This story was told by a person incarcerated at Soledad.
Caller: Okay, thank you. I would like to talk about the social distancing attempting to conduct throughout the California Department of Corrections. They have reduced the population down quite a bit. And they certainly need to continue doing that because, speaking for myself, the yard I live on now is currently nothing but dorms. We have nobody in cells here. This is a level one facility. We have six dorms here. And currently, they have the bunks separated by six feet each.
And the problem, though, is we’re sharing the same facilities, the bathrooms, there’s 10 toilets for the entire dorm population that are shared. Actually, it’s eight toilets and 10 sinks if my counts is remembered correctly. And everyone is sharing these common areas, you know, the air into enclosed bathroom, there’s no windows, so certainly not the best circulation and some of them the exhaust fan doesn’t even work, so there is no circulation.
So, it’s really a bad situation if the COVID were to come back. We’ve had it on this facility once already in one of the dorms and thankfully it didn’t spread beyond the one dorm but, boy, we needed the population out of there. So, and we’re going into winter now, so I’m a little worried about that knowing that this virus is liable to come back maybe tenfold.
We don’t know how this pandemic works in the wintertime. But we saw what it could do in the summer and it wasn’t nice. They took over a dozen guys out of here at least that were positive with that stuff. So, that was just in one dorm. I’m pretty sure it was many more than that, but I don’t have an exact number for you.
