The vaccination conversation is different for those who’ve been inside. by John Proctor

This month, we’ll have a series of dispatches that have developed out of extensive conversations in our workshop around Covid-19 and the vaccination, particularly the logic of whether they plan to to get it. This week, facilitator John Proctor gives his take.

Last summer, frustrated at not being able to see and work with any of our students inside, a group of college professors, including a sociologist, a microbiologist, a pharmaceutical scientist, a racial edidemiologist, and a writer (me), began discussing how we might use video technology to to develop and pitch a series of seminars using video technology to address elements of and responses to Covid-19 in real time.

We encountered mostly rejection or radio silence from the correctional institutions we were connected to; most facilities even now don’t allow non-uniformed staff or volunteers onsite, and last summer most weren’t even responding to the world outside their walls. But one facility, the reentry prison in Long Island City where many of our workshop members spent the last months of their sentences before release, agreed to let us do a six-week seminar series during the Fall semester via video chat. We arranged seminars around the microbiology of viruses, governmental responses to emergency, racial disparities in disease susceptibility, the commodification of crisis, and of course the history and makeup of vaccines.

In the fall semester the vaccine conversations were more academic, focusing on their composition and possibilities for rollout. After concluding the fall seminars, though, the facility asked us to run the seminars again in the Spring semester, and we also forged a second partnership with the jail in Westchester County. With both of these seminars running over the past few months as people began getting vaccinated, we shifted the focus toward giving scientifically grounded facts on Covid and the vaccination, fostering critical thinking and discussion by allowing participants the space to voice concerns and ask questions of recognized members of the scientific community. We even discussed printing t-shirts for the participants saying something along the lines of “I got the shot!”

Looking back on this semester’s seminars, the t-shirts were probably a bad idea. Unlike the fall, when vaccinations were an idea we hoped for, vaccinations are now a reality, informed by lived experience. And the lived experience of anyone who’s been detained or incarcerated will incline most people not to trust authorities who claim to have their best interests at heart, particularly medical professionals.

We’ve found a number of our students inside responding, some quite angrily, that they have no interest in a government (emphasis on that word) shot. This is not the only opinion, but it’s a pretty strongly worded one among the people who voice it. Our pharmaceutical scientist has had an especially rough time having a critical conversation on the science of vaccinations. Many students inside have had pandemic experiences characterized by withheld information, and have probably presumed our presence to be a way of the DOC controlling their thoughts. One student in particular, a hispanic man in his twenties who reads everything he can get his eyes on, has said frequently and forcefully that so many sources of information he’s read on the virus contradict each other, so why would he believe any of them? 

And it’s hard to argue the point with them, considering 1) the hippocratic oath (do no harm) seems to be suspended when performing healthcare inside a correctional facility, 2) our country has seen a century of healthcare commodification that has led most people to logically reason that most healthcare providers are more salespeople than public servants, and 3) as college professors being brought to them through the DOC, we are seen as agents of a corrupt governmental system that’s trying to force this vaccine on them. Perhaps in this way our carceral apparatus is simply a crystallized representation of our larger free market media system that gives information without context, tells stories without morals.

I honestly don’t know how to get around this. But the most important takeaway I can offer is, no matter how you might feel about this vaccination and/or the government, it’s different for the currently or formerly incarcerated. They have a fundamentally different relationship to our government that manifests in opinions and reactions to healthcare, government, and crisis that serve as important checks on both those systems and trauma-informed perspectives that we should consider. We should listen to and care for people who’ve experienced this trauma. We can’t undo it, but at the very least we don’t have to continue to traumatize.

Editors' Note: For up-to-date information about Covid vaccines, treatment, and prevention, please visit this page.

John Proctor is a writer, educator, activist, and founder of Re/Creation. He teaches academic writing at Manhattanville College, where he is faculty advisor for this academic year’s Human Rights Awareness Week and Undergraduate Research & Creative Achievement Fair. His work has been widely published and anthologized.