This story was told by a person incarcerated at Chino.
Caller: The yard that I was on, A yard, the COVID cases were going crazy. And they didn’t know what to do with people.
So they were just moving people trying to create positive buildings and say “well half the building’s positive at the building’s not.” Problem is everybody shares a communal bathroom and there’s only one bathroom with, you know, six toilets or eight toilets and nine sinks. Everybody has to use the same bathroom.
So how do you put, you know, 75 negative people with 75 positive people and not expect the negative people not to get sick? Not gonna happen. And it just continued to grow.
And then they started shipping people out of this facility up to San Quentin and Avenal. And then of course, the explosion happened at San Quentin with cases from the people that they sent here. It was just nothing but a series of moving people around.
Trying whatever, like they just had no clue what they were doing. At this point, they’re not doing so much of the moving but we do have 14 tents sitting in the middle of our yard. On a couple of key- on one occasion, we had a Santa Ana windstorm and many of those tents blew away.
So they had to evacuate the people from those tents. And they got sent to another yard. Well they had to rebuild the tent city because the tents had actually literally blown away.
So right now, they test us every week. This side of the yard that I’m on, I’m on the west side, we get tested every Tuesday. The four buildings over here and the tent city get tested every Tuesday, so we were tested today.
We’ve all been on quarantine for the last few weeks. We’ve had a few cases- onesies twosies here and there. But for the most part, as of right now, it’s pretty quiet.
As far as cases go, we do have staff members that have started popping up sick, and two COs out in the tent city area within the last week came up sick. Supposedly our captain came up sick this week, a guy that goes around from yard to yard that does packages came up sick. So there have been staff members now starting to pop up sick.
And of course, these staff members go to every building, regardless if you’re on quarantine or not. So the chances of it spreading again are pretty high. There’s a lot of us that still have never tested positive whether or not we’ve ever had it, we don’t know.
You know, in our current situation, of course, everybody’s scared. And the buildings, they’re starting to pack people back into here. So our population is upwards of 90 people.
And they’re starting to move people back into the buildings. So the closeness of our setting that we were in prior to the pandemic getting in here is being recreated, I have people all the way around me, right, left, within 42 inches of me. So there’s no ability to social distance, there’s no no ability whatsoever for them to do that.
We’re not provided hand sanitizer daily, we’re not given the ability to- to sanitize our bunk area in our living spaces, because we’re not given any of that type of stuff to be able to do that. We are given cloth masks. And honestly, pretty much, that’s it, you know. The ability to social distance is non existent, you have to do temperature checks twice a day, but they make us line up.
And of course, they tell you to crowd into a space that’s, you know, should only house maybe 10 people and there’s, you know, 60, 70 people crowded into a space to get your temperature check. So I feel like we’re on the verge of another surge coming through here again. We know we’re right there, we don’t know when it’s gonna happen.
There’s a lot of a lot of anxieties running high. We get threatened a lot. If you complain about this or that, like what I’m doing right now, that you’re going to get moved to an ad seg yard or get moved to B yard where I got stuck back over the summertime, which ended up causing me to end up in a suicidal situation. So it’s kind of it in a nutshell, our situation here.
