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Every day, Brother Dennis Gibbs sits by a window in the living room of his monastery in the San Gabriel Valley and pens a letter or two to people behind bars.
His “friends on the inside,” as the gray-haired monk calls them, have kept up a growing correspondence with Gibbs for more than nine months, sharing an intimate view into life in jails and state prisons during the pandemic.
Many have voiced worry about the coronavirus and “the tenuous feeling of how it’s being managed in the jails,” said Gibbs, 66. They’ve admitted that some aren’t reporting symptoms for fear of being put in isolation.