This as-told-to diary is based on a conversation with Adamu Chan, an incarcerated journalist at San Quentin State Prison in California.

San Quentin is experiencing a massive COVID-19 outbreak—more than 1,400 cases—after the state transferred infected people from another prison into San Quentin.

And so at that time, we were developing some content that talked about the coronavirus, and also, at the same time, we were interviewing people in the prison and kind of getting their perspectives on what people were feeling and what they felt was coming.

This part of the prison still hasn’t experienced an outbreak, which is pretty amazing since more than 1,000 people in the prison right now have been confirmed to have the virus.

Back then, they were moving people around the prison and, I think, trying to make sure that certain vulnerable populations were in places where they were able to social distance.

I’ve been trying to receive messages from them through people that we know, people whom we have contact with in common.

And so the stories that I’ve heard, which I think are to be expected, are that people can’t breathe and that people are collapsing and falling left and right.

I know a lot of people in vulnerable populations—older people, people with preexisting health conditions—who are up there whom I care about.

There are some people I know who have the virus and are asymptomatic.

Where I am, there’s one hand sanitizer dispenser in a building of 100 people, and it hasn’t always been readily available.

But I think the whole idea of talking about hand sanitizer is not really the point.

Even in the years before the pandemic, the Supreme Court ruled that the conditions in Southern California prisons were unconstitutional and ordered the state to relieve the overcrowding problem because people were dying because of lack of medical care and lack of mental health care.

There are people in the community who have stepped up recently and said that they will aid in the reentry of people coming out of prison.

So there are places for people to go, and people who are willing to accept them.

2 demand is that CDCR stop transferring people around the state and spreading the virus to other prisons.

I think a lot of what I was doing, even beyond journalism work, was just working on building community here.

People are involved in theater and in writing and graphic arts; other people are involved in education and teaching; there’s a college program here, a music program, and, above all of that, a lot of people here who are interested in self-development and trying to find out solutions to violence and investigating their childhood and things like that.

I think that those community bonds that I share with other people are really important.

I’m not able to see those people.

I don’t know what’s going on with those people.

There is quite a bit of distance between H Unit and the cell blocks in the other parts of the prison, so I think that’s one of the reasons it hasn’t hit here yet.