This story was told by a person incarcerated at Donovan.
UCI: I also wanted to ask about the vaccination situation at your facility.
Caller: Okay, what do you have?
UCI: Yeah, so how has that been handled?
Caller: Truthfully, they have been doing the vaccination, they have been offering it to people, I know they offered it to me. And a lot of people, like my cellmate, he got vaccinated. He received two vaccinations already.
And from what I see, they have been rolling that out making it available to all incarcerated people. I think at first they started off with the elderly people, maybe 65 and older, and then they kind of worked their way down. But they have made the vaccine available to my knowledge for – I didn’t take the vaccination, you know, for personal reasons, but they did offer it to me. So yeah.
UCI: With reduced visitation and programming, how has that affected you?
Caller: Horribly. I think, I haven’t, I got a visit, they opened up visits for one weekend and I got a chance to get an hour visit. My fiancé comes from Oakland, so she flew all the way out here for an hour visit. Trying to get in, with all of the new rules and stuff, as far as you have to prove that you took the COVID test, and she’s fully vaccinated and still making her take the COVID test, so it just seems like really unnecessary, kind of really overkill.
And it’s delaying, it’s delaying people’s visits. It’s really hard on people, it’s really hard on me. Like, it had been a year already before I had seen her, and we were supposed to get married last year and I’m still unable to get married because visits are really restricted. I can’t even marry her video visit, that would suck, but that’s not even available.
I think there’s more that this prison can do, you know, things are opening up out there on the outside world and we’re still restricted in here. I guess I understand the concern, but it’s really tough. It’s really difficult not being able to see our families, people are kind of losing their minds in here.
