This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Valley State.
Meanwhile, I noticed some things about how the pandemic has been handled in prison. First, many staff members refused to wear masks for months. Inmates didn’t want to in many cases, but we were ordered to long before the officers were ordered to.
Next, when people were exposed to the virus, they were all moved to another building. I noticed that as they gathered on their original yard to await escort to the quarantine building, officers took all their IDs and put them together in one plastic bag. This procedure had never been done before.
When they got to the quarantine building, their IDs were redistributed. I kept wondering why, since many of them did not have the virus, why would they put all their IDs in one bag? It was a foolish thing to do if you did not want the virus to spread.
Eventually, I tested positive for the virus. So I was not moved to the same building as ‘exposed’ people. I went to a building for only people who tested positive. What I learned was this: To get out of that quarantined building (with no program all locked down), a person needed to report no symptoms for two weeks.
I hate to say this, but many prisoners are not completely honest. What did they do? Of course they did not want to stay locked in a room for 24 hours a day, so regardless of how they felt, they reported twice each day that they had no fever, they were released from quarantine after two weeks to freely infect others.
This was done with the knowledge of the federal medical receiver assigned to oversee California’s prisons. For some reason, instead of requiring a negative test to get out of quarantine, the receiver OK’d the word of each prisoner to self report symptoms other than vitals taken by nurses.
So they dumped still-sick inmates back into the population. That’s how I got the virus. A person in ‘so-called’ remission was placed in my room. Was all that intentional? I don’t know. Was it negligent? Yes.
