"Anonymous Open Letter from Inside Stateville"

The Unitarian Universalist Prison Ministry of Illinois received this letter through one of our volunteer members:

"Since I've been moved to another unit, there have been multiple guys moved out because of a positive Covid19 test. The gym has been filled with tents to take the guys who are infected with the deadly virus. However, I still hear somebody throwing up each morning and a few people coughing. I wonder if they're too scared to ask for a test or their request has been denied. One inmate said to a nurse that he was having headaches, body aches, running a fever, and lost his senses of smell and taste. She said, "That's just stress; do some art or exercise." All we can do is sit back and watch all the talk on the news. We hear about individuals, first responders, and communities; but little about us. We have no voice, like we do not exist; yet, we are somebody's sons or daughters, brothers or sisters, fathers or mothers. Our lives matter too!

We are getting little information and the small motel-sized bar of Dial soap they gave to each of us is gone. We never got the hand sanitizer the governor promised. We're just sitting ducks and the governor needs to act fast on reviewing elderly incarcerated citizens who pose no threat to society. Right now, society is posing a threat to our lives by having us cluster together waiting on a viral death sentence. I've never been on death row, but I feel like I'm on it right now. There is no phone call in sight for the governor to give us a stay. I wasn't sentenced to die, so why do I feel like I am on the fast track to a death sentence.
 
We appreciate the governor's passionate words that all inmates placed in outside hospitals will be treated the same as everybody else, but we need action now before we start rolling into the hospital or makeshift hospitals in record numbers. We don't want to die like this. Governor, use your powers for good.  We need a miracle that you can look past political backlash and act with compassion to review elderly prisoners, violent or non-violent, and let us live. Human lives are at stake, and we need a fearless leader to break new ground to save us from the threshold of certain death.
  
We need the governor to show his true humanitarianism to review the most vulnerable people in here to be released from this incubator. We need protection in the worst way. We didn't bring this into the prison, so we need some type of reparation to free us from this death trap. Statistics show the elderly have the lowest recidivism rates, so why keep those who pose the smallest threat to society inside a vulnerable space such as we live in right now? This feels like a death camp and I can't smell the ovens or hear the human screams but I can hear the coughing and nauseating echoes of sickness bounding off the walls in the wee hours of the morning.

Please, Governor, act now!!!"