This story was told by a person incarcerated at Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility.
Caller: The whole prison, everybody had it and there wasn’t nothing they could do about it but let it play out. You know, they kept telling us we had colds, you know what I mean. And everybody, we had colds until the whole prison happened and then we find out the COVID virus that’s being passed out and then our staff that started leaving. And, you know, I got out right around the beginning of COVID.
And God blessed me and took that off my sentencing and let me out. This law that came in effect and they let me out and I got home. So, epidemic, I didn’t know nothing about it, I didn’t know what to do about it, you know.
My wife with her parents. You know, I couldn’t go here because her parents are 89 and 94 years old and, you know, they said I could have contacted it from anywhere. And I just know we just had it in that prison, I wasn’t going there to live. So, I was trying to, you know, get my wife to come out with me somewhere and get into a stable living environment.
Didn’t happen. You know, see my parole agent, made it short, and I didn’t get that happen. Didn’t make the – she wasn’t going to let that happen. Made sure that didn’t happen. I mean, she got [unintelligible] I was in, so I end up back in the streets.
So, like I said, [unintelligible], you know what I mean. I been running around here homeless in the streets living with all the homeless individuals that’s come across it and watching people die, you know what I’m saying. Not just from the pandemic we got going on, they got the [unintelligible] pandemic going on around here, too. So, you [unintelligible] find somebody dead from that.
So, nobody worried about the coronavirus though. We all wore our masks and we all are doing it. Even right now they got us here on restriction still with the mask. We got to carry our mask and keep our six feet distance from each individual.
They’re not spraying the phones, like, every time somebody use it. We do have the stuff right here to do it ourselves, so we got to really, like, you know, monitor our own health and keep it clean for ourselves, watch out for ourselves on that note. But, they let us out. They still, we still getting, I’d say, about 20 hours in the cell a day, you know what I mean.
But, they’re letting us out enough to get on the phone and call our loved ones and that. I don’t think there’s every been anybody really right here in the Smith Facility that’s been diagnosed with the virus, but anybody that comes to jail, they make sure they send you to the hospital if you even have any kind of signs, you know what I’m saying.
