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Friend, When Marsha Mason visited her father at Alabama’s Limestone Correctional Facility in 2014, he had a seeping open wound on his leg. At the time, Marsha was a newly licensed registered nurse. She wrote up what she saw – “severe swelling,” an “inflamed, deep crack in his skin” with a “brownish discharge” – in a letter to the warden. She wrote that doctors prescribed for her father, Melvin Mason, only lotion and a compression sock. Worrying about her father’s health was nothing new for Marsha. He had been in prison for more than eight years already for attempted murder. The wound was another ailment among many he had to treat or manage in prison. The elder Mason also had sleep apnea, arthritis pain, heart problems, and even two old bullets fired into his leg decades ago and lodged there ever since. He needs a wheelchair to get around. Marsha often found there was little she could do to help him from her home more than an hour away, near Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Once, Melvin returned an expensive and finely tuned breathing machine that she had bought for him to help manage his sleep apnea. It required purified water and electrical outlets, which were scarce in prison. The prison gave Melvin a different model, but it had problems, too. “All this one does is pump air. It doesn’t moisturize or nothing,” he told the Southern Poverty Law Center. “And you got to do the best you can do with it. It’s just awful how they do you. I believe they want you to die.” In 2020, when Marsha began to see COVID-19 patients arrive at the hospital where she works, she knew the coronavirus posed a huge risk to her father. The virus began to infect incarcerated Alabamians in April. Some died of COVID-19, often older men like Melvin, who is 76. The situation faced by this father and daughter is one example of Alabama’s broken parole system, which denies release to people despite advancing age and deteriorating health – even amid a pandemic. Confinement and coronavirus Avoiding the virus in a packed prison dormitory would be difficult. But the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles gave the Masons some hope when it set a Sept. 10, 2020, parole hearing for Melvin, who would be one of the oldest people to have a parole hearing that year. On parole, Melvin planned to live with Marsha. As an experienced nurse, she could care for her father. Marsha wrote a letter to the parole board on his behalf on Sept. 2. “While visiting with my father over the past 16 years, we had several discussions [about] the crime committed,” she wrote. “He acknowledges, and more importantly is remorseful, for the crime committed.” Prepared as the Masons were, when the day came, the board denied Melvin parole. Then things got frightening.In solidarity,
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