This story was told by a person incarcerated at Chuckawalla.
Caller: Well, doesn’t nobody want to lose, you know, their rack, they’re comfortable with the cubies that they have around them. And after the 14-day quarantine, we’re dispersed throughout the prison. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to go to our exact cube that we were in. Well, we can go to another yard, go to a cube, and then next thing you know, that prisoner comes up positive and here I go again.
It’s monotonous. Yeah, we don’t seem to understand why would they do something like that when they should just quarantine the whole building. The way these officers, these people are doing, CDCR is doing this is all backwards, we don’t seem to understand it. You know, we know that they’re clueless on what’s going on also. If the, you know, virus – but at the same time, to up and move a whole cube or two makes no sense when you should just quarantine the building.
Quarantine the yard. Why are you having inmates come from another building, another facility, a different prison and end up here just because they are out of reception? Well, that’s exactly where it’s coming from. If it’s not coming from other inmates from different prisons, it’s coming from the officers itself. If it’s not the officers, then it’s coming from the free staff. That’s exactly how we received it in the first place.
Today we had a situation with an individual asking a sergeant about sanitizer. Well, the officer, the sergeant in fact told the inmate well, don’t you guys get soap? Well yeah, we receive one bar of soap a week. Well, then wash your hands. You know, so why’d you put us the sanitizer dispensers in the restrooms just to make it look good for the CDCR or for the ombudsman that comes around for his COVID, you know, check to make it look good?
They’ve been out of it for almost a month now. So, why’d you put them up? Every time we ask a different officer on a different shift, they say we don’t know. We don’t know. So, then we ask the sergeant. He says he doesn’t know. First thing the inmate did on a rebuttal with it, with the sergeant, he told them, well, then since you don’t know sergeant, should I ask your lieutenant?
Oh, oh, you’re going to go over my head? Well, he’s just trying to get the answer. He wants to know what’s going on with the sanitizer, you know. There’s a virus going on, we have to clean every single day. We have to clean our cubes. We have to clean around us, clean the tables. Keep everything with our mask on and so forth. But you’re not helping us with that with the sanitizer.
It’s not helping. So, how is it going to help us in any way if we don’t have the materials, the chemicals to do so? They want us to clean the cubes, okay, that’s fine, we have no problem doing that. Where’s the chemicals? Where’s the cell block? Where’s the material that we need to keep it clean and to keep it sanitized? What, you give us one ounce, a spray bottle for the whole building?
That’s not sufficient. There’s 24 cubes in here. Eight men per cube, 192 inmates in one building, and one bottle, one spray bottle which is a 32-ounce spray bottle to do the whole building? Let’s get real with this, this is ridiculous. A lot of the inmates don’t want to stand up and say anything because they don’t want to get shipped out and moved to another building. Which, you know, that’s all of our nightmare.
But at the same time, what’s most important is, you know, our loved ones. We don’t want to put them in a, you know, scare. We don’t want to put them stressed out. A lot of things are not going as procedures and they say one thing, not to mention again the COVID announcement. Well, for the first few months, we were able to hear it, you know, loud and clear over the speaker monitor and so forth on the yard and everything.
Now it’s so muffled and low, we don’t even know what they’re saying anymore. So, we’re like well, what’s the sense of you announcing the COVID announcement and procedures when you’re not even putting it on loudspeaker. So, it’s no fun game whatsoever. Every time we try to get something done with the officers and ask them for gloves so we can clean. And more rags or again, material spray liquid, they tell us that oh, we’re out. Laundry’s out. We don’t have none. So, we’re not sure what to do. And so, we use our personal property to do it. It just gets old. It really does. If you have any questions you want to ask me, please feel free to.
