This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Solano.
Greetings PrisonPandemic,
As per your request on how I feel about my safety inside prison, quite honestly, it’s been such a scary experience on so many levels. First we’re lockdown for 23 hours and 45 minutes a day, only to come out our cell for fifteen minutes a day, to do one of the two things and that is either to take a shower or use the phone, or one or another. As far as reduced visitation from family and loved ones is concerned a more accurate account of visitation is there has been no visitation during the pandemic.
CDCR has posted that they are considering giving tablets to do educational schoolwork and video visitation on, but nothing yet. They gave a website that family can have video visitation, but it hasn’t worked at all until March 12, 2021 which was the first-time inmates have been able to utilize this option.
Which brings me to how I feel about my safety. Being that a lot of inmate have issues with coping skills, it’s only magnified by 10,000 in this time of crisis. And what really stands out to me is that inmates celled together for such a long time in the cell are fighting each other more frequently. And a lot of the times ending in one of them being killed by the other.
As far as safety concerns to COVID-19 is even more scary the governor and the Center for Disease Control suggest no movement. But CDCR has moved several inmates from San Quentin Prison here and since then COVID has been spreading. And a building I was housed in had several inmates that tested positive for COVID. They moved them to a building for positive COVID inmates and put the rest of the building on quarantine and continue to test for more positive inmates.
They moved me to a building with non-positive inmates without even knowing if I was positive or not while I was already in a building on quarantine. Which later the building they move me to soon after began inmate testing positive. Also, several inmates tested positive in cells which they left there in the building for over two weeks and they knew they had tested positive. I don’t know if they didn’t have the room to move them or they were experimenting with us in enclosed settings.
Then when they made the vaccine available to us everyone I have seen getting the shot was half my age. I requested to receive the shot but was denied ‘til I wrote a 602 to complain about the way they rolled out the vaccine to us. Then they started giving it to the older inmates that were high risk to catching it. I was eventually able to take the vaccine on March 12, 2021.
Well thank you for being so gracious with your time on behalf of inmates.
Yours truly.
