This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Orange County Theo Lacy Jail.
I realized after sending my previous letter that I failed to mention the food the county jail has been feeding us. I’m not playing when I tell you I haven’t received a warm meal since a few days after Thanksgiving.
Even then we only ate warm dinners with cold breakfast and cold sack lunches. Those warm dinners have come and gone since I arrived in the county jail, April 2020.
I’m really fortunate to be able to go to store/commissary canteen. Where inmates who are lucky enough to have family and friends put money on an inmates trust account (also known as “their books”) can spend that money on hygiene, snacks, food, and little accessories.
Things that help make our time, or rather, doing time so much better. Believe me, it makes all the difference.
So imagine having to sit in jail, most likely cause one can’t make bail and have to live off two cold sandwiches, a fruit, and some cookies. Oh, and can’t forget cold mini carrots, along a cold breakfast for six months continually. Simply cause he’s/she’s indigent which obviously they couldn’t make bail, so its also possible they don’t have money on their trust account to pay for a hot meal.
I count my blessings for sure for I’ve gone without any commissary canteen myself. Since shopping in the county jail commissary is expensive and my family and friends aren’t well off. In fact, let’s remember I’m from east Los Angeles. I wish I were from Orange County.
So there’s been some occasions when I couldn’t shop at the jail commissary and had no choice but to eat cold sandwiches, which sucked. I’d go to bed starving, thinking about food. Then a little later, dreaming about food. That’s when you know you’re hungry if you go to sleep and dream food.
You’ll be in bed hearing your stomach growl, feeling the pain of hunger inside. Drinking so much water I could drown in it. I’m joking around cause I have a sense of humor, but it’s really no laughing matter.
Especially when its real people going through this every single day. This can easily increase people’s vulnerability to such mental disorders as depression, anxiety, chronic stress, insomnia, and even dementia, not to mention malnourished.
Studies last year found that after a lockdown in Hong Kong, two thirds of respondents to a questionnaire reported clinical levels of depression, anxiety, or stress, and more than a fifth showed signs of psychosis risk.
That study caused me to wonder then just how many more people who are incarcerated are now suffering from some form of mild or severe mental disorder? For isolation here is a lot worse and we face certainly much worse living conditions than an ordinary person out there in the free world.
