the Sing Sing Law Library with a couple other incarcerated men. We were talking idly about something called the coronavirus, but not taking it too seriously.
"Things like that don't generally affect prisoners," was the general consensus among us.
A few weeks later, one of the guys I was walking with that day became the first person to die from the coronavirus
