Despite improving COVID-19 metrics in Orange County and Los Angeles, the scope of effects the coronavirus pandemic has had on the state’s prison system is hard to define.

As of Thursday, March 18, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported 39 active COVID-19 cases within the total 94,807 in custody. The CDCR has tested 119,928 prisoners since March 2020, and has reported a total of 48,187 COVID-19 cases, as of March 18.

Now, to bring transparency to the conditions incarcerated individuals are experiencing, a group of UC Irvine professors has created the Prison Pandemic database, a website featuring hundreds of first-hand accounts from prisoners inside facilities overseen by CDCR, during the COVID-19 era.

The Prison Pandemic now has a virtual library featuring hundreds of real-life recorded prison phone calls and narrated letters from prisoners across the state – told directly to UC Irvine student volunteers.

Throughout this documentation, CDCR prisoners continuously voice fear, frustration and anger about the lack of access to proper sanitation equipment, the housing of potential COVID-19 positive individuals in the general prison population, along with the alleged oversight of health and safety protocol by prison staff.

Kristin Turney, professor of sociology at UC Irvine, and co-founder of the project, said the focus was meant to shed light on society’s “hidden population” of those incarcerated being devastated by the pandemic.

“The goal of it was bring transparency to what’s going on in the prison across the state,” Turney explained in an interview with Irvine Weekly. “We started collecting stories in September or October, and have doing so ever since.”

In an entry titled “All Backwards” recorded on November 20, 2020, an inmate calling from Chuckawalla Valley State Prison explained that despite guidance from the Center for Disease Control to wash hands frequently, “and if soap and water are not available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol,” prisoners were still only allotted one bar of soap – weekly.

The caller also theorized that the prison staff only upheld the bare minimum health and safety protocol to satisfy state-health requirements, not to benefit prisoners.

The Prison Pandemic library provides the entire audio, accompanied with a written transcription of each recorded submission. The identities all that participated have been redacted.

“Today we had a situation with an individual asking a sergeant about sanitizer. Well, the officer, the sergeant in fact told the inmate well, don’t you guys get soap? Well yeah, we receive one bar of soap a week. Well, then wash your hands. You know, so why’d you put the sanitizer dispensers in the restrooms just to make it look good for the CDCR or for the ombudsman that comes around for his COVID, you know, check to make it look good?”

In order to reach those incarcerated, Turney explained that her co-founders UCI criminology professors Naomi Sugie and Keramet Reiter, wrote physical letters to solicit this project to people incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The group says they have reached prisoners in about two-thirds of all 35 prisons in California.

Within these letters, the group explained that a hotline for the Prison Pandemic was created, and it accepted collect calls in order for incarcerated individuals to share their real-time experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was also P.O. Box for letters.

“The hotline has been manned by mostly student volunteers, graduate and undergraduate students at UCI, who sign up to take shifts to take the calls during the week,” she said. “We just launched last week with about 400 stories, and we’ve got about another 300 that we’re processing right now.”

In terms of written correspondence from, Turney, who studies mass incarceration, said the group is getting anywhere from 30 to 50 letters each week.

“The people who are in prison are just so powerless, in terms of not being able to get their voices heard, and not being able to get this information to their friends,” she said. “We really hope these stories can be used to spur some positive change, and some positive action, for the folks inside because the conditions are quite horrifying. When you’ve got 400 stories and so many of them are saying the same thing – then it’s like strength in numbers.”

By listening to every single entry on the Prison Pandemic website, Turney said she has become familiar with participant’s patterns of experiences when it came to transferring individuals from prison to prison. Something she realized was happening, but not to the “extent that it was happening.”

“One of the things that was most striking to me was transfers. Moving people, transferring people that are maybe COVID-19 positive or maybe they’re negative but then test positive two days later – that seems like an egregious oversight in terms of how we handle infections disease,” Turney said. “Transferring people is pretty much the worst thing they could be doing.”

The CDCR has not allowed in-person visits since the pandemic began.

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