This story was told by a person incarcerated at Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility.
Caller: Yeah, you know, with the population a lot of guys don’t even have a high school diploma. A lot of guys don’t get past the eight, or ninth, tenth, eleventh, or twelfth grade. I, myself, did go to junior college so I’m a little bit educated. We have our own service and I even had a hard time even asking for help with the guards there.
And they just weren’t really communicating very well with us. They were kind of downplaying the situation. They did admit that, you know, us being on a lockdown was BS. But, they just, really – we got very little medical care.
I mean, the medical care that we got was just guys getting sick and, you know, it’s a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little office infirmary. It’s not really a medical center or even like an urgent care area where they could treat the guys who were positive.
But, now that there is a vaccination I guess we’re moving – they do have moving around a little bit more now that most of us are vaccinated. But, I can say during the height of the pandemic it was – didn’t really have a hold on everybody getting sick. They had to, you know – they were checking people’s temperatures with the hand held head temperature gauge.
So, but, I mean, through my 20 months stay here at the correctional facility I’ve seen probably over 40 people come and go that were positive or getting vaccinated that needed to get vaccinated because they were testing positive.
You know, they have, like, mask rules up on the windows and social distancing rules up on the windows and stuff like that. And, you know, some dorms are more restrictive than others, I guess. But, you know, they are mixing us up with people that were previously positive for COVID but vaccinated now. So, I guess they’re mixing us up more where they had us separated.
And just like I said before, there’s not much contact with the family members. They had us on a lockdown for about eight months where there was no visiting, there was no rec, there were no regular phone calls made. There was not much communication allowed to the outside world or outside the facility.
UCI: Wow.
Caller: That’s really it, that’s really it.
