Even though the state’s death penalty is in “legal limbo” over the use of a three-drug lethal injection procedure, Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to convert existing cells at San Quentin State Prison to create room for condemned inmates, according to a Marin Independent Journal (IJ) editorial.
According to a short editorial released in early June, $3.2 million is the price tag the state must pay to expand Death Row at the prison. The governor wants to convert existing cells at the institution to create 97 more for its growing condemned death row inmate population. He called this space crunch “critical.”
In 2010, Brown scrapped the plan of building a new complex. But, according to the Marin IJ, “San Quentin estimates that Death Row becomes the address for about 20 new inmates every year … Even with those inmates who die behind bars or those who successfully overturn their sentences, the state has to find cells to house about 13 more inmates every year.”
Nearly 70 percent of the residents in Marin want to do away with Death Row. However, statewide voters, by a narrow margin of 52 percent, rejected the 2012 proposition that would have abolished the death penalty in California.
Backers of Proposition 34 argued with the time and legal cost of inmates’ appeals of execution rulings. Most condemned inmates wind up dying behind bars without their sentences being carried out. There hasn’t been an execution at the prison since 2006. It is less costly to punish them with life sentences than condemning an individual to death, the Marin IJ adds.
Moving condemned inmates to other correctional facilities might be significantly less expensive than housing them at San Quentin, but that was not in the governor’s plans.
In the final analysis, the fact that San Quentin reduced its population by 25 percent, the state has the space to expand. However, until Brown’s legal and political Death Row quandary gets resolved, his current proposal makes sense, the Marin IJ concludes.
