I HAVE BEEN IN PRISON for more than 30 years. When I came to prison, the corrections goal was isolation, retribution, and punishment. In the past decade, the mission changed to rehabilitation.
I have taken every self-help program I need. I have college degrees. I have helped start self-help groups and I even helped create a plan to reform the entire prison system in California, with a group I co-founded called The People In Blue.
I did it while living in dangerously overcrowded prison conditions, in double-celled housing, with people dying all around me. I did it despite many Eighth Amendment violations for cruel and unusual punishment found by state and federal courts against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Now lawmakers are pushing Assembly Bill 1140, a single-occupancy cell pilot program bill authored by state Assemblymember Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael. It’s a bill that highlights the health consequences associated with double-occupancy cells, and offers a solution of providing single cells as a reward to promote healing.
This pilot program will target 10 percent of the population at four different prisons designated by CDCR. It sounds good. But I wanted a single cell and a healing environment 30 years ago. Today, CDCR’s priority should be to get well-behaved prisoners home, not to put them in single-occupancy cells.
“We have to be in the homecoming business. It’s not just about rehabilitation, it’s about homecoming,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in March 2023 at a visit to what was then called San Quentin State Prison. The governor has since announced the prison’s renaming to become San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.
AB 1140 isn’t about the health consequences of double-celling, it’s about the consequences of prison overcrowding. The bill cites a study from the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry that found overcrowding “has historically led to increased violence and poor conduct between correctional officers and people who are incarcerated.”
But CDCR already knows this information. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, at the height of overcrowding, widespread violence among incarcerated individuals and against correctional officers, as well as race riots at prisons statewide, led CDCR to start imposing race-based lockdowns. It was a practice that eventually led to a class action lawsuit for racism and cruel and unusual punishment against the department.
During a recent survey of California correctional officers conducted by UC Berkeley, 17% of officers reported serious injuries, 48% feared being injured, 63% saw or handled dead bodies and 73% witnessed someone seriously hurt or killed.
‘This is hazardous to your health’
At his March 2023 news conference at San Quentin, Newsom talked about the effect of overcrowding and violence.
“Roughly 10 percent of correctional officers think about seriously, or has attempted to commit suicide. This system isn’t working for anybody,” the governor said.
A 2011 mortality study by a sheriff’s office in Florida found that correctional officers die an average of 12 years earlier than the rest of the population.
“We need the warning label, like with cigarettes,” retired correctional officer Stephen B. Walker told Kaia Stern, co-founder of the Prison Studies Project at Harvard University, in a 2021 article in the news outlet Inquest. “This is hazardous to your health.”
Newsom handpicked an advisory council to make recommendations on how to transform San Quentin. In a report released in January of 2024, this council recommended, among other things, that the population be reduced from an average of over 3,000 to between 2,200 and 2,400, and to provide single-occupancy cells. AB 1140 will curtail these recommendations, if passed, by opting instead for a 10 percent single-cell pilot program at the prison.
“San Quentin would be a natural spot, given the work that is already occurring there, and that is something I would advocate for,” Connolly, who represents Marin County, told the Marin Independent Journal in March.
What Connolly doesn’t realize is that more than 10 percent of San Quentin residents are already living in single cells in the Donner and Alpine housing units. His pilot program would actually lessen those numbers.
California’s prisons don’t need a pilot program to prove that overcrowding is dangerous to the health of its incarcerated population and staff. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that overcrowded conditions are criminogenic. In other words, it produces more crime than rehabilitation, and it has led to inadequate care, particularly regarding medical and mental health.
The court ordered CDCR to reduce the combined population of its state prisons and cap it at 137.5 percent of their design capacity, which is 85,000 prisoners.
In November of 2021, a Marin County Superior Court judge found that San Quentin officials’ refusal to reduce the population during the COVID-19 pandemic constituted “historic deliberate indifference.”
California’s prisons don’t need a pilot program to prove that overcrowding is dangerous to the health of its incarcerated population and staff.
“Where (CDCR) had the ability to move (people) to other facilities or release them, the court can conceive of no argument to support forcing (them) to remain in a cell smaller than 50 square feet, with two bunks, and a cellmate, for virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week for months on end. Doing so enhanced (their) exposure to COVID-19. For the duration it lasted, it also amounted to solitary confinement in violation of common standards of decency,” Judge Geoffrey Howard wrote.
The inmate newspaper San Quentin News reported in 2022 that over 2,500 incarcerated individuals in San Quentin contracted COVID-19, including myself. At least 28 incarcerated individuals and one correctional officer died.
Shortening life expectancy
CDCR should reduce its prison population, rather than engage in an unnecessary pilot program. AB 1140 emphasizes the importance of restorative sleep and reduced stress in promoting rehabilitation. Studies cited in the legislation highlight that overcrowded conditions can lead to stress and health issues among inmates. Incarceration also shortens life expectancy.
“Each year in prison can shave two years of an incarcerated person’s life,” according to Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit, non-partisan research and advocacy organization that focuses on mass incarceration.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows that overcrowding decreases staff health and prevents CDCR from fulfilling its mission of providing rehabilitation to incarcerated residents. CDCR cannot provide an environment for healing for every individual. But providing that environment to a privileged 10 percent of the population, at four designated prisons as a reward, is the wrong solution.
CDCR could release more offenders who came to prison as youth and who are now elderly or aged out of crime. There are more than 93,000 people in CDCR prisons. The state agency classifies almost 34,000 people as long-term offenders (meaning people with life sentences with or without the possibility of parole, as well as those with more than 50-year sentences.)
Thousands of these individuals have been in custody more than 20 years and are eligible for youth offender or elderly parole release. There are thousands of disabled and infirm people who could be reviewed for compassionate release. Newsom has also been provided an extensive list of people who community organizations believe are rehabilitated and deserve to be released. These offenders are simply being warehoused.
These releases could be done without compromising public safety. The only individuals the AB 1140 pilot program will target are well-behaved or rehabilitated prisoners. Therefore, releases should be favored over single cells.
AB 1140 seeks to put a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. It isn’t about single cells, it’s about the dangerous effects of prison overcrowding for officers and the incarcerated population. We don’t need a pilot program. History shows overcrowding has dangerous effects. The solution is not to put well-behaved rehabilitated prisoners in single cells. The solution should be to get them home. By doing this, more single occupancy cells will become available and more offenders will have access to a healing environment.
Steve Brooks is a California Local News Fellow with Bay City News Foundation, reporting from inside San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. His perspective gives readers insight into issues and news from inside the prison. See more of his work at Inside/Out on Local News Matters.