This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Valley State.
Then inmates started to get sick. It was a wildfire that spread throughout a building in the blink of an eye. You can’t social distance when the facility is operating at 180 percent capacity. When you cram eight men in a cell designed to house six women, it becomes a breeding ground for a virus like COVID.
The prison officials were panicking, placing restriction upon restriction on inmates. Inmates were mandated to wear masks while correctional officers were not. That made no sense as it was the officers who were bringing COVID inside the prison.
Us inmates have been treated with much more animosity than usual because officers were getting sick and of course it must be inmates’ faults. I heard officers say “Who gives a shit if inmates get COVID. I am only concerned about us in green”, referring to other officers. More and more of us inmates felt as if we were being punished for COVID outbreaks.
Infected inmates were sent to an isolation building and their pod-mates, seven other inmates, would be sent to two-week quarantine in two-man cells. Only to be kicked out, not to their old building, but to a random building on a random yard. This further added to the extreme isolation growing in the inmate population. As the few friends and closeness one develops in a housing unit was broken.
The stress of someone getting sick and then being sent away was unbearable. So when people were getting sick, they tried to hide it and by doing so would spread the infection. We test weekly and you hold your breath for three days hoping you are not sick and if you refuse to test you are sent away to quarantine.
There were times when they would kick an inmate who tested positive out of isolation only to have that whole pod or cell test positive the following week. We started to believe the prison was trying to get inmates sick in order to build a “herd immunity”. Inmates were getting fed up. There were whispers of mass resistance against COVID testing and moving to quarantine cells.
