This letter was written by a person incarcerated at High Desert.
At High Desert State Prison, we was one of the last prison locations to get COVID-19! See the cases was very low, but when the prison system decided to transfer inmates from San Quentin State Prison, to High Desert State Prison, it the COVID-19 super super spreaded.
For a while the inmates here at High Desert State Prison, have been getting mistreated. The food they was serving us as meals was never cooked. The proportions that give us on the food trays is not enough to feed a child, let alone grown men and women in the California prison systems.
We have a store here on the prison grounds that they, tae prison, call commissary. We are allowed to go to commissary once a month. All inmates are allowed to go to commissary, but for some strange reason, a lot of inmates have been denied to go to commissary for two months now. And the staff here don’t care about that at all.
As far as being moved and moved out our cells for nothing! A lot of inmates done caught the virus, all in one location. But instead of moving inmates in a clean cell, they just move you in a cell. That they don’t clean, which they supposed to, but don’t!
Tell you, you’re moving at 4:30 a.m., and if you don’t move, you’re going to receive some type of discipline!
Safety inside? We feel that the staff is responsible for safety measures! Free staff cooks, COs not wearing masks, breathing on our food, transferring COVID-19 on our food trays! Not properly cleaning food trays, food carts, the building, period! Even when they was instructed to!
Not having visits for almost one year and a half, it’s been hard. We sone lost a lot of family members due to the COVID-19 virus. We was at one point allowed to make free phone calls a lot of days out of the week. That was helping a great deal.
But as you know it’s about the money and not about us being able to reach our families, our loved ones. So now we get free phone calls twice a month, instead of a few times out of the week.
