This story was told by a person incarcerated at Avenal.
UCI: So, how have you been doing like mentally? Like, has it affected you much?
Caller: Yeah, it’s honestly, it’s a whole different experience. I mean because for the longest time, we basically watched the pandemic takeover the world from in here. And then it’s, you know, for a while I kind of thought, I mean it’s not here, like nobody’s sick yet. You know, and this is before it hit. And I got to thinking, this is never going to hit us, you know, we’re so far away from everything. And then it just took over the whole prison in like two days, two or three days. And everybody started getting sick. One of my good friends, he almost died. You know, I basically watched him, you know, become just this zombie, you know, couldn’t even get up out of bed.
You know, and it’s scary, you know, because it’s something that, you know, you obviously can’t see. And these cops don’t really do anything to combat that. They don’t give us necessary, you know, like I said, no necessary cleaning supplies to clean our dorms. They don’t ever hardly wear their masks with each other until a sergeant walks in. You know, it’s just … It’s nerve wracking, you know, especially because a lot of these cops recently, because they just switched like …
So, they switch shifts. And how we have cops that are actively walking through our dorms going through our stuff. And the thing about it is, is that they’re not really wearing masks when they’re doing it. They’re wearing gloves, but they’re not wearing masks. And I actually had right after the pandemic hit this prison, I had one of the cops here actually like, I went to go grab my mail and he coughed on it and then gave it to me. And there’s no, that is not an exaggeration at all.
