Above: Jonathan White with his family. Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Family Handout/Getty Images

Jonathan White, a 45-year-old man incarcerated at a state prison in Ohio, gazed out at the group of people who had come to collect their lunch from the chow hall. As part of the effort to contain the spread of COVID-19, people were sent one dorm at a time to pick up their food. These individuals were from the dorm that houses many of the people who are elderly or have health conditions.

My heart just ached cause I asked myself who am I seeing now that I wont see again due to death from this virus, White wrote in early April, just as the pandemic was building toward its first peak in the U.S.

This prison is just too crowded, there is no way everyone will make it that Im seeing unscathed, White wrote. Thanks to years of flopping people simply because they have the power to, never truly looking into who people are today, he continued, referring to those he knew who had been denied parole. This has resulted in their apparent overall objective which is to see to it that as many people as possible die in prison.

Since White made that dire prediction, at least 13 people incarcerated at Marion Correctional Institution (MCI) have died, in addition to at least one prison staff member. More than 2,000 prisoners about 80% of the population have tested positive for the coronavirus , including White. The prison is the second-largest COVID-19 cluster in the country, according to the New York Times tracker, just ahead of Pickaway Correctional Institution, another Ohio state prison about an hour away. Nationwide, 9 of the top 10 coronavirus clusters are in prisons or jails.

There are signs this particular prison outbreak spread into the surrounding community: The relatively small county of Marion has one of the highest rates of infection in the state, even with the Marion prisoner cases removed from the count.

HuffPost spoke with eight people incarcerated at Marion for more than two months about what it was like living through the pandemic, knowing it was almost impossible to avoid the potentially fatal disease behind bars. They described how their prison sentence stripped them of the ability to make decisions that would increase their chances of survival. They did everything within their power to protect themselves from COVID-19: They followed the news closely. They requested masks but were denied until it was too late. They pleaded with prison staff. They filed internal complaints, knowing they would go nowhere. They filed lawsuits , sometimes without help from a lawyer or access to the internet.

And when they turned on the TV, they watched the governor and the head of the states Department of Rehabilitation and Correction officials with immense control over their fate mislead the public about the protections available to people in the states prisons.

The coronavirus outbreak at the prison in Marion is proof of what criminal justice reform advocates and incarcerated people have been warning since the beginning of the pandemic: It is nearly impossible to keep the coronavirus out of prisons and jails, and once its in, it endangers everyone who lives and works in and around the facility. It is a risk that disproportionately impacts Black people, who are more likely to be incarcerated and also more likely to die of COVID-19. In April, the prison at Marion was dubbed the number-one coronavirus hotspot in the country but because of a lack of mass testing in most American prisons, its impossible to know if Marion is truly an anomaly or if its indicative of how the highly contagious disease is traveling through similar detention facilities.