The practice of quarantine, as we know it, began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics. In the Mid-20th century, Americans invented a criminal punishment system, based on the model of quarantine, to protect white privilege and power against advances in civil rights and the end of Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. Laws that essentially criminalized the lives of poor people and people of color were rapidly enacted, catalyzing a massive increase in the level of incarceration. The disproportionately poor, black, or brown ‘offender’ was to be treated as a pathogen to be isolated and contained. COVID-19, an actual pathogen, both exposed and intensified the brutality of this quarantine punishment system.

The interactive documentary, Exposed, documents the spread of COVID-19 in prisons, jails, and detention centers, over time, from the perspective of incarcerated people. I conceived of this project during the early period of sheltering in place. I had no idea how LONG the pandemic would last or how bad it would get, but I knew it would be far worse for incarcerated people because prisons and jails are incubators and amplifiers of infectious diseases where social distancing and basic sanitation are impossible. After the first confirmed case of COVID-19 infection among prisoners in the US was reported on March 21, 2020, incarcerated people were subjected to extreme forms of isolation — visits were suspended, phone privileges restricted, and the use of solitary confinement expanded by orders of magnitude. I wanted to document the spread of the virus from the perspective of incarcerated people - to create a multi-vocal, cumulative public record and evolving history of the pandemic’s impact on people in prisons and jails across the US. Pandemic lockdowns prohibited my usual method (recording interviews during legal visits with prisoners), so I decided to collect all of the quotes and statistics I could find from news sources online and assemble them into an interactive timeline. I wanted the scope and scale of the project to reflect the scope and scale of the crisis.The timeline begins on March 3, 2020. I updated it weekly, until December 31, 2021, with sometimes more than 100 entries in the database for a single day. There are now over 11,000 quotes, statistics and audio clips available through the interface.

The function of the prison system has been to sequester, to erase, to quarantine —  a space where a prisoner’s life becomes, what Giorgio Agamben calls  “bare life,” reduced to an existence that can be ignored, neglected, or extinguished with impunity precisely because it is the law that renders it expendable. In late April 2020, a prisoner at Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio — which, at that time, was the largest coronavirus hotspot in the US — wrote the following:

The social category of prisoner qualifies one as undeserving of a decent civilized life. Herein lies the cause of the profound spread of the virus throughout the institution: the collective sense of the undeservingness of prisoners. A vaccination would be nice. Proper P.P.E. would help. But the real cure for our woes is an affirmation of the inalienable entitlement to life for people in prisons and jails.