ISCC COVID-19 PRETEXTUAL QUARANTINE LOCKDOWNS CONTINUE WHILE MANY INMATES ALLOWED TO BREAK QUARANTINE FOR "INSTITUTIONAL NEED/STAFF CONVENIENCE"

On Tuesday November 8, 2022 prisoners in F block at the ISCC were placed on "secure status" (i.e., locked in their cells for all but 20 minutes a day) despite medical staff stating there had been no recent confirmed or even suspected cases of Covid on the unit, and other staff continuing to confide that the lockdowns are due to staff shortages. These claims are supported by the fact that staff are not even wearing masks on the units or when in direct contact with prisoners. More than a full week later, the lockdown continues.

Assuming there actually was an outbreak of Covid on the unit on or about 11/8/22, it would have already been spread throughout the entire facility as prisoners from every corner of the prison have been interacting in the hallways for weeks, patting each other on the back, shaking hands and having other [sometimes "icky"] forms of physical contact despite the "rolling lockdowns" across the prison.

Prison administrators contend that the lockdowns are a necessary means to prevent the spread of the Covid virus, yet up to 50 inmates a day from locked down F block are allowed out of their cells/unit for hours a day to work in areas of the prison alongside staff and prisoners housed in other areas.

Further, while prisoners assigned to dormitory housing (nearly half the general population of the facility) are [necessarily] allowed dayroom access during quarantine lockdowns where they are allowed use of microwaves, telephones, kiosks, etc., this very fact precludes any logical rationale for disallowing the same dayroom access during unit quarantines to prisoners housed in other (north-wing/celled) units.

Dayroom amenity access is however allowed to some privileged north-wing/celled inmates who, for staff convenience, are allowed out of their cells to assist guards with passing out, supplies, distributing commissary purchases, conducting cell-to-cell feeding of locked-in prisoners (which inmate janitors aren't supposed to be doing anyway...) and other duties specifically assigned to staff, including locking other prisoners into their cells! Once the tasks are completed, these inmates are allowed to remain out of their cells to use telephones, microwaves, kiosks and showers, privileges which are denied to other inmates on the tiers.

Other inmate workers housed in locked-down/quarantined F block are allowed to break "quarantine" and go to work in different housing units, the kitchen, laundry, maintenance - even education and vocational classrooms - while the majority of prisoners are relegated to sitting in their cells. Inmate Labor Detail (ILD) workers are even allowed to move virtually anywhere in the facility, unsupervised, while dog handlers play outside with their assigned canines without a guard present.

When an F block inmate (I'll just call him Bubba) wrote to the housing lieutenant this week regarding these obvious discrepancies in logic, unfairness, special treatment for some prisoners over others and the reneging on the promise that once we received the Covid-19 vaccines we would not have to be locked down/quarantined, the answer, not unexpectedly, was summed up in the reply... "...circumstances have changed".

Unfortunately, the lieutenant's reply is not exactly or completely true, as the blatant lies and ridiculous attempts to justify the corruption, unconscionable discrimination, favoritism and the unmitigated B.S. by administrators and their support staff remains the same as it has been for years.