The last time she saw her husband was on March 3, when she was pregnant with their youngest child. Emmanuel Mendoza is incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison. Christina Mendoza with her two children and husband Emmanuel Mendoza on a Christmas Day visit in 2019. He is serving a life without parole sentence for aiding and abetting in a murder for which he was present but was not armed and not the perpetrator, Mendoza said. Mendoza, herself, had been attempting to schedule visits with her husband, Emmanuel Mendoza, each week since the rollout but had been denied each time since her husband tested positive for COVID-19 in early December. The pair manages multiple Facebook groups, some with thousands of users, where they field questions and concerns, which most recently, have largely been about video visits and COVID-19 outbreaks. 27 and 28 were canceled due to technical issues.Ĭhristina Mendoza, a Manteca resident who runs a statewide inmate family council group with McDaniel, also has stepped up to help families connect with their incarcerated relatives during the holidays.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation acknowledged the widespread glitches, saying that most of the hundreds of video visits scheduled for Nov.

families began to receive notifications that the state’s video visit system had crashed. On the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving, McDaniel said mothers dressed their children in their Sunday best, eagerly gathering them in front of computer screens, along with brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunties and uncles, some having traveled long distances to be there.įamilies logged on from home while those incarcerated logged on from viewing stations in their prison yard.īut during the first hour of visits, McDaniel’s phone was flooded with messages from panicked families, sitting in front of blank screens, unable to connect.īy 8:30 a.m. “I truly think it’s exacerbated by video visits being canceled.” “It’s traumatizing to the children they are in fear for their loved ones,” McDaniel said. She fielded calls and responded to messages from people whose visits were canceled or who had trouble scheduling a video call.Īlong with devastating COVID-19 outbreaks throughout the state’s prisons, successfully scheduling a video visit proved difficult, prisoner advocates said, due to paperwork issues, lack of capacity and widespread computer glitches on the system’s first weekend, when dozens of families were forced to cancel their visits. She leads Place4Grace, an organization that works to connect families with their incarcerated relatives, and has spent the last two months helping hundreds of others desperately trying to see their loved ones on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day and in the weekends in between and after.

Cdcr video visits