This story was told by a person incarcerated at Elmwood Correctional Facility.
UCI: And how has the COVID situation been like there?
Caller: Oh, man, it’s been – it’s pretty rough. So, we got – I went from the beginning of the pandemic when it first started and it’s been very different throughout the whole time. So, like, in the beginning of the pandemic, when we first came in the incarceration.
Like, there’s – that we have what’s called commissary to where we’re able to go to the store, like once a week to buy necessities, like hygiene products, or sometimes extra food or whatever that we eat per week, we’re able to go every week. And like, at first due to the COVID like there’s no incoming shipments and nothing like that. So, the like, beginning was very hard.
So, all we’re able to eat was like the first the three meals that they would provide us every day with very, like small servings, you know. So, it’s very difficult, wasn’t to where we could actually buy a personal hygiene items like we usually do, or buy more food like we usually do to make it throughout the week. And now it’s I’d say like within the past month, we’ve been having like a big surge of breakouts.
So, I’m on the minimum level camp, which is called the farm and it’s usually holds anywhere from like 1,300 to a couple 100 people at least at the very least at one time. And during the surge, when the surge hit, they went as low as moving people around from the farm facility to lockdown, to lockdown pods.
And when I came back from lockdown pods from them shifting everyone around together, there was only about 30 of us on the farm, which is a very big difference because there’s over 150 positive cases of COVID within like a week’s time.
