LIVING SPACES

How COVID-19 constrained, reshuffled  and otherwise upended the close quarters of San Quentin 

In early May, 2021, a big green bus rolled along the north end of San Quentin’s Lower Yard, its powerful engine echoing off the 30-foot wall. It settled into the prison’s Receiving area, discharging a loud hydraulic sound as it knelt to unload its human cargo. A handful of prisoners exercising on the Yard — for the first time in nearly fourteen months — paused and warily watched the new arrivals. I was one of them.

We knew that the last buses into the prison nearly a year before brought the virus that sickened more than 2,200 and killed 28. Since then San Quentin had been sealed against newcomers. Would CDCR really start pouring more people into the prison immediately on the heels of disaster? I wondered.

That disaster began slowly. The sickness had not yet appeared behind these walls at the end March, 2020, as COVID-19 deaths in the United States topped 1,000. But we knew how vulnerable we were. California’s oldest prison was populated beyond its design capacity. In response to a lawsuit brought by prisoners, the First District Court of Appeals would later order a 50% reduction in San Quentin’s inmate population. But that reduction would in turn be halted by an appeal of the Court’s order.

The architecture of the prison increased the vulnerability of its inhabitants. Bars, rather than solid doors, comprised the front walls of the cells. If a neighbor coughed or sneezed, nothing blocked the airborne threat. Each cell block was in reality one huge room, just a few feet separating men in any cell from their neighbors. As massive as the cell blocks were, the two men in each of the little cells felt starved for living space.

Due to the threat of the virus, the prison was in lockdown mode beginning March 14, 2020. Confined to cells 23 — and often 24 — hours per day, we saw no visitors and made few calls. The prison’s vaunted education and rehabilitation groups shut down. Outside volunteers stopped coming. The library, chow halls, and chapels were closed. Nonessential medical services were cancelled. Only the most vital inmate workers worked.

About 4,000 men lived in San Quentin at the time of the lockdown, a number well beyond the prison’s designed capacity of 3,082. We are kept in one of four large cell blocks. East Block houses Death Row, while North and West Blocks contain the general population. Until the COVID-19 outbreak, South Block served as a reception center to intake from county jails, along with other functions. This big building consists of four sections called Alpine, Badger, Carson, and Donner, each with almost 250 cells. There is also a five-building dormitory called H-Unit and an Adjustment Center (AC), which serves as the prison’s disciplinary housing, also known as the Hole. The cells in the AC have solid doors, a feature that became important when the virus broke out. 

The dimensions of the cells, about 4 feet by 10 feet, together with the practice of housing two men per cell, made the lockdown particularly trying. We struggled with claustrophobia, lack of exercise, reduced family contact, and boredom. Many feared the deadly virus. We knew it was coming. We just didn’t know when.

A notice posted outside our cell labeled us COVID-19 contaminated. I thought of Hurricane Katrina,  how first responders had painted big X’s on houses where they found bodies.

The conditions outside the cells were also very difficult. Long, compressed lines of men waited to receive medications or pick up food trays. There was not room to spread out. Red tape on the floor suggested six-foot intervals for these queues. But only sporadic efforts were made to enforce the spacing, because the population far outnumbered the six-foot intervals. Men waited to shower in the small space allotted, elbow to elbow, unmasked. Signs in the area insisted on social distancing, an impossible mandate. We joked darkly about the warnings.

Pressed by these conditions, state officials began to allow San Quentin’s population to attrite during the lockdown. Some prisoners with very short time remaining on their sentence were released. Others paroled. Meanwhile, intake from county jails was halted, ending San Quentin’s use as a reception center. Effectively, those leaving the prison were not replaced. As South Block’s reception function wound down, many of the cells in that building became vacant. The population gradually dropped from more than 4,000 to about 3,500 in early June.

Where I lived in West Block the decline of the prison’s population was not discernible. My cellmate and I were still crammed together in the tiny cell. The crowding in the queues and the showers continued. The men in the building followed grim reports on television news of the sickness and death outside the prison’s walls, and warned one another that the prison was a tinderbox waiting for a spark.

Outbreak

Meanwhile, at the Chino California Institution for Men (CIM), a state prison in southern California, 509 prisoners had tested positive for COVID-19, and 10 had died by the last week in May. There were no positive cases at San Quentin when the now infamous transports from Chino CIM rolled onto the empty Lower Yard at San Quentin and unloaded 122 men on May 30. Twenty-five new arrivals subsequently tested positive for COVID-19. The tinderbox was ignited. On June 13 there were 49 cases at San Quentin; by June 23 the number jumped close to 800, and it surpassed 1,500 by the end of the month.

As the virus spread through the prison like a wind-driven fire, my cellmate tested positive for COVID-19 on June 25. I tested negative. A notice posted outside our cell labeled us COVID-19 contaminated. I thought of Hurricane Katrina, how first responders had painted big X’s on houses where they found bodies. In spite of my negative test results and my protests, I was left in the cramped cell with my sick companion. He was only mildly ill, and I didn’t even know he was sick until his positive test was returned. I soon became ill too and tested positive for the virus.

The illness was all around us. Calls of “Man down!” punctuated our nights as well as our days. By mid-July more than 2,000 were confirmed COVID-19 positive. The prison’s few hospital beds were immediately filled and prisoners were shipped to outside medical centers. Some sick men were moved from the cell blocks to the few “solid-door” cells in the prison’s Adjustment Center, but spaces there were quickly exhausted. Others were moved to the gym, to the chapels, to the empty cells in South Block, and to tents on the Lower Yard. Many of the sick, like my cellmate, were simply left in their own cells, even when their cellmate, like me, had not yet tested positive.

We knew that the last buses into the prison nearly a year before brought the virus that sickened more than 2,200 and killed 28. Since then San Quentin had been sealed against newcomers. Would CDCR really start pouring more people into the prison immediately on the heels of disaster? I wondered. 

Each man here has a unique story to tell about how the pandemic impacted their living space. I spoke with Randy “Dos” Stuart of West Block, who became very ill with the virus and was moved to Saint Francis Hospital in San Francisco. He returned one month later to a 220-bed Alternative Care Site (ACS) constructed in San Quentin’s Prison Industry Authority (PIA) building. It housed very sick men returning from outside hospitals and other men who were not as ill. Accustomed to the impersonal treatment by prison medical staff, Stuart was touched by the warm, attentive care he received from nurses and doctors in the PIA building.

Joshua Lovett, a hearing-impaired resident of North Block, was moved to the Carson section of South Block when he tested positive. Two of Carson’s five tiers still held reception inmates when Lovett moved in, and the noise in the building was deafening. One prisoner banged his plastic coffee cup against the iron bars of his cell throughout his waking hours. Lovett removed his hearing aids and borrowed earplugs to protect him from the noise. “Thank God I’m deaf,” he said.

Jaime “Happy” Paredes, another hearing-impaired man from North Block, was sent to South Block’s Badger section on June 23. Weak with active COVID-19, he was given a filthy cell without cleaning supplies. A neighbor gave him a little Cellblock, a liquid cleaning agent. “I had to cut up a shirt to use as a cleaning rag,” he said. “I used it to clean the toilet and the mattress.” He didn’t have the strength to clean the floor. 

The electrical outlets in Paredes’ cell did not work. Initially, the guards in the building didn’t know that he was deaf. They were banging on his door to wake him for vital signs and for standing counts. Tommy Wickerd, a neighboring prisoner who served as inmate interpreter for the deaf, repeatedly yelled to the guards, “He’s deaf!” Paredes fought through his five-day ordeal. “I was very sick and didn’t want to eat, but I forced myself to eat to keep up my strength.” On June 28, at the urging of Wickerd, Paredes was returned to his cell in North Block.

Sometimes efforts to isolate and spread out the sick could be frantic and incoherent, epitomized in Richard Fernandez’s experience. He tested positive for COVID-19 in North Block on July 25 and moved to the Catholic Chapel. The church’s pews had been replaced by cots, and the tapestries that normally adorn the walls had been removed. Five days later he was moved to the Protestant Chapel, which was similarly converted to a sick bay. The same day he was moved again to one of nine tents erected on the Lower Yard, each housing 10 beds. This arrangement came to be known as “Tent City.” Within two days he was moved again, this time to the “Big Tent,” an expandable unit that could shelter 160 beds. Five days later he was moved to the ACS.

Finally, on August 12 he was considered “resolved” and returned to North Block. In 18 days he had lived in five improvised housing arrangements and come full circle to his original cell block. “I had tested positive, but I was asymptomatic,” said Fernandez. “Every time I moved, I was around a new group of sick people. It was frightening.” During the five days he spent in the Big Tent, the air conditioning ran continuously, producing nighttime temperatures below 50 degrees. “I woke several times each night because of the cold,” Fernandez said. 

San Quentin’s outbreak of COVID-19 peaked in July. Ultimately there were 2,241 confirmed cases. By August new cases declined sharply. So many people in the prison had been sickened that the potential victim pool was essentially exhausted. While the outbreak in the prison seemed to have burned through the available human fuel, the pandemic continued to rage outside the walls. The tents on the Lower Yard came down and life in the crowded cell blocks continued, still in full lockdown mode. 

But efforts to reshuffle living arrangements at San Quentin continued. Double-celled residents of North and West Blocks were offered single-cell living in South Block. After months of too much togetherness with my cellmate, I accepted the offer. I was hopeful when I moved alone to a cell in the Badger section of South Block. The cell was filthy, but once I cleaned it up I was glad for the change. Until late February, I was left alone. Then, without explanation, we were suddenly moved from Badger to the Alpine section of South Block. In Alpine many of us were forced to double up in the cells. My move to South Block in pursuit of a cell to myself was in vain. 

While this development was frustrating and disappointing for me, my outcome was relatively mild compared to that of John Sullivan. Sullivan moved with the rest of us from Badger to Alpine on February 17. Housed alone in Badger, he was paired up with another man in Alpine. But on the morning of March 10, he was dead. His bloody body was removed in the early morning hours, his cellmate taken away in handcuffs. 

One tier above, Bill Hinson had been awakened by the sounds of Correctional Officers (COs) and medical personnel attempting to revive Sullivan, an effort that lasted nearly an hour. Finally, Hinson heard a voice say, “I’m calling it.” The voice then stated a time. Another neighbor, Jeffrey Isom, was a friend of Sullivan’s. He mentioned that Sullivan was very “short” (close to the end of his sentence) and spoke about the respect he had for him. “He had his head on straight,” Isom said. “He was personable.” 

After more than a year locked down, an exhausted population at San Quentin had quit wondering when relief would come. That’s what epidemiologist Dr. Meghan Morris saw when she visited the prison in April, 2021. On May 26, 2021, testifying as an expert witness in a Marin County Superior Court evidentiary hearing in a habeas corpus proceeding, she said, “I was really struck at how quiet it was, and it actually felt very eerie to me. The general feeling in the space was not energetic. It was the opposite. I saw men just lying there. You could feel kind of there was just a sense of kind of hopelessness. That was the word I used. Nobody said that to me. That was just the impression that I had when I was walking through.” 

Aftermath 

Through gradual attrition, San Quentin’s population fell to 2,384 by the time the prison reopened on May 5, 2021. To its residents, this number seemed a reasonable match for the facility. Since then the figure has been creeping up: 2,418 on May 19, 2,434 on June 2, 2,548 on July 29, and more than 2,700 by September. The prison has a design capacity of 3,082, as noted in the evidentiary hearing referenced above. Provisions of a federal receivership allow California’s total prison population to be 137.5% of prison capacity. But individual prisons may have populations well in excess of that ratio, so long as the statewide ratio is maintained. 

Once the prison reopened, the big buses kept rolling into San Quentin. The first newcomers were directed to the Alpine section of South Block, where I live. As the population in our section swells, we hear, see and feel the change. The competition for showers and phones has intensified. As we exit the building for chow or Yard, our massed bodies evoke images of crowded street scenes in downtown New York. The constant hum of the building, absent only in the middle of the night, increases daily as our numbers grow. At times the noise reaches a deafening crescendo. We run fans to create white noise. We wear headphones and crank up our music in a vain attempt to escape the cacophony that is the inevitable result of too many people living in a confined concrete and metal space. 

There is a profound disconnect between what prisoners see and what prison officials see when they consider population density at San Quentin. In the evidentiary hearings referred to above, the Acting Warden was asked if he believed that the prison was overcrowded at the time of the arrival of the fateful buses from Chino in late May. He recalled that at that time, the prison “had roughly 3,992 inmates,” and conceded that the number was over design capacity. But he also said, “I did not believe that San Quentin was overcrowded.” To the men who lived doubled-up in the prison’s tiny cells, who witnessed firsthand the devastating impacts of the crowding on the spread of the virus during the outbreak, such remarks are very difficult to understand. As San Quentin’s population is nudged back to pre-pandemic levels, it can only be hoped that the prison’s ability to protect its residents, as well as their overseers, will not be tested again with such intensity.