This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Valley State.
To UCI,
Currently housed at Valley State Prison, serving a sentence of life without parole. I received your letter during the time I had COVID-19 and I was constantly moved around the prison due to isolation protocol the prison has in place. Now that I am stable, I found your letter and wanted to write you back.
Having COVID-19 and being moved around from yard to yard was difficult. I had experienced being considered resolved to being moved from the isolation building into a resolve building to be on quarantine building because they were putting us in buildings with men that had not yet caught COVID-19.
So when these men was exposed to COVID-19, they would be moved to isolation building, but your building would be placed on a 14 day quarantine. This would be repeated several times before I was moved into a completely resolved building.
I knew I would catch COVID-19 due to it is hard to socially distance behind these walls, especially how we live with eight people in a pod. So it was just a matter of time that we all would catch it. When the buildings are isolation or quarantine buildings, we did not get phone calls. You had to be in a resolve building to get a phone call.
I went almost a month of not talking to my family during my COVID-19 sickness, but throughout this pandemic, I went about a total of three months during this pandemic, of not talking to family. At the end of this, given this pandemic, I don’t know if they knew how to handle this pandemic and did the best they could, given the circumstances.
As far as visits, I usually get two to three visits a year due to the distance for driving for my family. So it really did not hurt me in that area. Do I wish I could have seen them this last year, yes, but I also wanted them to be safe also.
Dealing with this crisis has been up and down because of the moving, no phone calls, staff and medical not really knowing who was in charge and miscommunication from medical staff was frustrating, but I dealt with it because of how the free world was dealing with it. A pandemic people really did not know how to manage it.
Through all this Valley State Prison did not do as bad as I thought they would. With inmate deaths, we were under five so that is a good thing for us at VSP. Any more questions, feel free to contact me.
Sincerely.
