This story was told by a person incarcerated at Chowchilla.
UCI: So it was generally what’s going on, and that completely answered it. And I’m sorry that you’re going through that right now, and I feel for you.
Caller: Yeah, we’re still going through it. Some of the units don’t have air conditioning with the direct air flow. Some of them have mold and have erosion, metal erosion in the bathroom, actually, in the showers, when you take a shower, the steam mixed with the erosion and mold, you’re still inhaling.
I don’t understand how I became asthmatic here when I was never asthmatic, and I lived out here in the valley. Never was I ever asthmatic, and now I’m an asthmatic with bronchitis. I believe it’s based off of mold and erosion. But you know, that doesn’t help anything when it comes down to COVID.
So, different nurses, some of them are very caring, some of them are very passionate and talk to us like people and not addicts. Talk actually, with us when they came to take the vitals, we told them, as we told them what our symptoms were for the day, no smell, no sense of taste, headache, body temperature, whatever.
And so I’m really down. They just put a zero because anyone can go work with it. So it was a lot going on, and it remains going on, you know? Part of me feels bad for the warden here because he’s not actually the warden yet, and everything fell in his lap.
However, I just feel like he could get with the time, you know. We’re very fearful of catching it again. People have been told they could catch it again, and we don’t know whether that’s true or not, and they’re still saying they’re giving people temperatures. If they’re going to do vitals on people and do swabbing, and you know they’ve had it within the last 90 days, what is the point?
UCI: Right.
Caller: Yeah, it’s a lot going on here. When we get off the telephone, there’s not a crew out here to sit down to wipe down the telephones. There’s no supplies available. These are the things that one of my associates made a lawsuit against the CCWF and CDC offer for females regarding the living conditions in here.
They’re cruel and unusual, bottom line. You know, when you have to live eight people per room with their CCTRP transfers, who are quarantined transferred inmates, when they’re going to CCTRP, they’re allowed to let four people per room. So how are you able to do it for them but can’t do it for the rest of us?
Yeah, but I haven’t talked about the population. It’s at 135 percent, now we’re overextended. I was here when these rooms were made for four people only. We’re now living eight people to a cell.
Okay, with one toilet, we didn’t get an extra table, we didn’t get an extra chair, we didn’t get anything, an extra sink, or any of that. And now we’re living eight people per cell. And it’s not just because of the pandemic.
Okay, it’s over the sending them here, or the whatever, and they’re not – the CDCR are not moving females out of here fast enough to where it reflects the housing capacity. Okay, if we only have 60 people that are traveling CCTRP, what about the other 900 on the yards? Yeah, so what are your questions?
