This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Pelican Bay.
Dear UCI PrisonPandemic,
Hello. Earlier this evening, I received a letter from [redacted] who was requesting information about prison life during the pandemic for a project you are conducting. It asked the following question:
What has it been like to be inside during this time (either at the beginning of the pandemic, middle, or now)?
Well, it has been surprisingly terrible!! Surprisingly how? Like, why was it a surprise? Because I have spent every single minute of the last twenty-nine years, three months, and four days in custody, and more than half of that time was in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), so my position was that nothing that happened here should affect me very much.
But, then the quarantine started. You see even though visiting and almost all programs were suspended in April 2020, and even though all staff were temperature checked daily and tested weekly, we still would have staff in the housing unit whose test results were pending. Test results came back positive? Quarantine the unit that the officer worked in.
From October through March my unit went on quarantine nine times. Fourteen days minimum, each time. On one occasion, after a lengthier-than-usual quarantine, my unit was cleared for “yard-release”, the “Q” was over, and off I went, outside, the fresh, juicy air of winter in the Pacific Northwest. Ahhhh, nice!! Right??
Thirty minutes!! Thirty minutes later, they recalled the yard and put us back on “Q”. Ugh! Once we were off for one full day, but our average time in between “Q”s was like five days. It was a drag.
Please excuse my strange, lefty printing; I would’ve typed this but the machine is loaned out at the moment.
I hope this was helpful. Be safe. Warm regards to you and yours.