Horror Stories from the New Dark Age in the United States

April 27, 2020 (EIRNS)—Descriptions of the New York subway system and prisons throughout the U.S. and provide a glimpse of life in the pandemic’s New Dark Age:

• The New York Post reports that

“the subway has become a filthy, deadly homeless shelter on rails, according to disgusted transit workers who have taken to recording and photographing the horrid conditions. One video shot earlier this month shows cars of homeless men and women stretched out and slumbering away on an E train. A homeless woman was photographed sitting on a 2 train mid-afternoon Wednesday next to an overflowing grocery cart and plastic bags. And in one video, a man uses the space between the cars on a 2 train as a toilet while stopped in a Brooklyn station.... Workers say the transit systems has never been dirtier or more packed with the homeless as ridership has declined with stay-at-home restrictions for all but essential workers.”

• The Marshall Project, which covers the U.S. criminal justice system, reports that in the state prison in rural Lincoln County, Arkansas, where prisoners produce cotton, rice, and eggs, 14 staffers and more than 680 of the prison’s nearly 1,700 prisoners have coronavirus. Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution, has reported 4 deaths, but has more than 2,000 prisoners and at least 160 staffers who tested positive for the virus, while at Pickaway Correctional Institution in Pickaway County, at least 9 prisoners have died, while more than 1,500 prisoners and 79 staffers have tested positive. The Marshall Project adds that Louisiana reported the death of a prison warden and a medical director this week, while 11 men have died at the Oakdale Federal Prison.

“Federal officials have largely given up testing at a half-dozen prisons where serious outbreaks have erupted, saying they assume that all staff and prisoners have been exposed.”