This story was told by a person incarcerated at Chino.
Caller: Well, California Institution for Men (CIM) was one of the basically the starting points for COVID within the CDCR, the California prison system. It started, the cases started here back in early March of this year. The yard that I’m on currently (facility A), we didn’t start really seeing an impact until sometime in April, we had a building go on quarantine.
Basically, they didn’t handle anything, they just put the building on quarantine, we still mixed with the individuals. The buildings here, there’s eight on the yard. The buildings can house 160 inmates and a wide open dorm setting- bunks are about 42 inches apart, less in some situations, and they are double bunks.
There’s virtually no ventilation in the building, no air circulation. On April 30, they decided to drop the population in the in the buildings. And so they took approximately 30 inmates per building and just called a bunch of names.
I was one of the names at this time, that got removed from my building, and sent over to B yard, facility B, which is right next door and was a reception center. And basically thrown in a cell by myself. I suffer from epileptic seizures, which of course is a problem and I’ve had suicide attempt issues when I’m housed alone in previous situations.
So basically, they threw me in a cell by myself along with approximately 150 other people in cells by ourselves with wide open front doors. A week later, they decided to start COVID testing on facility A. My understanding was close to 100 inmates tested positive.
Facility B building I was in we had almost 40 inmates out of that initial test of those of us that were moved over, test positive, I had people all the way around me, above me, and to each side of me that tested positive and we were all still left in these cells. I did not test positive. I have not had a positive test thus far, and I just had my 14th test today, today.
So basically, what they were doing is like the folks that tested positive were there, they just put a sign on the door said isolation, and they left them locked in their cell for their 14-day isolation. They didn’t even get a chance to use a phone or take a shower.
So it made it very counterproductive for anybody that was having symptoms, which I did go through a period of time where I was having symptoms, but nobody wanted to report them because they were afraid of the situation they would be put in, cut off from their family, stuck in a cell alone for, you know, 24 hours a day, 14 straight days without even the ability to use a shower.
It was very, very cruel what they were doing to these folks, because the way I looked at it is you could end up dying and your family would never know that you were even sick. So it made it really counterintuitive for anybody they’re telling you “well report a symptom” but nobody wanted to because they were afraid of getting locked down in the situation they were.
