My name is Heather Jarvis, and this is “Women Are Different.” I sat on my bunk anticipating the morning supply drop along with the rest of the women in my dorm. It was that time…

Hi, my name is Derrick Gibson, uh, prisoner of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, and I can’t breathe, because law enforcement officials have a foot on my neck due to systematic racism and racial profiling,…

“Romaine Chip Fitzgerald returns to his ancestors.” The name Romaine Chip Fitzgerald is perhaps not widely known except for his supporters. In his wild youth decades ago, he was a teenage member of the LA…

By Juan Moreno HainesJuly 16, 2020 This is Prison Radio intern Isabel Barbera, reading the words of Juan Moreno Haines, an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalits. Juan writes for The Appeal and Solitary Watch. To receive Inside Updates, contact Valerie Kiebala - [email protected]. Since mid-March, all California prisons have ceased visitations. At San Quentin, telephone use is now suspended. So, for me to reach the free world, I must use the same US Postal Service that’s slowing down mail delivery, because of a Trump move. That said, available technologies could securely and better connect prisoners with the outside world - see JPay tablets. Just think, I mailed this July 16 and you’re hearing it now. Even as this pandemic is raging, a 12 year old could show prison officials how to give us secured telephones. So, the telephones are taken, I contend, to quiet our voices, particularly to abolitionists and especially to the media...the tactic is to quell the audio and leave it to print. That said, I’m slowed, but not stopped. On July 9, Ron Broomfield, acting warden at San Quentin and Clarence Cryer, CEO of the prison’s healthcare services issued a joint memorandum to prisoners. The memo refers to CDCR’s Covid-19 debacle, saying, “The sudden wave of illness has created a staffing crisis that severely impacted the normal operation of San Quentin,” resulting in “restricted movement for the entire population and a disruption in services you all deserve and expect.”What prisoners deserve and expect is justice and fairness about a crisis that’s existed for scores and decades. California prisons are so cruel and inhumane that in 2011 the US Supreme Court said that a poor healthcare delivery system causes unnecessary deaths to prisoners. Federal judge, Thelton Henderson, told prison officials that CDCR can’t build it’s way out of the problem - partly due to staffing shortages.  Henderson advised CDCR on various ways to reduce the prison population to humane levels. Yet, in the midst of this deadly pandemic, what are prison officials doing? They’ve built 220 beds in a prison workshop and put tents on the prison yard. They say it’ll “improve our capacity to provide onsite medical care for those impacted by the virus.” They go on to say the department is “working on additional remedies that should benefit the population during this pandemic.” The only remedy to this pandemic are found in the immortal words of Moses.

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