Lisa Armstrong

During the pandemic, prison officials could have prevented sickness and death by releasing those who were most vulnerable to coronavirus and least likely to reoffend — older incarcerated people.
t first, Anthony Eaton ignored the moaning. He was twisting his budding dreadlocks in the bathroom of 1000 pod, a unit at the Deerfield Correctional Center in Capron, Virginia, when he heard a noise coming from a shower stall. In prison, Eaton said, you don’t investigate such things.
“It was a strange...

During the pandemic, prison officials could have prevented sickness and death by releasing those who were most vulnerable to coronavirus and least likely to reoffend — older incarcerated people.

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On Monday morning, I received a frantic message from a man at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
“Lisa, this is crazy, a law library clerk just died,” wrote Bruce Bryant via JPay, an electronic mail system for people incarcerated at New York state prisons.
A few hours later, he added: “He was in isolation for a couple of weeks complaining about loss of breath, all they gave him was generic Tylenol, he supposedly had Covid 19, I think his name was Mosquero…It’s getting crazy, ...

Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Getty Images
On Tuesday evening, Francisco Hernandez returned to his cell, put up the state-issued blanket he uses as a curtain, and wept. A few hours earlier, word had traveled through Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, that Ramon Escobar, who’d been housed 11 cells away from Hernandez, had died of COVID-19.
The Westchester County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed that Escobar died of COVID-19. Escobar’s was the fourth COVID-19 death at t...

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Anthony Swain refused to sleep at night because he was afraid he’d stop breathing. Swain, 43, is a quadriplegic, having been shot in the spine during a home invasion when he was 20, and has a number of other ailments that have followed since.

Their friendship began on July 17, 2014, with whispered secrets shared through the vent in the wall that separated their cells.
Jessica Burlew remembers the exact date because she’d turned 17 the day before, the same day that Mariam Abdullah, then 16 and about to be charged as an adult with armed robbery, had been brought to Estrella Jail in Phoenix, Arizona.
When Abdullah arrived, shackled and belly chained, in the closed custody unit, where girls deemed incorrigible were held in their cells...

Charles Moore, an ex-inmate at Sing Sing who now works as a producer for RTA

As Charles Moore surveyed the room, the small black stage lit by late afternoon light streaming through the wall of windows overlooking the Hudson, he felt a mess of emotions. About 240 people, including staff from Senator Cory Booker’s office, choreographer Bill T. Jones, and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., had come to see the play “Of Mice and Men,” and Moore, 52, wanted everything to be perfect. He ch...

"Little Boy Lost" is a documentary about a young man who, at the age of 16, was sent to an adult prison in FL. Directed by Lisa Armstrong, with live music composed by Daniel Bernard Roumain. Premiered May 2017 at the National YoungArts Foundation,

It was a late summer morning when Robert “Fat Daddy” Taylor woke up, smoked two blunts, and decided to turn himself in. He’d been on the run for four days, and it seemed that everywhere he went in and around the 7 Mile neighborhood on the east side of Detroit, there were photos of him in stores, and people quick to call the police, to claim the $1,000 reward for finding him.

“The streets talk,” Taylor told me recently. “Everybody was telling me, ‘Yo, Fats, man, those boys trying to get you.’ ...