Punishment by Pandemic

DeMarco Raynor, who is incarcerated at Cummins Unit, a penitentiary in southeast Arkansas, had been approved for its most prestigious job: working at the governor’s mansion. Prison labor at the mansion is a “longstanding tradition, which kept down costs,” Hillary Clinton wrote, in a memoir. (She noted that “onetime murderers” proved to be the best employees.) Raynor saw the position, which was unpaid, as a chance to meet people with the power to grant him clemency. But, shortly before he was to begin, an officer said that he had violated prison rules by wearing slippers that he had made himself. The job was revoked. Raynor believed that the officer had intentionally thwarted his opportunity. “I still maintain my manhood, and he felt like that was too much,” Raynor said. Another officer once told him, “Man, you walk around just like you’re free.”

Raynor is forty-one, and is serving a life sentence for shooting a man during a drunken confrontation, when he was twenty. Raynor, who is black, was convicted by eleven white jurors and one black woman. “I will die remembering her name,” he told me. “She looked at me the whole trial like I was her son, and then, when the verdict came back, she couldn’t look at me.” Raynor monitors his use of language, so that he doesn’t assimilate to institutional life. He refuses to call food “money”; he will not invite people to his “house” when he means his cell. He bristles when prisoners, working unpaid jobs, describe an officer as their “boss.”