From the earliest days of the pandemic, we knew that one of the most dangerous places to be is group housing.

Of course, that includes nursing homes, people in those facilities are starting to get vaccinated right now.

But it also includes jails, prisons, detention centers, and the millions of people in those facilities are wondering when the vaccine will get inside those fortified walls.

You three feet apart from each other, every bed you don't even have three feet. It's a little out that you have between beds.

You hit the hay and three feet apart. Your head is against another image.

When Robbie Dennis was transferred to the Louisiana prison known as Angola, it was March, just about a week after the first reported coronavirus case in the state.

His first stop was two weeks of quarantine, locked in the cell 23 hours a day. And as bad as that kind of isolation sounds, Dennis embraced it as a measure of security.

So I felt like I was safe. I was in the safest place possible being in the confinement area of the prison.

So I embraced that situation.

Dennis was 46 with no underlying health conditions. He had almost finished serving his five years for possessing cocaine.

If he could survive to August, he'd be reunited with his wife and five kids in the outside world.

Like I told my wife, I said, I think I'm in a better position to be here than to be out there moving around in general population for my own safety.

Then he did have to enter the general prison population and he says nobody had masks for months.

When they finally arrived in June or July, people didn't wear them. The masks tied around the back of a neck. And Dennis says people were afraid of getting strangled.

It was fear for the wearer because you're in a prison. I don't want to be at a disadvantage with somebody who grabs them and has them tied around my neck.

So it was the mask was a disaster. Nobody would wear it because of that reason.

At least 16 inmates at Angola have died of COVID-19. That's the official number though the actual tally could be higher.

Dennis only ever heard about it through word of mouth.

And you only go ahead that because you got inmates doing the job. Those inmates got a bear in that person.

If you don't have the way to go home too. Those inmates working in the infirmary and you may know those inmates so were travel.

The US incarcerates almost 2.3 million people, far more per capita than any other country.

And now that there's a vaccine, the CDC is coming up with recommendations on who should get prioritized.

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