Mental health crisis

03.19.2021 • CIW • Full Story

This letter was written by a person incarcerated at CIW (California Institution for Women).

This letter was written on March 17, 2021.

I’ve been down seven years which means seven years without my two boys.

They forgot about me despite all we talk on the phone and write. Taking away visiting is something we must do in order to ensure safety and health. But I was so close to getting my first visit from my kids. It’s like stabbing me in the heart.

COVID-19 is destroying my life! I can’t stand being away from my kids all this time. I’ve been going to the mental health crisis bed repeatedly due to the depression caused by lack of communication with my kids.

I wish I could be next to all my family and boys. But yeah us mothers are suffering.

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ABOUT PRISONPANDEMIC™

By providing a digital archive of stories, UCI PrisonPandemic™ is bringing greater transparency to the COVID-19 crisis in prisons and jails. Made up of faculty and students at the University of California, Irvine, it is an ongoing initiative to collect stories from people incarcerated in California carceral facilities, their family members and loved ones, and the staff who work in these facilities. We will continue to add more stories as we receive them. If you use any material from this site, please reference or link to prisonpandemic.uci.edu. In creating PrisonPandemic, our hope is that the archive will outlive the COVID-19 pandemic and serve as a resource for understanding the unequal toll of the criminal justice system in the United States.

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