This story was told by a person incarcerated at Avenal.
UCI: Yeah, thank you for that. And, personally, how have you been coping with the crisis? Oh, and also, I think the call expires in two minutes. So also, like any final thoughts before we get cut off?
Caller: Personally, like, you know, visiting wise and, and overall morale, we get a yard still to this date, we only get a yard, sometimes an hour a day, you know, from having yard four times a day. It’s been, it’s been really stressful. I mean, our overall programming and just the way that we get treated is just, I wish they would let cameras in and people could really see what’s going on, because what’s portrayed by the media, and, and politicians, it’s not what, what reality is as far as what’s really going on here in prison.
And you know, in some cases, it’s bad, but and not all cases. And we’re not all monsters and, you know, deserve to be locked up and murderers and, and all these people that deserve no rights or we’re spoiled. Because if you’ve seen the conditions, the squalor that we live in, and we experience from day to day, you’d be like, it would just, I think it would, it should shock the conscience because so many people are coming out.
But in a final thought I would just say that. I wish that there was more oversight. I wish there was more, somebody that would take accountability because the people and the things that have happened, they haven’t took into account. They haven’t changed any policies or procedures. They’re still intermixing negatives with positives, possible positives.
They’re still transferring people that are, have come up positive and leave them in the situation and transfer them and it’s just a mess. It’s, it’s a mess inside these prisons, especially here and God forbid if we hit a worse pandemic, we are, there’s going to be a lot more people that die in there. And if you look at the ratio, why did so many inmates have to die?
But so few officers and staff died because they got to go home, isolate, take medicine, and take care of themselves. If we get sick, we get nothing. Absolutely nothing. We just sit in here and suffer, until you’re either gonna die and then they’ll do something for you.
