This story was told by a person incarcerated at Elmwood Correctional Facility.
UCI: And what has the COVID situation been like at your facility?
Caller: It’s been kind of hard at the beginning. There’s like a two-week – I was hold a little – held for in the quarantine dorm for a little more than two weeks. You’re held in the cell, you know, with another person.
COVID’s going in and out. And it keeps us held inside the quarantine dorm even longer than normal. The phones, you know, we’re not able to use them quite often.
I was, in the 18 days I was in here, in the quarantine dorm, I was allowed to use the phone two, three times because there’s 30 minutes, if that, and I got about intervals of four of those. Some of them were cut short. Enough time to take a shower, you know, talk to somebody, or grab some soap, some toilet paper for the cell. And then use the phone.
It’s not really feasible to do in that amount of time. And then eventually, I was moved over to an open dorm. And the open dorm is – it was completely empty.
The – the hotpot we call it, in order to cook our food from commissary, we did not have that. It was taken out before we came in here. There was more and more waves coming in.
Right now, we’re about half full. There was no chairs for us to use. So, everyone was standing watching TV. There was, you know, I mean the good thing is, we have a little half court to play basketball.
There’s a couple of things we could do. But, you know, other than that, when I was in the quarantine dorm, we were, me and a couple other people went to court. And we were, we had to call a number to get into a program.
And it was – it was mandated. And now while the judge said “Hey, I’ll have somebody allow you, you know, a CO or somebody allow you to use the phone when you’re back,” that didn’t quite happen. It took a week after my court date.
