This story was told by a person incarcerated at Avenal.
Caller: And we were like the last building in the whole prison, we were like literally the last building on the whole prison that were getting COVID because we were, we were pretty much locked all willing down. And the mistake that they made is they kept moving people around. Shifting people from yard to yard. I mean you’re talking about six yards, five yards, four yards coming here.
And for some reason they designated our building, one of our buildings, is cell living, they designated that building as a COVID building. So those who got sick would go there for two-week quarantine and they would come back out to one of the other big buildings for 90 days, 90-day cleanup or whatever after, after a couple months and they would kick us back out to this building here that we’re in.
And so, the biggest mistake they made was shuffling people around, and then after a while they end up moving, they end up moving them into three yards and in these three yards, the quarantine yards. And it all stand down because PIA was locked down, they were losing millions of dollars for PIA industry.
And a lot of us were trying to tell the captain, “Look if you guys had any fucking sense, you guys would just shut the whole prison down, shut every yard, shut every building down, and let everyone do the two-week quarantine and you’d get your workers back in two weeks, instead of six months.” But their idea of handling the situation was to shuffle people around and get everybody sick at one time, and it happened okay.
So, after the captain’s team invaded us in our building, and he made that comment about a week later, 50 of us got sick, we all tested and 50 got sick.
And he moved the whole building out to the 20. They moved us all out and I’ve been in this building for four years, and so we went we, they moved us out to the 20, and we all did our two-week quarantine and only half of us came back. And the other half went to the 40, the quarantine building. And, so I mean they just, they mishandled this whole COVID thing terribly. They were not, they were so little prepared.
