This story was told by a person incarcerated at CMC (California Men’s Colony).
UCI: How had the COVID-19 situation at your facility affected your loved ones and your visitation with them?
Caller: Well, even the fact that I went to quarantine a couple of weeks back, it was a little frustrating for my family not knowing what happened to me cause I used to call them weekly. And then I went to quarantine and they didn’t know whether I had COVID or not. I only got a message through somebody else. Which I had to trust with my family’s phone number to let them know that I left for what I thought that was two weeks. It ended up being 23 days.
So we went through it. There was a little stress. I’m not gonna say that it wasn’t, but we came out stronger. At least that’s what I believe in. And my visitation, well, we haven’t got a visit since like March. I haven’t seen my family since like forever. I’ve been down in for like 13 years now in October and not even the prospect of video visits.
Video computers in our visiting room, and they are always full, we only can get visiting once a month in the video calls. So that is pretty much it. I don’t see no hope of ever seeing my family until this is over because every time that we have the hope of the yard opening up, we get cleared at the levels according to the guidelines of CDCR, somebody commits a mistake, somebody doesn’t get tested, or comes back and tests positive.
What I hear is like they test them in the morning, and then two hours later they tell them, “Hey you got COVID, get out of there”. But we are already exposed, so we go back again FCOM three, or whatever they wanna call it.
And we just get locked down, so there’s no program. There’s no program, there’s no visits.
