Story by Brittany McGee
Photos by Elizabeth Ranatza
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – Ashley Jackson sits on the cream sofa, talking with a visitor when her phone lights up as a call comes in. She smiles.
“This is my father,” she whispers, politely signaling the end of the conversation.
Ashley puts the phone on speaker, and an automated female voice announces an incoming prepaid call from Orrin Jackson, an inmate in a federal prison. Before Ashley could say anything, the voice warns her the call is being recorded and subject to monitoring. Then, it asks whether she would take the call.
She accepts.
Ashley and Orrin exchange greetings, in the automatic way people do on phone calls.
“Everything all right?” Orrin asks his daughter over the noise of Butner Federal Correctional Complex in the background.
“I’m good,” Ashley chuckles, before explaining that she has company.
This monitored form of communication with her father is the only thing Ashley has ever known. Orrin, along with his brother and nephew, were arrested and sentenced to life on drug and weapons charges when she was six months old.
She’s 31 now and has no memories of her father outside of prison.
In the face of learning that Butner has the highest number of COVID-19-related inmate deaths in the federal prison system, Ashley renewed her efforts over the summer to get her incarcerated family members released.
“My father was not sentenced to die,” she recites.
Orrin is allowed to go out to recreation for an hour and a half every other day. He spends much of his time reading books that give him more perspective about his situation. Ashley has a copy of “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander that he sent to her at the start of the pandemic.
“Things have been hectic as you can imagine – but things are going according to plan and I do not think it will be long now,” Orrin wrote on a pink slip of paper preserved inside the front cover of the book, confident this new push to reduce his sentence and be released will be a success.
Orrin was on lockdown 23 hours a day at the start of the pandemic. He heard news of how the virus was devasting communities outside the prison, and wanted to check on all of his loved ones. His anxiety increased due to the fact that he could only call twice a week for five minutes.
“By the time you got the conversation going, it is time to go,” he said.
When she learned about the first death, Ashley called the prison to ask about what was being done to keep her father safe. There was no real answer for her question. Her voice shakes as she talks about the fear she got whenever a new death was announced, not knowing if her father was safe.
A couple of years ago, Ashley began working in a leadership role for North Carolina in the advocacy group for children of incarcerated parents, We Got Us Now. The organization released four demands they want to see implemented to protect their parents from COVID-19: immediate clemency for elderly and sick; free communications; a real-time notifications system that includes mobile notifications; and sanitation measures that include hand sanitizer.
In May, the ACLU along with other organizations in a coalition filed a class-action lawsuit calling for the release of vulnerable inmates and safer conditions. However, a federal judge ruled that there was not enough evidence showing the prison was treating inmates unconstitutionally with its response to COVID.
Orrin was charged with selling crack cocaine in addition to weapons charges and is serving an 80-year sentence. When he turned himself in, he didn’t think it would be the last time he would kiss his daughter goodbye as a free man.
Communication became something the two learned to cherish over the years.
Outside of visits, all they had were phone calls, letters and the gifts Orrin would send her. In a letter sent in early April, at the start of the pandemic, Orrin wrote that the atmosphere in the prison is not normal, but everyone is making the best out of the situation.
The bulk of his letter is focused on her.
He hopes that she is social distancing. He jokes that she is probably thriving because she’s a “loner.” He acknowledges the burden his incarceration has put on her and daydreams that at this point in her life he should be scaring some knucklehead away from her.
Mostly, he just wants his daughter to know he loves her.
“I wanted this relationship that I have with you because I did not want to be a stranger when I came home,” Orrin wrote.
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Arrested in 1990, Orrin, his brother, Cecil Jackson, and his cousin, Eric Whitener, were sentenced during the height of mass incarceration. According to the ACLU, in 1990, the average federal drug sentencing for crack cocaine offenses was 49 percent higher for African Americans than for white people.
Theodore Shaw, a criminal justice policy expert and the director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, said mass incarceration can be blamed, in part, due to Congress placing a steeper penalty on crack cocaine than on the powder.
“Black people are disproportionately arrested for drug violations, they are disproportionately charged for drug violations, they are disproportionately prosecuted for drug violations,” Shaw said. “And a disproportionate number of white violators are allowed to go into diversion and treatment programs.”
African Americans are disproportionately convicted and given longer sentences than white people. Black people account for 38 percent of the prison population despite being 13.4 percent of the U.S. population. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1 in 3 Black men is likely to be incarcerated in their lifetime.
For Ashley, these statistics only add to the worrisome situation for her father and other Black incarcerated persons. The CDC reports that racial and ethnic minority groups have been disproportionately affected by COVID-1.
This fact, along with the thought that Orrin is no longer a young man increases Ashley’s fear.
Are they safe?
Ashley knows that prisons are filthy.
Prisoners can’t have hand sanitizer. They’re in close quarters. Butner Prison is in the news for its high number of cases. And there was no news coming directly from her father or the prison. Ashley is his only daughter, and her support network is aging.
“It’s not like I have siblings to help carry this weight,” she said. “It’s hard.”
The pandemic isn’t over, and Ashley’s ultimate goal is to push for Orrin’s release. She has been trying to work with U.S. Attorney Andrew Murray, hoping he will be able to help her father. A change.org petition she posted that features an open letter from Orrin to Murray has over 1,400 signatures.
Both she and Orrin have been making plans for his release. She has financial power of attorney for her father, so she is confident she could find him housing upon release and ensure all his needs are met.
Circumstances inside the prison have improved since the start of the pandemic.
The schedule has been modified, allowing them the chance to come out more. Orrin says the prisoners have been educated on the things they should do to limit the spread and were provided with masks. However, he is cognizant that social distancing inside a prison is difficult with multiple opportunities for the virus to spread, such as the open showers.
Orrin says there has not been a case in the building he is housed in that he knows of, but according to the Bureau of Prisons, the Butner complex has had over 600 inmates test positive for COVID-19 and 17 inmates die from the virus to date.
“Just because my father is in prison, doesn’t mean he’s a horrible person,” Ashley said. “He’s an amazing father, brother, and friend.”
