This testimony was a declaration from the May 7, 2020 filing of a new class action lawsuit over jail conditions related to COVID-19 on behalf of prisoners at Santa Rita Jail against the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office.
I am currently an inmate in Santa Rita Jail, the County Jail for Alameda County. I am a federal inmate, housed in Santa Rita Jail. I am here due to a claim that I violated the terms of my supervised release. I have been in Santa Rita since September 2019.
On April 17, 2020, I was woken up around 3 a.m., and told that Santa Rita was moving me to a federal facility. I and a number of other inmates were taken out of our cells. Some of the other inmates were going to court or other places. Around 6 a.m., I was placed in a cell called the “dress-out room,” where inmates change from street clothes to jail clothes if they are being booked, or where inmates change from jail clothes to their old street clothes if they are leaving.
After I had changed out of my Santa Rita Jail clothes, I was then told that my name had been “scratched” off the list, and that I was not going to be leaving. I was instructed to take off my street clothes and to put back on, my Santa Rita sweats. After that point, I was left in the dress-out room for approximately 11 hours.
After 5 p.m., I was moved back to my original housing unit, 31, which is a dormitory style unit. If in fact, I was exposed to the corona virus in the dress out room, then when I was returned to Housing Unit 31, I was carrying it back and passing it on, potentially to everyone in my dormitory cell.
During this 11 hours, a number of new-books, meaning men who had just been arrested were also placed in the dress out room where I was. Although Santa Rita Jail has made all these public news statements that new books were quarantined, to separate them from men who had been incarcerated for a while and were known not to be infected with the corona virus, here I was in the dress out room, spending time with these new books, without any form of separation or checking to see whether these new books have the corona virus.
I was held in the dress-out room from about 6 a.m. in the morning until after 5 p.m. that night. During that time, three different groups of new books were moved into the dress-out room, for a total of nine people. And then, two of the new books, who had been moved from the dress-out room to Housing Unit 23, a quarantine unit, had made bail and was moved back to the dress-out room, to change into street clothes for their release.
None of us had masks. None of us had hand soap. There was no hand soap available in the dress-out room. There was not enough space in the dress-out room for social distancing. At best, we could be three or four feet apart. And when it was crowded, we were less than two feet apart.
After 5 p.m., I was moved back to my original housing unit, 31, which is a dormitory style unit. If in fact, I was exposed to the corona virus in the dress out room, then when I was returned to Housing Unit 31, I was carrying it back and passing it on, potentially to everyone in my dormitory cell.