This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Soledad.
December 28, 2020
To whom it may concern,
I’m currently serving a 25 to life sentence for a selfish and senseless murder that I committed when I was 16 years old.
I made a commitment to dedicate myself to changing and growing into a positive person and demonstrate my remorse by how I live each day. I am involved with self-help and am 30 units away from multiple degrees in college. I also recently just published a book on Amazon in order to raise awareness about mass incarceration and the ability of young children to change.
I read a letter you sent a friend and was very interested. These are unprecedented times and one day this will be part of history. I’ve been logging in information in regards to the responses to COVID-19 by our prison.
To be honest, it’s been horrible. We started November 12, 2020 and the program was never shut down, now we have over 1,100 cases. I hope to put it all into a book. Currently, we live in a state that gives billions of dollars more to prisons that hold a little over 100,000 inmates, than we do to our colleges and universities that educate much more.
It costs the state $81,000 annually to house one inmate. So I would like to raise awareness about the wasteful spending on a system that claims to be rehabilitation inmates and takes the billions of dollars gladly, but during a deadly pandemic, refuses to release inmates in a significant way and instead called us violent and dangerous.
So, in a sense they admit that their means aren’t enough to help the people they house. Anyways, the following I am sending is on my experience as a worker in prison during a pandemic. I appreciate what you guys are doing and I hope it makes a difference. Feel free to ask any questions.
