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How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration

Pilsen Community Books welcomes Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar to the store for a conversation about Corridors of Contagion. Tracing the narratives of five incarcerated individuals, Corridors of Contagion speaks to the devastating impact of surviving the pandemic inside prison walls.

Corridors of Contagion brings to light the experiences of five people incarcerated across the United States as they navigate the onset of the pandemic—and the many months, stretched into years, that followed. Journalist Victoria Law combines this storytelling with a trenchant analysis of the structural failures of the US carceral system: failures that made prisons uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks, from overcrowding to solitary confinement, from insufficient healthcare to life sentences.

The book portrays the horrors of continual lockdowns not in the comfort of one’s own home, but in prisons where routine violence and chaos is made even more unimaginable by the complete lack of control over protection from a terrifying and lethal new virus. The pandemic provided an opportunity for lawmakers and policy makers to rethink the nation’s addiction to perpetual punishment. Instead, US jails and prisons doubled down on punishment under the guise of pandemic protections. As a result, people behind bars experienced increased stress, mental health challenges, increased violence, and higher rates of deaths, many of which could have been prevented.

While the pandemic emergency has been declared over, we are continuing to learn more about the extent of its destruction. Corridors of Contagion reminds readers about both the particular horrors experienced by people in cages and the continued role of the US as the world’s prison nation.

Victoria Law is an author and freelance journalist focusing on the intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. Her books include Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reform, and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration. Her writings about prisons and other forms of confinement have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Village Voice, The Guardian, In These Times, HellGate and Truthout. She is a co-founder of Books Through Bars—NYC and the zine Tenacious: Art and Writings by Women in Prison.

Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also a writer and organizer focused on collectively ending criminalization and building abolitionist worlds. Maya is the co-editor of We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, co-author of Prison by Any Other Name, and author of Locked Down, Locked Out. She is a cofounder of the Movement Media Alliance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund, and she organizes with Love & Protect. She lives in Chicago with her child, partner, and abolitionist cat.