This week, we hear from two people who explain the rapidly deteriorating COVID-19 situation in facilities in both Saskatchewan and Indiana.

As we reported last week, prisoners at the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada organized a hunger strike last week to protest the rapidly-spreading COVID-19 outbreak at the facility. The hunger strike lasted several days and ended Monday, November 30th. Cory Cardinal, an Indigenous prisoner and a leader in the hunger strike, spoke with us again about the facilities response to the hunger strike.

Afterwards, we speak with Kelsey Kauffman, who details how the various IDOC protocols are seeding COVID-19 outbreaks in facilities across Indiana. In addition, Kauffman reads a letter from a prisoner, who describes the stress of being isolated in a cell with a potentially infectious cellmate as “something from a horror movie”. Kauffman lays out potential options for freeing a large percentage of vulnerable prisoners, as COVID-19 continues to run rampant through Indiana prisons and their surrounding communities.

You can find out more about the data Kauffman’s team has been collecting about the pandemic in Indiana prisons here.

The letter she mentions, addressed to Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, can be signed here.

We also cover Thursday’s tragic execution of Brandon Bernard. You can find out more about Brandon here.