This story was told by a person incarcerated at Donovan.
UCI: How has the COVID situation been like at your facility?
Caller: It seems like it’s kind of leveling out now. We’re at phase two. So, I think it’s part of the inmate population. There hasn’t been any outbreaks for a couple of months now. But that’s not the [unintelligible] staff. And officers, they’ve been having outbreaks, deaths, and we have to go back on modified lockdown, because there was an outbreak with them.
But yeah, I think things are kind of like, leveling out now. It was worse before, I don’t think that this prison did a really good job at really dealing with the COVID issue. A lot of people, I think out of all the [unintelligible] prisons, we have the second highest mortality rate. In our whole prison, there was an outbreak here, there was an outbreak and they were mixing incarcerated people, they were mixing with [unintelligible] last year.
They were mixing infected people with people who weren’t. And they already had a policy where if you were an infected person they would move you to an isolated place, and it was on another yard, B yard. But the prison went against its own policy, and housed infected people. And I’m on A yard. They were housing infected people with uninfected people.
And they knew about this, and they put a tag on the doors of people who had tested positive, or had come into contact with people who had tested positive. They put a tag on their door saying this, but still had them all in the same area and were supposed to move them.
We used the same showers, we used the same telephone, we used the same dayroom, so they had infected people with uninfected people. And it spread, it really spread in our prison. So I don’t think that this prison did a good job of really dealing with that.
And this was all after the outbreak that had happened at San Quentin, an outbreak at another prison, so this prison could have been better prepared, knowing how to deal with it, but they just dropped the ball. And the result was that a lot of people did die as well.
UCI: You mentioned a current outbreak, right?
Caller: Uh-huh.
UCI: So, regarding the prison staff, do you know if they got COVID, and how many?
Caller: Say again?
UCI: Due to the outbreak, do you know anything regarding the staff? If they had COVID, or how many of them had COVID?
Caller: I don’t know that data. But I know my fiancé, she’s pretty active with prison related issues. She’s on these prison websites, so she keeps me informed, and I do the best of my ability to stay informed in here.
But I know that there was this staff and he got infected, he tested positive, and he had been coming to work and I’ve heard that he didn’t have his mask on at certain times and stuff, and he’s been in contact with a bunch of incarcerated people because of the nature of his job, and we end up going on lockdown. So I know about that, and then there were some other correctional officers that I’ve heard about, but I can’t give you specific data, I don’t have that information.
