This story was told by a person incarcerated at Solano.
Caller: And so to- and, and then what made the, the straw that broke the camel’s back for us was, uh the sergeant came in here late last night and noticed everybody had their stuff on, on top of the top bunk. And so, um, the top bunk is not occupied because we have uh most of the time, a single bunk.
And then we don’t have a bunkie. And so when she left out, uh, that night, yesterday night, last night, she told officers to tell us not to put stuff on the top bunk. And when she made that announcement over intercom, we were like wait a minute, what is wrong with this lady?
You mean to tell me this lady is not concerned about our health? We don’t know what’s going on. For all we know we about to die.
We don’t have people to clean the bathrooms and clean the showers. We don’t have, uh, you know, uh, sanitary stuff. It’s water everywhere in here, it’s leaking, and it’s vermin. And this woman is- don’t want us to put our stuff on the top locker so it don’t get wet and we don’t have, uh, mice going through our foods.
And so, what we did is we demanded to see the sergeant. And so, the officers called the sergeant up in here and we, we start talking to her and we said, “What is going on?” You know, you know. “You send, you send, you send, you send, can you send a cleaning crew up in here to, uh, you know, to make sure that we have, uh, you know, uh, a clean facility that you got us in?”
And she told us that, uh, “Yeah if there’s gonna be some cleaning going on, it’s going to be one of y’all.” So that uh perplexed us. We were flabbergasted. We was like wait a minute, we up in here fighting for our life. And you mean to tell me that the only cleaning that’s going get done is going to have to be by one of us?
I said what in the hell is the, what and we were like what. I- we’re supposed to be recovering. We’re supposed to be resting. We’re not supposed to be cleaning up no bathroom, cleaning up the shower, we’re popping.
So she told us, “That’s just the way it is, you’re going to have to deal with it.” So then we addressed the problem about the, um, the vermin and the leaky roof. And a leaky roof is a construction problem. And, uh, she sit back and said, “Well, just put in a work order for that.”
And I’m, I’m saying like, “A work order? How, if you put in a work order for a leaky roof, you mean to tell me a plain officer is gonna come out? They’re not gonna sit back and, uh, and, and tear the roof apart to fix the leak.” You know what I mean?
You would think that when I told her the- so we pointed out the water, that she would say okay I’ll send some guys up in here with wet drawbacks, to get to clean up the, um, the water. But instead she told us, “I don’t know what to tell you, um, to put in a work order.” You know?
And then, this is what another thing that made me so frustrated. I said sergeant, I said, “We up in here. We fighting for our life. We don’t know what what’s going on. We watch the news, we see people dying.” I said, “You mean to tell me since we don’t have a neighbor, a bunkie, we can’t put our stuff on top of the bunk?”
I said, “We got rats and roaches up in here.” And she told me, “No you can’t.” And she said, “Where are the rats and roaches?” And that just really let me know that this woman had no, um, no, compassion for us.
Because she told us to point out to her rats and roaches and here this is in early in the morning. Everybody knows that if you got rats around, they hide. They only come out at night, for the most part. And that just really let me know what her mind frame was and her whole-body language was. She was just looking at us like we were disgusting.
