This story was told by a family member of someone incarcerated at Solano.
UCI: Perfect. Okay, so what has their experience been like, and then what has your experience been like as a, you know, a loved one?
Caller: Well, the experience for myself has been difficult because we have not been able to see them at all for a year. And they just recently started video visiting there, so it’s only been in the last couple months they’ve had video visiting. So we haven’t had any contact other than phone calls and letters with our loved ones.
UCI: Mmhmm.
Caller: And then on their behalf, I believe they are mishandling how they’re the, the process of how to quarantine somebody during the COVID, it seems to escape them at times. I am not sure if they’ve perfected it or not, but I do have a recording of my fiancé that he had called me, and I had recorded different people at different times mishandling the way the pandemic broke out there.
UCI: Oh, wow.
Caller: Yeah, I have a recording. If you have an email, I can send that to you, and you can have that to go with it.
UCI: Oh. You know what? That’s a great. Let me ask my supervisor real quick.
Caller: Okay.
UCI: In the meantime, can you explain kind of what it was like with writing letters, were you? Did you feel like taking longer than normal because of the pandemic? Did you feel like he was constantly being shuffled around or anything like that?
Caller: He wasn’t constantly being shuffled around until recently, soon as they had an outbreak there. Which was like six months ago, and I’m guessing the time. I’m not positive the exact frame of time that it took place.
But as soon as it broke out, they would get an infected person in that building, and then they would quarantine that person and then they would quarantine the other people that weren’t infected in another building. But then they were allowing still people to go to work even though they were around this person that was known to be infected.
UCI: Mmhmm. Wow, so it was just, he, you really didn’t know if one day you would get a letter and he would be infected, right?
Caller: Right, yeah, because of how they mishandled the whole cha cha.
