This story was told by a person incarcerated at Fresno County Jail.
Caller: As long as somebody is 18 and older, they’re close family or friend, and they have a vaccine, and they can prove that they have their vaccine with either a vaccine card or they can take a test that proves that they’re negative, but it has to be within the 72 hour period.
You know, but it’s been fairly well. They were caught. I guess the county before I got here, they were giving out what they call quarantine packages. It would consist of $20 worth of food because the inmates were not allowed to order commissary or, as they call canteen.
But recently, that’s been lifted. I guess they told us that it’s too much for the budget for them to be giving every single inmate in the jail free packs while on quarantine. But I guess, you know, they just cut that off because they said it was too much for the budget.
So, they let us and allowed us to do canteen. Our canteen process is basically we order with bubble sheets. Now that’s changed. Recently they had tablets now that we order from.
But the process of getting our canteen was the people that would bring us our delivery, they were a different company, they would give us a paper that we would have to sign our initials on, and we’d give it back to them, and they’d give us our food that we ordered.
But any time we’re on quarantine, they don’t give us our papers, they don’t give us our receipts, they don’t give us a copy. They let the COs, the correctional officers, handle the canteen on the quarantine pod. They just hand us our stuff. We don’t have to sign anything. We have a wristband for identification, and we show that and we get to receive that.
Before I got here, some of the other inmates, they told me they were caught lying on the news. The county jail told the news stations that they’re providing a mask and bars of soap every two weeks. Apparently, they asked the COs about that, like, “Where’s our soap? Where’s our masks that you’re supposed to be providing us?”
The COs were just pushing it off, saying, “That’s not true. We don’t provide that.” And what not.
So, you know, this county is not very, how would I say, promising with their word, per se. You know, but they do the best they can and what not. When were, usually they start, they were spraying our entire pod every night. They would spray it with like hand sanitizer, you know, and they would wash the walls.
They would wash the doors. They would wash our tables and sinks and bathrooms and everything, but they stopped doing it after a while, and that seemed pretty unsanitary. It seemed very unprofessional. Why start doing it and then stop doing it?
And you know, it doesn’t make sense if we get tested outside, and somebody new comes in, and they test positive; what does that tell you about the outside test? That it’s not very accurate, or they’re just sending sick people from the outside world into a pod with people who aren’t sick, and then we’re all punished by that because that one person is at risk of infecting us all. So, why would they send someone in who has it to a bunch of people that don’t and then get us on quarantine?
And how would they be positive if we tested them outside and they were negative? You know, It really doesn’t make any sense.
