This story was told by a person incarcerated at Soledad.
Caller: Well, it’s not the best of times when you don’t have visiting. And I do have a very, my mother, she passed in 2008. And I do have a father who is very elderly. He isn’t gonna be with us much longer and that’s very frustrating not being able to go out to the visiting. We haven’t had visiting since March, I believe. There’s nothing we can look to in the future that might change on this.
So, we haven’t heard anything anyway. So, that’s rough. He’s been at my side, so to speak, for all these last 40 years of incarceration. So, we are close as we can be considering we’ve been separated for so long by prison walls. But yeah, it does amplify the isolation I gotta say.
And it’s not helping your family out there either. I mean, they’re going through the same thing. Particularly, being in one of those places where there’s a convalescent situation where they’re isolated and have risk of this COVID. It makes you sit in this idle time in here. There’s no programs. You get plenty of idle time.
They’ve got everything shut down. There’s no vocations, there’s no self-help groups. No, not even AA. There’s nothing. You just have to sit here and wait this out and twiddle your thumbs and think about your family, I guess. So, yeah, it’s not an easy situation, in any way you want to look at it.
