This story was told by a person incarcerated at Avenal.
Caller: But, you know, overall and it’s like, before the pandemic started, we told them about masks, you know, what if this happened, and, you know, we’re so close, we’re two feet away from our bunkie next to us and we’re like saying, “Hey, you know, we, you know, people would come in and have symptoms, and you’re telling me you can’t put people on these bunks.”
They came in at first and tried to like, one bunk, separate, a bunk, but you got a bunkie. Everybody’s still got a bunkie. So, you got a guy living on top of you who may not practice social distancing, may not practice proper hygiene.
And he’s associating with people that are, how do you put it, like, in the I would say, like the lifestyle of, let’s say, not, I don’t know how to put that. But there’s people maybe, that maybe, smoke cigarettes, or do drugs, or stuff like that, you know, they’re sharing stuff, and then we’re forced to be like, right there with them, you know what I mean.
We can’t tell them, “Hey, you can do that, you can’t practice that, because you’re gonna get me sick, and I could die from this” or, you know, “I don’t want to, I don’t want to get sick,” or, you know, they run us into the chow hall, they create these six-feet, like social distancing things but they run us into the chow hall and sit us four at a table.
Just packed in and it’s just the whole policies and procedures, and the way that they handled the pandemic and God forbid, if it, you know, if it does come worse, or another worse pandemic comes. They’re so ill prepared to deal with the situation because of the overcrowding in prisons, you know.
They did some transfers in the middle of the whole pandemic and like it’s weird because they talked about all of these other prisons, like San Quentin and Chino having the highest COVID rate. But if you look at the statistics, Avenal was the worst of all of the prisons as far as infection rate and, and stuff like that, and they haven’t done, nothing’s changed.
They don’t provide the proper cleaning. They don’t provide the proper social distancing space, they don’t. But they’re petty on all the other stuff like, like, “Oh, wear your mask.” They gave us N-95 masks probably like seven or eight months after the policy. And they, they threaten us to wear the masks, the CDCR custody staff. A lot of times they ain’t wearing their masks, you know, and it’s like, it’s just, do as I say not as I do. And I mean, I could go on, I listed it all.
