This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Soledad.
Now because there are so many staff out sick, there are days when there is only one CO in the building who has to handle the feeding, which seems to come later and later each day. The food portions have gotten smaller. I sometimes wonder where my next meal is going to come from, if it comes at all.
We haven’t been able to shop at commissary due to the staff shortage, we are being told. So a lot of us are barely getting by on the meager rations that come to the door, which I am grateful for and count as a blessing because it can be a lot worse. I’ve watched a docu-series, “Locked Up Abroad” and there was a prison in Russia, I believe it was called The Blue Dolphin or Black Dolphin, but they were suffering a pandemic before the COVID-19 pandemic.
I feel that the 33 prisons in California are 33 sacrifice zones where the system is tucking away all of the black and brown individuals who it has kidnapped off of the street. I don’t believe CDCR had any intentions on rehabilitating any inmates when they added the “R” onto CDC. I believe that it was just another ploy that they’ve used to generate more millions.
There was a statement that was made by someone who was employed by CCR that I’ve never forgotten. In fact I admire her for her courage. Her name was. She was a sponsor of a program at San Quentin. She said, “If a person gets rehabilitated here, it takes a lot of work. It’s not something that the state makes easy. It seems at times that the state is in the way more times than they are positive factors.” That was the truest thing I had ever heard anyone “on the inside” say about its employer. And it’s the obvious and evident, yet, it hasn’t changed.
