This story was told by a person incarcerated at Chino.
Caller: Yeah, first and foremost, I think just try to get people to be able to have video visits with their family due to this pandemic, because people are losing their families left and right out there and we’re just now finding out in here. Like, people are just now finding out that their parents didn’t die today, and it was over a month ago. So, it’s kind of hard for us to get to the outside world as far as this phone situation, it’s kind of hard. So, when we received them letters about y’all trying to help us out, it kind of, you know, loosened up the tension that’s going on that the pandemic brought on us.
UCI: Definitely, definitely, yeah man and, you know, I mean that’s what we’re here for man. We’re here to try to be the voice for you guys, and you know, try to voice your guys’ stories to let the world know what’s really going on and how COVID is affecting you guys. So yeah, you know, that’s what we’re here for you, to help you guys out. And then, like, moving on to a different question, you mentioned about, like you know, video visits so I’m guessing they reduced the visitation rights that you guys have right?
Caller: Yeah, they already stopped like face to face visits, or contact visits, due to corona.
UCI: Mm-hmm.
Caller: They don’t want anybody in the prison, so they resorted to the Zoom visits or iWeb visits. And that’s becoming a problem, because you got to get an application, then it takes six to eight weeks or a couple months to get approved, then you gotta hope there’s an opening just to get a video visit.
Like I said, people are just now finding out their parents is dying, like, my sister in law just died and I just found out this happened two weeks ago. It’s kind of like scary trying to get to our loved ones besides through letters. It’s hard with the letter situation, like, we’re hoping to improve because everybody is getting letters that are a month old, three weeks old, five weeks old.
We’re not being relevant to the outside world, all we get is information from the COs and whoever come in that tell us, that “Hey it’s bad out there,” well we don’t know because we don’t have contact to the outside world. So my best answer for that is to improve on our mailing and our visitation.
