This story was told by a person incarcerated at Chuckawalla.
UCI: Thanks. So what’s the current COVID-19 situation at your facility like?
Caller: They, long story short, they shuffled us around whenever we became positive. Or even if we were negative, they moved us into different areas that were already in, they had put positive people and they never cleaned them. For example, what used to be the administrative segregation unit, they turned it into a negative area but it was full of positives basically.
The family visiting area is the same thing. They were putting negatives and/or positives together to try to get everybody infected. Long story short. And then on top of that they were not separating everybody correctly in order to avoid a huge epidemic within the prison.
UCI: So, you feel like they were trying to intentionally infect the other prisoners?
Caller: Pretty much. Pretty much. It seemed like the goal was to get everybody infected in order to get the program running again. Like they wanted to- they’ve been trying to get education running, and they were supposed to start it about two weeks ago. But because of not everyone’s been infected, they had to wait, and it seems like they, we were pretty much the last holdouts that had not been infected yet.
Now they’ve been infected, so now they can continue on with their plan instead of actually protecting us from the COVID-19.
UCI: Wow.
Caller: Yeah.
UCI: How, can you kind of give me like a brief timeline from, you know, from March until now about, you know, with what’s been going on in there? How they’ve been handling it?
Caller: Okay so in March they basically shut most everything down. They put a what’s called on a quarantine program.
UCI: Okay.
Caller: Where each building goes separately to chow. And each building goes separately to yard in order to try to avoid a pandemic. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, it came in anyways. Right around May or so, three yards got infected, Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie.
All at the same time. Uh Delta yard was the only holdout until, for about six months until a couple weeks ago, when unfortunately, it seems like one of the staff members brought it in. And then it came, it supposedly came through the kitchen. It got infected in one building and then somehow it jumped to the other building because there’s a little bit of co-mingling that was happening that shouldn’t have been happening.
And then on top of that, because of the lack of social distancing, they still have the buildings overcrowded, at 192 per building. When these buildings are designed to only hold maybe 130, 140 people.
UCI: Wow.
Caller: Yeah, so it basically was a recipe for disaster, long story short.
