This story was told by a person incarcerated at Avenal.
Caller: Okay well, most of us have already had, have been of COVID, already done with the COVID, we’ve already caught it, already been to the process of the two-week quarantine. Right now, they barely opened, they started opening up the yards for us to program with other buildings. So the distancing, I don’t know what’s being told by people out there in the streets, but these people are trying to provide social distancing on paperwork.
They are providing us masks. They start out with cloth masks, and then they went to the N95s, and then most recently, apparently the money right now for masks, the N95 masks, and now went back to the regular masks. The social distancing is not really available to us, I mean they empty some of our bunks are emptied, but I still have a bunkie that’s two feet away from me.
So, you know I might go to, want to use the restroom, I’m less than a foot away from the person next to me. When I take a shower, same story.
When I go to eat dinner, I gotta eat with four people at a the table so, they’re only social distancing us when it’s to their convenience. I do find, we do find a lot of the staff are not wearing masks, and they’re very – [unintelligible] masks. But they are not setting an example for us.
We’re not being provided chemicals on a regular basis. We have to steal what we can get to keep our person clean, our area clean, our racks clean, stuff that we touch clean.
I mean, I understand they are doing some stuff for us, but again that’s so our loved ones can think they are doing whatever they can, but I mean the social distancing is not really, really applicable to us in this situation because prisons were not designed for this type of programing. It’s just a meat warehouse and so now they’re trying to, you know, rush I would say, trying do some kind of social distancing to separate us.
But I can’t you know, I have a bunkie, he’s less than two feet away, he sleeps underneath me so, I don’t have anybody to the right of me or to the left of me.
