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COVID-19 Inside Arkansas Prisons: The Death of Derick Coley

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Derick Coley and his daughter during a prison visit.
Family Photo

In a three-part series supported by the National Geographic Society's COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists, multimedia reporter Anna Stitt takes an extensive look at the impact the coronavirus outbreak has had in Arkansas prisons. In the last three months, nearly 1,200 inmates in four state prisons have tested positive for COVID-19. At least 134 staff working at eight state prisons have also tested positive. In part two, Stitt tells us about the largest outbreak of the virus at the Cummins Unit in Lincoln County where 11 people have died, one of them was 29-year-old Derick Coley of Magnolia.

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Anna Stitt is an award-winning multimedia reporter. She grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, graduated from Swarthmore College and the Transom Story Workshop, and spent several years as a news producer at KNWA-TV in Fayetteville and KSTP-TV in Minneapolis. Her audio work has been featured on public radio stations across the U.S. She produced the series on COVID-19 in Arkansas prisons through a grant from the National Geographic Society.