As of Wednesday, 4/8/20 – San Carlos: There is a new sign outside of Medical, “Only 5 people inside at a time.” Sounds good, right? It’s not being enforced at all! On that same day at 6 am there were 17 people in the lab lines. At the 1:30 pm pill call there were 15 people inside.
ADC has stated that there is robust availability of soap, paper towels. hygiene items, and cleaning supplies for the inmates. We reported on the soap situation in an earlier post however, we just learned a new twist on this situation. To get soap an inmate has to go to the yard office to make the request. Before the inmate can get the soap, their room will be torn up looking for soap.
Paper towels. How much cleaning and sanitizing can you do with 2 paper towels (not rolls, sheets?) That is what the inmates are getting, 2 sheets of paper towel per week, handed out on Wednesday.
There are no cleaning supplies, and no one can explain what the promised “hygiene products” might be other than there isn’t anything available that remotely matches that description.
Now we move on to masks. Last week masks were made available for staff to wear on a voluntary basis. Not everyone volunteered. Now masks are mandatory for all essential workers. But apparently it isn’t mandatory to wear them over the nose and mouth. Using a mask as a chin warmer is the new fashion for Perryville staff. Except for some of the nurses. Yesterday, 2 of the nurses were seeing inmates and not wearing any kind of mask.
And last, but not least from this update – getting ready for isolating infected inmates. From a staffer at the Perryville warehouse: “They are expecting on Monday the arrival of 200 cots, to be used to quarantine inmates with the virus. But, we have no idea where to put them.”
For more information, please read this article from the Arizona Republic.