I’ve never seen staff at the California state prisons where I’ve lived drink water from the prison plumbing systems. They only drink water they bring in from the free world.
The prison rumor is that new staff recruits are instructed never to drink from our prison’s water system. Incarcerated yard crew workers also report they were told by their boss — a prison staff member — not to drink the water.
My cellmate, or cellie as we say, noticed the smell of the water coming from the sink as soon as he arrived here. The first thing he said to me was, “The water here smells like the sewer!” I had noticed that when I first arrived, too. But over time I had gotten used to it.
My cellie also told me that when he was at a state prison reception center, Wasco State Prison, he saw notices posted saying the water was contaminated with trichloropropane, a chemical often used as a cleaning agent and typically found at waste sites that can make its way into groundwater. The Environmental Protection Agency has classified trichloropropane as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” The notices posted at Wasco said that no one should drink the water. If someone did drink the water, they would be at a higher risk of cancer. The water at that prison has been contaminated for six years now, according to reporting from KERO-TV in Bakersfield.
Another incarcerated person, who lived a couple cells down from me, told me that the water at his previous prison was so bad that the prison started selling bottled water at the commissary, a prison’s general store. I’ve never been to a prison that sells bottled water at its commissary before; we have been told you can just drink the tap water.
I should also mention that a few years back, the California prison system had to pay more than $400,000 for bottled water at Deuel Vocational Institution to provide clean drinking water for people. To make matters worse, high levels of heavy metals in the prison’s water supply were contaminating tributaries of the San Joaquin Delta, according to Prison Legal News. Because of this, the state prison system paid out millions in fines to the Regional Water Quality Control Board and a nonprofit in charge of improving the water in the San Joaquin Valley. In 2021, the state closed Deuel Vocational Institution.
When I found this last bit of information, I realized this issue is not just about me and my fellow incarcerated people being forced to drink bad water that smells awful. No, it’s about everyone on the outside, too. It’s about the greater good. It’s about innocent people, even animals and fish. No one, inside or outside, deserves to be poisoned by prisons.
