This story was told by a person incarcerated at Elmwood Correctional Facility.
UCI: Yeah definitely. You also mentioned your family a couple times. How has the COVID situation affected your loved ones?
Caller: Financially? It affects – it affected me and my family a lot. Like, now that I’m in here – like, well my wife she has to take on all the responsibilities of the pandemic.
And, mean, I know the government has been assisting people, and especially with my family but the money or the bills or whatever is running out and it’s not going to be enough. I know I’m not the only family. So, on top of that you still have this – people are still getting sick and here in California it’s going up, people are getting more sick.
When they were supposed to be under control and all this shot – I mean – to me personally I think that there’s things that are happening that we as a people don’t know about. You know, because there are so many stories and so much information to take in. But I know personally that there’s a lot of people that their families are struggling. You know?
Especially, I was one that got laid off two times because of the pandemic. And it’s not that I can’t keep a job, it’s just that, you know, people are getting sick, they’re closing down, you know, everything is getting closed. And it’s just hard for people.
What are they going to do? Everybody is getting sick and they can’t go to work. How is the economy going to move forward? You know there’s only so many people that can work from home. You know?
And my job, like, I was a maintenance technician. And I worked inside people’s houses and I’d do one on one in people’s apartments. So, like, what is it going to do to me if everybody has to be quarantined and I can’t go into nobody’s house, and nobody, like, where does that leave me?
Like with no income. Unemployment only goes so far. And they only give you so much, but then what happens when the money runs out? It’s going to be crazy.
