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While incarcerated at California’s Wasco State Prison in November 2024, I woke up drenched in sweat. I quickly became sicker: body aches, shortness of breath, and no energy. I recognized the symptoms of valley fever, a lung infection caused by fungus that grows in the Southwest. Despite repeated requests to be tested for it, I was instead told it was pneumonia and given antibiotics.

My symptoms worsened. My face swelled. My breathing became labored, and I had to be rushed to an outside hospital. I lost 25 pounds in two weeks and feared I wouldn’t survive to see my family again. After weeks of declining health and multiple sick call forms, I was finally able to get tested for Valley Feverin December. The result came back: positive.

It shouldn’t have taken that long. I now have to take lifelong medication for a disease I knew I had but was ignored. As a Black man — part of a group at higher risk for valley fever — it feels like I was sent to Wasco to die.

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What happened to me is part of a larger story, with deeper roots that trace back to the siting of prisons on drought-damaged, devalued land during California’s prison-building boom of the 1980s and 90s. Prisons were seen as an alternative economic engine for land that was no longer agriculturally productive. Twenty of California’s 31 prisons were built in this 13-year period. Sixteen of those prisons are located in California’s Central Valley, an area known for its toxic air. Four of them were built in counties with the highest Valley Fever contraction rates– caused by land containing spores of Coccidioides Fungus.

Since 2005, 4,000 imprisoned people in California have been diagnosed with Valley Fever, causing at least 53 deaths. Valley Fever impacts the same populations mass incarceration disproportionately........

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