This letter was written by a person incarcerated at San Quentin.
I have been here at San Quentin State Prison since August 2019, and when I first got here, it was a very uncomfortable feeling because being here, I am now over eight hours away from my wife and family who live in Long Beach. That’s a big difference from traveling one and a half hours to R.J. Donovan, the last prison I was at, but we both soon adjusted, and my wife, being the amazing person she is, made sure that we got to see each other for our fifth anniversary.
We were scheduled for our first family visit here at San Quentin for April 4th, but visitation were cancelled statewide until further notice due to the coronavirus. The coronavirus hit California and started to spread. Being that I am a ward of the State of California, I felt that my health, care, and safety was in the best of hands.
I found that not to be true when the warden and CDCR medical receiver allowed the transfer of 121 inmates from the California Institution for Men, a hotspot at the time for the coronavirus, to San Quentin, who had no cases of COVID-19 at the time. But just over a month after the transfer, our cases went from zero cases to 2,000 cases in a population of 2,152 at the time.
