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On a bright afternoon in June, a group of protesters wearing masks gathered in a dusty parking lot outside a prison in rural Kings County. One of them held a megaphone up to a cell phone. “My name is Jacob Benitez, I’m an inmate calling from Facility F right here at Avenal State Prison,” crackled the voice on the other end of the call. Benitez had called in to the protest to demand officials do more to contain a COVID-19 outbreak that had just begun at Avenal, calling attention to the difficulties of social distancing and other protective measures that proved challenging in the confines of prison. “I’ve found that a great deal of negligence toward the inmate population as well as lower level staff has taken place,” he said. Although that is disputed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the agency that oversees the state’s prisons, what’s more clear is that the pandemic has disrupted normalcy. Benitez has been in prison since 2009, and the pandemic has
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