COVID and prisons: No walls, no borders in the workers’ struggle By Johnnie Lewis posted on December 22, 2020 Texas “It’s a nonviolent protest going on right now because the officers [in an unnamed Texas prison], in the middle of the coronavirus, have refused us electricity for several hours, no showers or anything.” The voice is that of an incarcerated human being on video taken inside a Texas prison. The grainy images show smoke wafting across the cellblock, where men shout in the dark. Desperate to draw attention to their untenable situation, dozens on lockdown throughout the Texas prison system have started fires in their cellblocks and other living spaces, and made videos of the fires for family members, advocates, and media outside the walls. But even as COVID-19 rages — 26,000 infections; 168 deaths, an undercount — inside these walls, Texas prison administrators, similar to guards shown in the videos, “pay no attention.” In many of the videos, no fire alarms sound because they are broken, and have been since 2012. (tinyurl.com/yc4sxgm6v)