This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Norco.
I don’t want to lie to you so I’m just going to be all the way honest with this pandemic going on. And it’s all bad, especially here at CRC prison. I been incarcerated for six years — two years in the county jail, two years at SATF Corcoran State Prison, and two years here at CRC.
Corcoran Prison wasn’t that bad at all. But here at CRC they say they make us social distancing but they don’t. The only time we do social distancing is when the sergeants are walking around going dorm to dorm. The only time we really wear face masks is when the sergeants are walking dorm to dorm. We all sleep like three or four feet apart from each other.
I was in a dorm when I got COVID-19 from my dorm officer. I was quarantined. Sent up the hill to D-Yard to another dorm where I was quarantined for 12 days, then sent to another dorm where the inmates wasn’t sick. After being in that dorm for a week, other inmates in the dorm started testing positive.
When I first walk into the dorm, every inmate in the dorm started asking me to show them my paperwork that shows that I wasn’t sick anymore. But I was never given papers to show I wasn’t sick, which put me in danger. All the inmates wanted to fight me just to get me out of the dorm.
They didn’t want to take the risk of getting sick, and I understand how they all felt. I’m still in the dorm and I work in the kitchen SGT crew. Everything was going good until we found out that this dorm officer was sent home because he tested positive, and we’ve been on lockdown since.
And to make things even worse, they just put 16 sick inmates in the same dorm with me again. Now everyone is starting to test positive all over again. It’s unbelievable. Every day they come they pull five to six inmates out, making them pack up their belonging and quarantine them for two weeks. Then they send them into other dorms and getting other inmates sick. That’s how CRC works.
I’ve seen sick inmates get the crap beat out of them. Why? Because they’re sick and sent to dorms and they just want to get well but other inmates don’t want them in there because they don’t want to get sick. So they tell the sick inmate he has to leave and if he refuses he get beat up or jump. That is how the inside of this place works.
