Suicidal Thoughts

Suicidal Thoughts...

     I've struggled for weeks now, trying to figure out a way to convey the horrors of what's happening in CDCR without violating any unwritten rules, or worse, without worrying my readers anymore then they already are. After giving the matter a great deal of thought, I've decided that some stories simply need to be told. Consider yourself warned.

     One of my Twitter followers just asked me to pray for a friend of theirs. Turns out that she has a son in prison. When he returned to his cell, he discovered that his cellmate had hung himself. In response, he himself was placed on suicide watch, which is Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Sadly, I suspect that this won't be the last time we hear of someone in a prison resorting to suicide as a means of coping with the COVID 19 crisis, and for good reason. If you thought prisons were difficult before, you haven't seen anything, yet. We were always separated off from society, but at least we had regular contact with the outside world. Many of us received visits from family and friends and attorneys and legal organizations frequently visited the prison to ensure our rights weren't openly being violated. All of that has come to a screeching halt, however, due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Family visits have been completely stopped, as have regular visits with family and friends, tours have been stopped and even our own attorneys have been asked not to attempt to visit with us if it's not an emergency, leaving our only means of contact with the outside world being snail mail and the occasional, 15-minute phone call, neither of which are conducive to carrying on a meaningful relationship.

     Losing our contact with the outside world was bad enough, but it's what's going on in here that really has us worried. None of us are experts in medicine, but we all follow the news regularly, which means we've all picked up an understanding of how the virus spreads. Clearly, our medical staff hasn't been following these same broadcasts. If they had, things would have been very different. Things like masks and additional soap would have been offered from the first day. Guards and staff would have been tested on a regular basis, but instead, they refused to even implement my most basic suggestion to take the temperatures of prison personnel as they came to work. We continue to be crammed in here like sardines in a can, and the rumors continue to fly like dust in the wind. One day we're hearing that we're going to see another mass transfer, the next, it's canceled, only to be renewed a few days later. It makes it impossible to make any plans for the future, like attending a program or taking a college course, because you don't know if you'll even be here. Not that it really matters, we're pretty much in a state of lockdown right now, anyway.

     Prisons have always been difficult, but getting a visit, no matter how infrequent, at least gave us something to look forward to. As you might imagine, our morale, low to begin with, has dropped significantly. People around us continue to become infected, continue to be taken to outside medical facilities, and continue to die, and we continue to feel as if neither the Governor nor CDCR is taking things seriously. Guards continue to work around us without wearing their masks, a we're still so overcrowded that we can't practice social distancing and everyone continues to drag their feet when it comes to releasing us early. Each day that passes without a mass release is another day that someone else gets infected, and another day that yet somebody else dies of COVID 19. If I were CDCR, I'd be terrified at the thought of having a prison system filled with people who were all infected and believed they no longer had anything to lose, or live for.