Over the past several weeks, the Kettle Moraine Correctional Institution has been dealing with an outbreak of COVID-19.
Over 800 inmates have contracted the virus, and a community activist out of Manitowoc has voiced her displeasure in how the situation has been handled. Sonia Vasquez, who serves as the President of the Lakeshore’s United Visionaries, wrote an article for their website about the situation.
Vasquez says, “My initial spark on it was knowing somebody that is in the prison there and hearing them talk about what’s been going on there and the dramatic increase of COVID cases and how it’s being handled.”
Vasquez then took it upon herself to reach out to a few inmates and hear their take on what was happening in the prison.
“The first question I asked was “how are you physically and mentally?” They talked about if they had COVID and their physical signs of that, but they almost always went into being upset, feeling a lack of control because of how the prison was handling the COVID cases.”
While the situation there can be compared to outbreaks at schools, it is obviously different in the fact that the people in school are there to learn, while those in prison are there because they did something illegal. Vasquez said that despite their situation, these are still human beings.
“So yes they do give up some of their rights by being a prison, but they still do have the right to fair treatment. So that’s where they are feeling like they are missing out from the prison, like they aren’t getting treated fairly.”
You can read Vasquez’s article at LakeshoresUnitedVisionaries.org.
