This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Calipatria.
I’ve been incarcerated for 21 years already and I haven’t experienced something so horrific such as COVID-19. In fact, a big majority of prisoners in here were so unfortunate and actually caught COVID-19 by free staff.
I’m a firm believer that nobody is perfect but I did notice a lot of CDCR staff and officials lacked in security measures. It wasn’t up to the point when prisoners got real sick and staff before they started being more attentive and careful. By then it was all bad and a whole train reaction started like a wild forest on fire.
People getting sick and placed under quarantine. I’m basically sharing that CDCR didn’t take COVID-19 very serious until they started seeing that it got real. CDCR pretty much toyed with our lives. Up until the point where many of our loved ones started complaining and Sacramento placing CDCR under watch brought CDCR to do damage control.
At first- CDCR issued us inmates state made masks (orange masks). Then when the complaint kicked in and Sacramento came, they started passing out real surgical made masks to any of us called 95s.
CDCR went up to the point to threaten us by giving us all write-ups if we didn’t wear our blue/green 95 mask at any time. It’s common sense to wear a mask of course. But they threatened us so that we wouldn’t wear the orange masks.
So the threat came in to hide and dispose of the incorrect orange mask not certified. Now that the vaccinations came into effect. All sorts of masks are being worn. Orange, black, white, and blue.
Being in here during this pandemic has been rough. I’m sure everywhere. But under CDCR care it was tough because we literally had to do everything ourselves. Our mac reps here from different ethnics here grouped and gathered our opinions and voiced it.
We got very little results out of it because they limited us from a lot of things. The social distance had a lot to do with it.
But at the same time using the social distance for safety measures was no excuse to keep us from having visits for a very long period of time, excessively. Finally after a long time, we got CDCR to give us visits through a laptop for one hour. Soon we should be receiving contact visits but across the table from each other.
If everyone has the vaccinations it shouldn’t be like this. But like I mentioned CDCR is at a slow process. I feel for those who haven’t hugged or kissed their loved ones. Trust me I know because I haven’t had any visitors in 21 years.
Only once but that’s because a friend gave my loved one a ride. Transportation is a factor with my loved one. I’m satisfied with just a phone call and knowing that they are well.
Little by little things are getting better over here. A lot of us including myself are struggling here to maintain with food and packages, and clothing because our loved ones don’t have jobs anymore. I draw, I’m actually an artist. So that’s how I keep myself afloat with hygiene and food.
