This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Soledad.
At the very onset of the pandemic, there were no major modifications made to our program to protect us from COVID-19. There was no PPE, no social distancing being enforced. The disinfecting and cleaning chemicals that we did receive were watered down.
The only so-called precautionary measures taken here at CTF was the facility stopping non-essential civilians from mixing in with the prison population. This meant that teachers, college proctors, group facilitators, and visitors weren’t allowed to intermix with us. Our main roads and connections to recovery and rehabilitation had been severed. Everything that kept our systems going, shut down.
Correctional officers, cooks, commissary or canteen managers, everybody that it takes to keep their system going, were all still allowed to come in and mingle amongst us without masks or facial coverings, without social distancing, and without being tested.
