This story was told by a family member of someone incarcerated at Chowchilla.
Caller: The way I’ve been coping with it is mainly just, I really just make sure to always have money on my DCL account. And I always try and use JPay as often as I can. And then, family usually just writes in. But the best thing that I’ve done is just always make sure that, whenever is the most random time that he calls or anything like that, just to always make sure that I’m answering my phone and everything and always making sure I have money on my account, yeah.
UCI: And then also, just, what were you doing when you couldn’t speak to him? I mean, were there certain things that you were doing just to kind of deal with not being able to just, you know, just not wondering what was happening?
Caller: The only things I would do would be. I would just write. I would actually type a lot of letters, and then I would send them that way and then just get all my thoughts together within those weeks and just kind of bundle it all together. Because I know that, you know, I didn’t know how the restrictions were on: Could they receive mail? Was it being held?
And then, even if they received it, sometimes they couldn’t write back. Things like that. So, I just tried to bundle everything together. And then, every time I felt like I wanted to speak to him or know how he was doing, I would just keep adding on to, you know, one of my letters or word documents.
UCI: And why would they not be able to send letters back?
Caller: Well, because kind of when they were not able to receive calls and everything, I’m assuming that they also – just everything was just, I guess, taking so long to process. So, just everything was so delayed when it came to everything. Even when I would send letters, he wasn’t receiving them as quickly as he was before.
