This story was told by a person incarcerated at Santa Rita Jail.
UCI: What has the COVID situation been like at your facility?
Caller: What’s the hospital like?
UCI: Oh no. What has the COVID situation been like at your facility?
Caller: Oh. so, Well, they’ve been using it to, as a means to commit criminal acts like, okay, we’ve had some outbreaks. But then, they’ll fake some outbreaks to make it appear as if we need to be quarantined. So they can stop us from going to court until quarantine is over to keep us in jail longer so they can earn money because there’s a shortages of people in jail right now due to COVID-19. That’s what they, that’s what they’ve been doing.
They have us in multiple different custody levels, all in one pod. Maximum, medium, and minimum, even protected custody, general population, mainline, and mental health, are all together to where they can all, where they can make a justification for only allowing us out one hour in the morning and sometimes not even an hour out at night. Because there’s so many different groups, they got to rotate with letting us out separately. So they use that as a justification to keep us in our cells for the most amount of time as possible, during COVID-19. Any other questions?
UCI: Oh yeah. What about the, how has the vaccination situation been like at your facility? Are they offering vaccines?
Caller: Oh yeah. They’re offering vaccines and they’re offering COVID tests, but they’re playing a lot of little psychological games. Like, they’re psychologically torturing the behavioral mental health who, inmates who are discriminated and get the worst out of all inmates that are housed in this facility. Anything else?
UCI: Yeah. How has the COVID situation been like for your loved ones?
Caller: Oh, it’s been really, really rough because you got, like, I was telling you, they’re playing a lot of little different games. They’ll suspend your pin code, you have to use the 13-digit code on the phone to allow you access to get a line to call out. They have vindictively been suspending your pin code numbers when they want to stop you from calling loved ones or friends.
We have GTL smart device tablets, they’re given loaner phones, the deputies and stuff and they do cyber hack apps, free apps that allow you to take over the device. And they’ll hang your device up, make your wifi connectivity keep dropping when you’re trying to watch movies to harass you, and make the phone, if you’re trying to call someone out, keep ringing, ringing, ringing, you know, stuff like that. And they think that’s funny. Anything else?
