In Their Own Words: Life in the Time of Corona

Mile in My Shoes Team VOA Southside Alumni Members share how COVID-19 has affected their work and personal lives, and discuss what life must be like for people still in prison.

Join a typical Mile in My Shoes circle-up, and you’ll find yourself arm-linked with people who do all types of work - graphic designer, baker, financial consultant, engineer, teacher, physical therapist, barber, stay-at-home parent, hospital manager, warehouse laborer, truck driver.  And while the heart of MiMS is focusing on what makes us all similar, this global pandemic highlights how different our ability to “shelter in place” and “social distance” - in short, keep ourselves and our families’ safe - can be. In order to help the greater MiMS community gain a better understanding of some of the unique challenges Covid-19 has brought to men & women in reentry, MiMS’ Run Mentor Laura B spoke with five Alumni of Team Southside about how this pandemic and stay-at-home order has affected their employment, working conditions and their personal lives, as well as their thoughts on the challenges facing people currently in prison. 

Laura: Between the five of you, you represent manufacturing work (a foundry, a recycling plant, and food production) and the service industry (a restaurant chef and a barber). For those of you who are still working, have you been able to telecommute, or do you have to go into work?

Hardy: In a job like I have with physical actions, not just moving electrons, we can’t telecommute. I’m glad to be working though. 

Jesse: It’s not like you can telecommute in to make [the food]. You’ve got to go into work. We’re doing everything we can to stay open because we don’t get paid if we shut down. And we have been slammed with orders.

Laura: How has the way you work been affected? 

 Jesse: I am tired. Tired, tired, tired. My hands are extremely sore, they’re starting to crack open because it’s constant, constant hand washing and sanitizing. Any free time we have where we’re not busting our ass keeping the machines running, we’re cleaning stuff. The last couple weeks it’s been pretty harsh. 

Also, even though our orders have increased, we are working with a third fewer people, so we are busy as hell. We usually have temps who help package stuff so we can keep the machines running, but we don’t have the temp service coming anymore. They were  an uncontrolled variable. It’s safer not to have them there. There’s times when I’m doing five or six different jobs. It’s rough because we’ve had so much more to do because of the Corona virus, but it’s better than not working. 

Hardy : My facility has also laid a lot of people off. They use a lot of contract temporary employees, and most of them were laid off. I’m fortunate that I’m expecting to be able to keep working, but even so my hours were cut back. 

Laura: Are you able to social distance where you work? Do you feel safe?

Jason: I work in a foundry, so due to OSHA regulations, everybody already had to wear a N95 mask regardless of Covid-19. When we’re working we pretty much stand side-by-side, but everybody is wearing earplugs, mask, safety glasses, a hat, and is fully dressed in fire-retardant clothing. For a person to pass it to someone in the foundry would be pretty tough. I don’t know what we’ll do if the foundry can’t keep getting the N95 masks though. We can not reuse the masks. I know we are struggling to get them, and if we run out I think a lot of the guys won’t be able to work. 

Jesse: Where I work there’s a lot of tasks where we just can’t be six feet apart. When you’re in a situation like how the line is set up, there’s only so much you can do because sometimes you have to be in close quarters to get stuff to work. We try to stay as far as we can out of people’s way but there’s some spots where you just have to be a little bit closer. 

Laura: What about other time spent at work, are there accommodations made there? 

Jason: In the locker room and break room, guys are sitting far apart enough to maintain distance. It’s good to see, because you get around a group of guys who are true blue collar workers and you might not think they’re paying attention [to Covid-19 safety warnings], but they are. Some people think blue collar workers in this industry either have that “we’re invincible” or “that’s never going to affect me” kind of thing, but they are conscious of it. 

Laura: What about the two of you who aren’t working? How are you doing? 

Mark: I got laid off right away, on March 17. I was working as a banquet chef at a nice white tablecloth restaurant and they had to shut the doors. My wife and I have enough to live on in our savings and my wife is still employed, so we are doing ok. We have everything we need and we don’t need to buy anything new. Also I have health insurance through my wife’s job, so that’s another way I’m in a very fortunate place compared to so many people. I qualify for $150 a week for unemployment. You can’t live on that! That’s not enough to even pay rent. If I didn’t have my wife’s income then I wouldn’t be able to make it. 

Shane: I also got laid off right away. I’m a barber and my income is now zero dollars. There is no help for me as a person with a state license to cut hair in a barber shop. I’m still paying for my license, fees, rent, taxes, but there is no unemployment available for me since I am self-employed. How can you just shut me down for no one knows how many weeks? I look at the stimulus package, but I make $1000 a week, what the hell is a $1200 check going to do for me? My mind is one-track right now, just wanting to get back to work and make money.     

Laura: Do you have any other income streams? 

Shane: I’ve been doing rounds once a week to customers who I’ve been serving for years. I wear gloves and a mask, and I make a couple hundred dollars, but I put myself at risk. I’ve taken a lot of precautions [not to catch Covid-19] but I figure at 44 [years old], I’m ok. 

I also teach at a barber school in St Cloud, but we had to close the school for now. That means I don’t get paid, the students can’t take their tests to get their barber license, and we can’t pay our rent so it looks like we are going to lose our lease because the landlord is not going to give us any break. We just don’t have any income coming in because half the income would be tuition from the students and the other half comes from the public who come in for haircuts from the students. 

Laura: How else has social distancing and the shutdowns affected all of you? 

Hardy: I use public transit [bus] getting to and from work.  That has been more restricted lately – they just passed a measure limiting the bus to 10 riders at a time. On top of that the timing has switched to Saturday schedules all the time. So there are fewer buses, and fewer people allowed on the buses that do come. Depending on the route, if you can’t get on the bus the next one could be an hour later, which would seriously hinder someone trying to get to work. You can’t call your boss and say “I’m going to be late because I couldn’t get on the bus.” Now that the weather is getting a little better, I can use my bike to get to work and back but it’s about 15 miles each way. I’m glad to be off the bus even though it seems a little far on the bike.

Jason: With the library being closed, there goes my Internet access. I don’t have Internet at home so I have a hard time staying informed on news. I have the basic TV channels, so I try to catch news reports on TV. That’s the only thing I can do. 

Hardy: I don’t have the Internet at home either. I have a small portable radio, so in the morning I listen to NPR to stay informed.  

 Jesse: With the library closed, I don’t have Internet either. 

Laura: So most of you don’t have Internet access. Without the Internet and your usual activities on pause, it must be hard to stay informed about what’s going on and to feel connected.

Hardy: I am just getting snippets of information from my sister. I’ve been trying to figure out the graphs and where we are in the rise of infections. I realize it’s going to get worse before we’re over the bad part.

Jason: The big problem with this is that I feel really isolated. I can’t do anything that I would normally be doing. I miss MiMS for that reason too, it’s my social thing that I do. 

Shane: I feel very worked up and isolated. I’m very outgoing, and I have a job where you see a lot of people in a day. I miss the connection with MiMS while we can’t run. When I’m around MiMS my compassionate side comes out, and I’m a little bankrupt on compassion right now. It’s a really scary time. It is very emotionally exhausting, to be doing nothing.

Mark: Yeah, sheltering in place for me is otherwise known as hanging out at home and doing nothing. The sad reality of my life, having been incarcerated so recently for five years, is that this is very normal to me. I had a great job when I was incarcerated. I was the clerk for the laundry, doing all the paperwork. But otherwise I had nothing to do all day. The job gave me a routine to follow in the morning. I’d go to work, then I’d come back and go for a walk in the afternoon. I’ve been walking and running a lot in my neighborhood now too, but besides that I am sitting around all day doing nothing. 

Laura: So for people who are in prison now, what do you think it is like?

Mark: Right now, being incarcerated would be so scary. They’ve already had three deaths from Corona in the facility that I was at in Ohio. You have to understand the living conditions there. It’s like a big gymnasium with 20’ ceilings, and everything is concrete. Imagine an office where everyone sits in a cubicle. Except at the facility, the walls are concrete and do not go all the way to the ceiling – they are only 5’ high. So if you are sleeping on the top bunk you are at the same height as the wall, with another bunk in the other cube but right next to you. If you roll off the bunk you are going to roll right into the cube next to you. When you think about that and the conditions of how this virus is spreading, there is absolutely no way that the virus could be contained in that environment. Especially now that we know that asymptomatic carriers are out there and can spread it just as easily as someone who is exhibiting symptoms. There’s absolutely no way that the Bureau of Prisons is going to be able to prevent the spread of this. In one housing unit there could be 120 guys, and if your neighbor coughs, it’s going right into your cube. Each cube is about 8x10 and has two and sometimes three men. 

Laura:  What do you think about the discussions to release some people early, as a way to control the spread of the virus in the prisons? 

Shane: I’ve seen those articles. It sounds good but we’re talking about people who have no resources, no money, no jobs, no treatment, no health care. Unless they have a family or money there isn’t shit for them to come home to. That’s why I like MiMS so much, it brings people into a fold who have burnt their bridges with their family, and helps them start to rebuild. But for most of these people there’s no safety net or support to catch them or for most of them, anywhere to go.

Mark: I 100% agree. For people like me – who have a stable home and a support network to return to, a place to go, food in the refrigerator, a place where they can pick up where they left off – I think that’s great. The thing that concerns me is that I met a number of men who had a better life when they were inside the prison than they had outside. They were homeless, unemployed, illiterate, and worse. There were so many men that I met, that if the BOP called them into the office and said “OK, pack up your stuff, you’re leaving next week,” that would be a huge burden on these men because they have no place to go. Some of these men who are getting early released will be kicked out on the street, and I’m worried about their safety and well-being. I haven’t heard anything ensuring that once these men leave the facility, they will be taken care of in the sense of a stable place to live. I met enough men like that [when I was in prison] that the first thing I thought of when I started seeing news that people were going to be released, was that those men will be in a total panic at the thought of being released. Getting out of prison is a good thing but there’s other facets to think about. 

Laura: For everyone, no matter what your situation, there is so much anxiety and uncertainty right now. How do you feel about where you are now and for the future? 

Jason: When we got notice that the foundry is an essential employer, it was a quite a weight lifted off my shoulders. I was worried that we might have to shut down, and I was concerned about missing a paycheck, and maybe even more than one, while we were closed. My thoughts go out to the people in the community who aren’t working. I worry about whether the economy will rebound, whether the local businesses will come back. It’s such a mess that I’ve never heard of. We tend to think we’re on the top of the food chain, and then something we can’t even see can actually kill us. 

Shane: My girlfriend is an optometrist and she just got furloughed after having that job for 20 years, because she is “not essential.” How can eyeglasses not be “essential”?  And who knows if their shop is even going to be a thing [after this]? The shop sells high-end eyeglass frames. Will there still be a market for them when all this dust settles? What luxury items will people still be able to afford? I put myself in a good position as a barber. A haircut is the essential luxury item, because people will figure out how to pay for a good haircut. I’m in a recession-proof industry.

I have a cushion of money saved but lots of people don’t have that. It’s sink or swim for everyone. Do you sink or can you swim? What can I go without? What are my needs and wants? This is going to hugely fracture society. You thought there was a separation of “haves” and “have nots” before – it’s going to be terrible now. I don’t know what will happen if things don’t go back [to normal] soon. I’m worried anxiety among people is going to get to a blowing point. This has opened my eyes to a lot of abuses and neglect in the system. I’m also worried about how are we going to pay for all this?

Hardy: I get worried too, but I’m blessed and very fortunate to be in the situation I’m in. I have a full pantry, a bank account, I have work to go to, and I have friends I can contact over the phone and by text. The weather is getting better so I can get outside a little more and get exercise. I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I’d rather they shut things down now for a shorter time, than it be worse later and have to shut down longer to get things under control. 

Laura: Before we go, can you tell me anything that has uplifted you lately?

Hardy: I was cheered when I saw a photo Ben [MiMS Southside Core Team Mentor] posted of himself post-run in the VOA parking lot. I miss MiMS and I miss running. My pants are getting tighter so I need to get back out there. I hope to see everyone again soon and well. 

Jason: I hope that events like this can help bring people closer together and see the good that people are doing. The way these guys are sewing masks at home to give to nurses. There’s a restaurant that is making meals for the doctors and nurses at the hospital. It’s stories like that, that give you hope for humanity. It takes a crisis to bring it out, and it’s too bad it takes a crisis. That’s one thing I like about MiMS: I’ve found a community that actually cares about me and I miss it. We go out and run and laugh and tell stories. We share food and get together. It leaves an emptiness to not have it. It’s one of those organizations that a lot of mainstream people wouldn’t know of, since MiMS is reaching out to people in my situation. MiMS comes to places like halfway houses and searches for those people who are lost inside and who don’t feel like they belong anywhere. People who are confused about what the next step is, and MiMS is there with the next step. When I got out [of prison] I wanted to try and become a part of something. At first MiMS sounded scary because it was unknown – what do they want, what do I have to do? That’s why I hate this virus coming on, because I wanted to make a really good stand this year for the half marathon. So I’m still running on my own even though the team can’t meet right now. 

Mark: Right. Get outside, enjoy the sunshine, and move your body. And stay away from people. And stay home.